Although she finds more than a few defects in The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, Janet Maslin in today's New York Times noted that many popular authors have followed huge hits with terrible embarrassments. "Mr. Brown hasn't done that," she continued. "Instead, he's bringing sexy back to a genre that had been left for dead."

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Cool idea of the day: M.J. Rose is calling on Twitterers to tweet (using #buy+brown) suggestions of books people should buy tomorrow in addition to The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. She wrote: "I want to remind the world that when they walk into the store this week to buy Dan Brown's latest that there are thousands of other wonderful books to buy too." Her own first post at #buy+brown: The Promised World by Lisa Tucker.

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Cool in-the-news promo idea of the week: "The book everyone says is going to save the book industry is coming on September 15. Yes, we're talking about Tao Lin's new novella Shoplifting from American Apparel," noted Melville House Publishing's e-newsletter.

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In a column, the Independent laments the "extraordinary farce" by which "hardly anyone in the British book trade, apart from Dan Brown, his agent and his publisher, will make any money out of The Lost Symbol.

"The big chains are using it as a loss-leader to coax in trade. Many independent booksellers will find themselves in the absurd position of buying their copies not from the wholesaler with whom they usually deal but the Asda down the road.

"At a rough calculation, several million pounds that could have been used to irrigate an industry struggling to emerge from recession is simply being thrown away in defiance of fiscal logic. Here, after all, is a product that hundreds and thousands of people want to buy. Why not make them pay a proper price for it?"

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"Horrified" by the news that Cabinet Books and Music, Libby, Mont., might close, Cathie and Gordon Sullivan purchased the 30-year-old shop from Patti Lennard, the Western News reported.

"It was probably one of the quickest decisions we ever made," said Gordon, who, along with Cathie, "made a visit to Lennard while she was holding a closeout sale. The next day she allowed him to peruse through business records, and last week Sullivan and his wife officially bought Cabinet Books."

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The Cadence Group has launched New Shelves Distribution, which offers sales, marketing, warehousing and fulfillment operations. Since opening in 2006, Cadence has provided publishers sales and marketing services. The company's partner for the new services is Pathway Book Services, Gilsum, N.H., which will handle all warehousing, ordering and shipping services.

In connection with New Shelves, Cadence has hired Tom Galvin, formerly of HCI, DK Publishing and Sourcebooks, as national sales manager.

In a statement, v-p Bethany Brown said, "This new program now adds a full service fulfillment option to the smaller and midsized publisher. We provide warehousing and fulfillment to all the major wholesalers and retailers and then national, regional and/or on-line sales programs are created and executed for each title. This program is being offered as a less expensive and less constricting way to distribute books."

For more information about New Shelves Distribution write services@newshelvesdistribution.com or call 518-391-2300.

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Books Behind Bars is a successful nonprofit program run since the 1980s by Kay Allison, owner of Quest Bookshop, Charlottesville, Va. (Shelf Awareness, July 8, 2009). But it was recently banned by the same Department of Corrections officials who had often praised the program that "has shipped more than one million volumes--this year, up to 3,000 a month," the Daily Press reported.

"This has come as a shock," Allison said. "It's making me (appear) as a criminal. I'm anxious to find out the real reason."

According to DOC spokesperson Mike Leininger, "We ran into a problem that things were coming inside those books. So in order to halt any contraband coming in, it was taken off the approved vendors list." When asked how many incidents were involved, Leininger conceded he is "aware of at least one."

The Daily Press suggested that "Books Behind Bars is a victim of its own success, and of no small amount of Department of Corrections paranoia. All incoming book shipments, for instance, are first inspected by prison staff. So if there was lax oversight of program volunteers, the same goes for prison staff. But both could be beefed up."

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Obituary Note: Jim Carroll, author of The Basketball Diaries, died on Friday in New York City of a heart attack, the New York Times reported. He was 60.

Published in 1978, The Basketball Diaries chronicled Carroll's wild youth and was made into a 1995 movie staring Leonardo DiCaprio. Carroll was also a punk rocker and poet and published a series of collections, including Living at the Movies.

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Book trailer of the day: Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon.

(Production note: The trailer was "an all-Skylight affair!" Emily Pullen wrote on the blog for Skylight Books, Los Angeles, Calif.)

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Actor and author Stephen Fry's bookselling talents were on display last week. The Telegraph reported that Fry's Twitter post recommending David Eagleman's Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, led to a 6,000% increase in sales.

"You will not read a more dazzling book this year than David Eagleman's Sum," @stephenfry tweeted on September 10. "If you read it and aren't enchanted I will eat 40 hats." The book's Amazon.co.uk ranking subsequently climbed from 3,629 to second place.

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Has the bad economy provided good material for writers? The Guardian asked several authors "who have been quick to tackle the crash in their work" to consider where we are a year after the September 15, 2008, stock market dive."

This morning on the Today Show: Carin Rubenstein, author of The Superior Wife Syndrome: Why Women Do Everything So Well and Why--for the Sake of Our Marriages--We've Got to Stop (Touchstone, $26, 9781416566786/1416566783).

Also on Today: Frank I. Luntz, author of What Americans Really Want . . . Really: The Truth About Our Hopes, Dreams, and Fears (Hyperion, $24.99, 9781401322816/1401322816).

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Tomorrow morning on Good Morning America: Howard J. Morris, author of Women Are Crazy, Men Are Stupid: The Simple Truth to a Complicated Relationship (Simon Spotlight, $22.99, 9781416595052/1416595058).

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Tomorrow morning on the Today Show: Tiki Barber, author of Wild Card (Simon & Schuster, $15.99, 9781416968580/141696858X).

Also on Today: Jeffrey Ross, author of I Only Roast the Ones I Love: Busting Balls Without Burning Bridges (Simon Spotlight, $24.99, 9781439101407/143910140X).

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Tomorrow morning on the Early Show: Paul LaRosa and Maria Cramer, authors of Seven Days of Rage: The Deadly Crime Spree of the Craigslist Killer (Pocket, $21.99, 9781439172391/1439172390).

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Tomorrow night on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: LeBron James, author with Buzz Bissinger of Shooting Stars (Penguin Press, $26.95, 9781594202322/159420232X).

Jeff Bridges "is in discussions" to star in the Coen brothers' "more faithful" adaptation of True Grit, based on the novel by Charles Portis. Variety reported that Bridges would reprise the role that garnered John Wayne an Oscar in the 1969 version. 

From last week's Indie bestseller lists, available at IndieBound.org, here are the recommended titles, which are also Indie Next picks:

Hardcover

A Duty to the Dead by Charles Todd (Morrow, $24.99, 9780061791765/0061791768). "A Duty to the Dead introduces Bess Crawford, a strong-willed young woman in the nursing corps during WWI. To fulfill a promise made to the charismatic dying soldier she fell in love with, Bess will have to uncover family secrets and a web of deception spanning years. Bess Crawford is a character I look forward to spending more time with."--Joni Montover, Paragraphs on Padre Boulevard, South Padre Island, Tex.

The Meaning of Matthew: My Son's Murder in Laramie, and a World Transformed by Judy Shepard (Hudson Street, $25.95, 9781594630576/1594630577). "More than 10 years after her son's murder in Wyoming, Judy Shepard tells Matthew's story with eloquence. Her memoir is both a moving portrayal of a strong family dealing with the grief of their loss and a powerful testimony for human rights and the full inclusion of gay and lesbian people in society."--Blake Hardy, Outwrite Bookstore & Coffeehouse, Atlanta, Ga.

Paperback

The Island at the End of the World by Sam Taylor (Penguin, $14, 9780143116257/0143116258). "In this fascinating post-apocalyptic novel, Sam Taylor crafts the story of the last survivors of the Flood: a family of four isolated in the simplicity of their own little Eden. But, from the beginning, we sense something eerie suffusing the idyllic atmosphere, and when the harmony of their world is breached by a stranger, ugliness erupts and relationships begin to disintegrate."--Jennie Turner-Collins, Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Cincinnati, Ohio

For Young Adults

Love Is the Higher Law by David Levithan (Knopf Books for Young Readers, $15.99, 9780375834684/0375834680). "Love Is the Higher Law looks at 9/11, and the days, months, and years following it, through the eyes, hearts, and minds of three New York teenagers. Levithan's story will be eye-opening for today's younger teens--some of whom may have little memory of the actual attack--and for older teens and adults it will help to make it clear that, however one reacted to the tragedy, you were not alone. A powerful book sure to touch all who read it."--Kat Goddard, the Bookloft, Great Barrington, Mass.

[Many thanks to IndieBound and the ABA!]

Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells--Our Ride to the Renewable Future by Amanda Little (Harper, $25.99, 9780061353253/006135256, October 13, 2009) 

Opening lines of books we want to read:

The trouble started on an August afternoon in a remote field in northern Ohio, miles from any town large enough to be marked on a standard road atlas. The field was empty except for scattered deciduous trees--maple, poplar, oak--thick with late-summer leaves. The ground was scrubby and parched. A nearby river rolled lazily in the summer heat. The only trace of humanity hung above the trees--an electrical cable known as the Harding-Chamberlin Line, carrying 345,000 volts of power. By three o'clock the air temperature had risen to 90 degrees, and the cable itself had reached nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit--roughly twice its average temperature. The aluminum core of the 3-inch-thick wire was expanding with the heat and beginning to sag.

Five hundred miles due east of that meadow I was sitting at my desk in New York City when, at 4:09 p.m., my computer suddenly shut down. The lights, music, and air-conditioning died. I heard a strange lurching sound as the elevator in my building froze with passengers trapped on board. I rushed to the window along with my officemates and was amazed to see traffic snarling to a halt up the entire length of Broadway as street signals went black. The Verizon landlines were dead and our cell phones had no signals. We hurried down eleven flights of stairs, into streets already thickening with crowds of evacuees. Storefronts, groceries, and cafés were darkened. Subway stations were emptying of travelers as word spread that the trains had no power and hundreds of people were stuck underground. It was 2003, and like most New Yorkers, we initially jumped to the same conclusion--another terrorist attack.

What had in fact happened to us, and to a majority of the residents of the metropolitan areas of New York, Newark, Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, and Toronto, was a blackout--larger than any other blackout in recorded history. One of the greatest achievements in industrial engineering, the 93,600 miles of electrical cable known as the Eastern Interconnection, had been brought to its knees. All because of unseen events in that distant Ohio meadow where an overloaded wire had drooped into high tree branches and short-circuited, triggering a massive cascade effect throughout the aging power grid . . .

Up to that point, I had spent most of my brief career as a journalist trying to gain a better understanding of the causes of just such events--an understanding, more broadly, of the strengths and vulnerabilities of America's energy landscape. The twenty-four-hour blackout made me realize how little I actually did know, and how much I still had left to learn.

--Selected by Marilyn Dahl

.

Lloyd Constantine represented Wal-Mart, the Limited, Sears and others in a federal antitrust lawsuit against VISA and MasterCard filed in 1996. Dubbed the Merchants' Case for short (the matter evolved into a class action involving five million merchants), it alleged that VISA and MasterCard, a joint venture owned by U.S. banks, "operated as a bank cartel that had monopoly power in the credit card market . . . [and] used their monopoly power to dominate the newer debit card market." Constantine's highly informative book covers the long, tumultuous history of that landmark case with passion.

Constantine starts with the nitty-gritty, discussing a decisive event for initiating the lawsuit. When Wal-Mart discovered it had no negotiating room with VISA and MasterCard, it was not happy that its status as the Biggest Customer cut no bargaining ice and went in search of legal counsel. Constantine, with experience in lawsuits against VISA and MasterCard for related collusive practices, developed an elegant strategy for the case and was hired. As he makes clear, once you land the clients, then you hunker down to the daily legal grind to win the case--in this instance, defending 350 depositions, analyzing 54 expert reports and attending so many hearings that judges become more familiar to you than your own family.

Constantine is especially adept at showing that factors beyond anybody's control affect the way a case plays out. Assembled in one courtroom are a huge number of very-big egos; various parties with vastly different goals; judges making sometimes curious rulings; and expert witnesses introducing odd spins into the case. With so many unpredictable players and so much at stake, anything can happen. One moment of high drama occurs when a witness for the defense blurts out an unexpected piece of information that supports the plaintiff's claim of collusion and signals the judge that central facts have been purposely misrepresented to the court. Another bombshell drops when an expert witness admits that he didn't write the report he signed and, in fact, disagrees with many of the assertions made in it.

As soon as a jury is seated in 2003, another surprise happens: the parties settle the case. Constantine's team prevailed in most of its claims; the settlement agreement broke up the cartel, committed a $3.05 billion cash payment to merchants and required redesign of debit and credit cards. Yet Constantine is frank about what he hoped for but didn't get. And in his eloquent argument on the importance of antitrust law, it turns out it's not always about the money.--John McFarland

Shelf Talker: Aspiring litigators, fans of Court TV and everyone holding a VISA or MasterCard will be fascinated by this candid, often bare-knuckled account of one of the largest antitrust cases in recent years.

The following were the bestselling titles at member stores of the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association during August:

Hardcover

1. The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson (Knopf)
2. 206 Bones by Kathy Reichs (Scribner)
3. The Dead of Winter by Rennie Airth (Viking)
4. New Tricks by David Rosenfelt (Grand Central)
5. Bad Day for Sorry by Sophie Littlefield (St. Martin's)
6. Rain Gods by James Lee Burke (Simon & Schuster)
7. Royal Flush by Rhys Bowen (Berkley)
7. The Venona Cable by Brent Ghelfi (Holt)
9. The Defector by Daniel Silva (Putnam)
9. Sand Sharks by Margaret Maron (Grand Central)
 
Softcover

1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (Vintage)
2. Uneasy Relations by Aaron Elkins (Berkley)
3. Secondhand Spirits by Juliet Blackwell (Berkley)
4. The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
5. A Royal Pain by Rhys Bowen (Berkley)
6. Sew Deadly by Elizabeth Lynn Casey (Berkley)
6. Spackled and Spooked by Jennie Bentley (Berkley)
8. The Bordeaux Betrayal by Ellen Crosby (Pocket)
9. Where Memories Lie by Deborah Crombie (Avon)
10. Envy the Night by Michael Koryta (St. Martin's)

[Many thanks to the IMBA!]