Several people responded to yesterday's price war discussion.

Jim Lewis of Fireside Book Shop, Chagrin Falls, Ohio, wrote:

What's wrong with buying super-discounted books and reselling them cheaply? What if all the independent bookstores bought several of the $8.99 books and then sold them to our customers for $8.99?

• Would it upset our customers? Not ours. Some of our customers actually enjoy paying less than retail.
• Would it upset the publishers? Probably not, since the Big Guys pay about the same price as we do.
• Would it upset the Big Guys? Good possibility as it would make their promotion significantly more expensive.

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Jim Barkley of Southeastern Book Travelers wrote:

I believe there are many reasons to continue to buy books direct from reps.

I still think the best connection independent booksellers have with publishers is through their sales rep, whether that rep be a house rep or a commission rep. The reps pass on valuable information to both the independent buyer and to the publishers they represent. They also are aware of any special offers and pass these on to the buyers. And if most reps are like me--and I think they are--then they also very happily furnish the buyers with comp copies of books, galleys and other promotional items such as banners, posters, bookmarks, etc. Let's not forget, too, about co-op and author events, which reps take care of on a regular basis.

The book pricing conflict entered a new stage Thursday as Wal-Mart, Amazon and Target began rationing the number of copies customers can buy of certain discounted titles. "The limits will stop other booksellers from scooping up cheap copies in large quantities and reselling them," the Wall Street Journal reported, noting that for online customers Wal-Mart's limit is "two copies each of certain bargain books," while  Amazon has a three-copy maximum and Target a five-copy limit.

Arsen Kashkashian, head buyer at the Boulder Book Store, Boulder, Colo., told the Journal "he had intended to buy as many as 70 copies of Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna from Walmart.com, Target.com or Amazon, because their prices are 'more than $5 cheaper than what we can get it for from the publisher, Harper.'"

"It's to prevent a run on the bank, so to speak," said consultant Joel Bines of AlixPartners. "They are losing money on every item they sell at this price, so they want to make sure the items actually go to customers, who might then buy something else."

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Congratulations to Left Bank Books, St. Louis, Mo., which is celebrating its 40th anniversary, Sunday, November 8. At 4 p.m., Anita Diamant, author of The Red Tent and one of the founders of Left Bank Books, will read from and discuss her new novel, Day After Night, at Left Bank Books Downtown, the Left Bank tributary that opened last year. In addition, Diamant, fellow founder Terry Koch and current owners Barry Liebman, Kris Kleindienst and Jarek Steele will be the stars of Four Score & Three Grand: How Left Bank Books Started as the People's Bookstore and Became a St. Louis Institution, a "conversation and reception" that will include "memories, fun, food, drink!"

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"Amazon's astute timing" was examined by the Wall Street Journal, which reported: "It isn't a secret that Amazon's financial success is partly based on its ability to take in money for selling merchandise before it has to pay its suppliers. But lately Amazon has gone one better: steadily lengthening the time it takes to pay suppliers. That has been a factor behind the retailer's soaring cash flow. In the third quarter, Amazon stretched out its bill payment to 72 days, up from 63 in the year-earlier period. As Brian Evans, an analyst for research firm Behind the Numbers, notes, this 'theoretically means that Amazon has not paid suppliers for sales consummated in mid-June.' Amazon's sales rose 28% in the quarter, but accounts payable nearly doubled, helping push free cash flow up 116%."

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Daniel Pink will be the Friday luncheon speaker at ABA's Fifth Winter Institute (Wi5), scheduled for next February 3-5 in San Jose, Calif. Bookselling This Week said that Pink's next book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (scheduled for January release), "presents a new way of thinking about motivation, one not based on reward-and-punishment system, but rather an 'innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.'"

ABA CEO Oren Teicher said that Pink's "previous Winter Institute talk on the power of right-brain thinking captivated the interest of everyone in the room, and we believe his current focus will leave booksellers just as motivated."

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The Open Book, a co-op bookstore located in the former Harry W. Schwartz Shorewood location, plans to open November 7. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the co-op, which received a "$35,000 low-interest loan from Shorewood for books and expenses . . . will compete with the nearby Boswell bookstore on North Downer Ave., at the site of another former Schwartz store. Owner Daniel Goldin said he didn't get any financial help from Milwaukee for his shop, and he's concerned that the new shop in Shorewood will hurt his sales."

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In the Huffington Post, Praveen Madan and Christin Evans, co-owners of the Booksmith, San Francisco, Calif., predicted that "independent bookstores can have a great future and we are betting our careers on it. What makes us optimistic in the face of all the doom and gloom surrounding independent bookstores? New opportunities that can help independent bookstores reinvent and reinvigorate their businesses. New opportunities being made possible by a publishing industry in turmoil, new opportunities being served up by new technologies, new opportunities we can identify if we pay attention to the unmet needs of our customers."

They explored "a short list of five such new opportunities," including:

• Literary community building
• Author services
• Enhancing the browsing experience
• Print on demand
• New markets

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The Town Book Store, Westfield, N.J., will celebrate its 75th anniversary during November. Owner Anne Laird, who purchased the the bookshop in 2007, told Bookselling This Week: "I feel fortunate I was able to keep it alive. It's something I didn't think would be a real possibility."

She added that her business has weathered the recession thanks to a supportive community. "People seem to be embracing the idea of shopping locally and having a hand in the success of local businesses," said Laird. "I can't tell you the number of people who said they had been planning to go to Barnes & Noble, but they decided not to when they saw our sign, which says, 'Nurture Your Community: Shop Local.' . . . The fact that we're surviving with so much competition speaks not only to us and what we're providing, but to the town itself and the people who live here."

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From Green Apple Books, San Francisco, Calif., the store that gave us the Book vs. the Kindle video series: the November book of the month video, which explores O.B.B. (overwhelmed by books) syndrome and recommends Running Away by Jean-Philippe Toussaint.

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The late J.R.R. Tolkien is one of the world's "Top-Earning Dead Celebrities," according to Forbes, which reported that the Tolkien estate and HarperCollins "recently reached a settlement with New Line Cinema over allegedly unpaid royalties from the Lord of the Rings movies. September's agreement was reported at over $100 million, meaning J.R.R. Tolkien earned a sizable income in the last year. His earning potential isn't dimming: The Hobbit is rumored for release in 2011, with directors Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson at the helm."

Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) and Michael Crichton also made the Forbes list.

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Mary Alice and Marvin Schaefer, who have owned Glenwood's Books With a Past, Glenwood, Md., for 14 years, plan to close Saturday unless a potential buyer is able to close a purchase deal. The Howard County Times reported that as of early this week, Erin Matthews "was awaiting approval of a bank loan that would allow her to buy the store. If she is successful, the Schaefers, who live just four miles from the bookstore, plan to continue working in the shop while Matthews learns the business."

 

International Publishers Marketing has added three publishers, effective December 1:

• NB Uitegewers Publishers, South Africa, with five imprints that focus on fiction, travel, nature, language, cooking, history, military history, politics and reference. IPM will begin distribution here with a large selection of NB Uitegewers backlist and new releases.
• Maestro Books, Amsterdam, which publishes photography books about traveling, modern cities and architecture.
• ESKA Publishing, founded in France in 1982. IPM will carry its English-language titles in medicine, management, finance and industry, politics, economics and the arts.

 

Today on Oprah: Lisa Niemi, author with Patrick Sawyze of The Time of My Life (Atria, $26, 9781439158586/1439158584).

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Sunday on NPR's To the Best of Our Knowledge: Kitty Florey, author of Script and Scribble (Melville House, $22.95, 9781933633671/1933633670).

 

Summit Entertainment will re-release Twilight to theaters on November 19 for a single night, just a day before the launch of The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Variety reported that Summit "decided to re-release Twilight in response to fan requests, even though it's already available on DVD. The minimajor also said some theaters will offer discounted admission prices. Twilight grossed over $380 million in worldwide box office following its release last November."

 

Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series extended its reign as vampire queen of all media when The Twilight Saga: New Moon soundtrack rose "to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 this week, selling 153,000 copies (up 33%) in its first full week of release, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The Summit/Chop Shop/Atlantic album, which features music by Death Cab for Cutie, Thom Yorke and the Killers, arrived on the chart last week with 115,000 after an early release October 16 pushed it onto the list with just three days of sales," the Hollywood Reporter noted.

 

Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance: 1929, The Great Depression, and the Bankers Who Broke the World won the £30,000 ($49,687) Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.
 
Financial Times editor Lionel Barber called Lords of Finance a "brilliant book, which brings to life the 1920s and the role of its great public servants in trying, but ultimately failing, to manage the world financial system. A must for anyone who wants to understand economics."

 

Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet by Seth Rogovoy (Scribner, $25, 9781416559153/1416559159, November 24, 2009)

Steve McQueen, King of Cool: Tales of a Lurid Life by Darwin Porter (Blood Moon Productions, $26.95, 9781936003051/1936003058, December 25, 2009)

With astonishing focus and intensity, Seth Rogovoy and Darwin Porter show how Bob Dylan and Steve McQueen arrived in New York City as poor and obscure 20-somethings determined to carve out very different paths to fame and fortune. Their close-ups of Dylan and McQueen along with the icons' psychology and sources of creativity should prove endlessly fascinating for their fans.

Lyrics serve as the trusty guide for Rogovoy's exploration of Bob Dylan, as both songwriter and performer. While engrossed in study of the Torah, Rogovoy was struck by how familiar some of the verses seemed. Why, he wondered, did he recognize, "The soles of their feet . . . their appearance was like fiery coals, burning like torches," and "No man sees my face and lives?" He then realized that he knew these lines (or slight variations) from favorite Dylan songs.

Viewing Dylan as engaged in a form of midrash (riffing on Biblical texts to create new meanings), Rogovoy began to analyze the Dylan songbook from the beginning ("Blowin' in the Wind" is linked to verses from Ezekiel and Isaiah; "Masters of War" is tied to Isaiah) to his most recent work. Rogovoy concludes that as early as his arrival in Greenwich Village in 1961, Dylan began using his knowledge of Biblical texts as jumping-off points for his compositions. The more he studies the lyrics in depth, the greater awe Rogovoy develops for Dylan's originality, wit and energy. Rogovoy does at times become so over-invested in Dylan that he can sound like a defense attorney countering critics who have caught whiffs of misogyny and anti-Semitism in the lyrics. On the whole, though, he offers much food for thought about the genius who wrote, "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more."

Darwin Porter approaches Steve McQueen through his cinematic image: "A man's man and a woman's dream" to his admirers or a star saddled with a face that "looked like a Botticelli angel who had been crossed with a chimp" to those less enchanted with his Bad Boy appeal. Exhibiting a tabloid reporter's enthusiasm for dirt, Porter investigates how McQueen developed the unique persona that captivated audiences in such movies as The Magnificent Seven and Bullitt.

McQueen's early years were a nightmare of abandonment, neglect, abuse and exploitation. His mother was an alcoholic; purportedly one of his "step-fathers" put him on the street as a child prostitute; he spent time in reform school and ran away to kick around brothels as a towel-boy. All that was a nasty prelude to a direction-changing three-year stint with the Marines (he enlisted at 17) and acting classes in Greenwich Village.

If McQueen was secure in anything, Porter assures us, it was his physical appeal and sexual allure. Notorious for having the morals of an alley cat (according to many sources), he admitted to one of his girlfriends that he would do anything with anybody--men, women, acting coaches, co-stars, competitors, idols--if it landed him a part. He told Rod Steiger, "I became a slut in New York looking for sluts." There are no complaints on record.

McQueen may have wanted to remain a tantalizing mystery to everyone, but even women he bedded suspected his competitive friendships with James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, Rock Hudson, George Peppard and others went beyond a few beers and shop talk. Lee Strasberg and Shelley Winters shared their own theories about McQueen's sexuality with Porter, and they are suitably lurid.

Porter is so enamored of fun filth that the occasional questionable report slips in. The notoriously unreliable Anais Nin alleges that McQueen waltzed into New York City's White Horse Tavern with James Dean, radiating sexual tension before her astonished eyes. Delicious as this implausible tale may be, let's not confuse public crowd-scenes with intimate bedroom encounters.

To their credit, Rogovoy, burnishing the luster of Dylan, and Porter, at times tarnishing McQueen's, celebrate their stars to the heavens and yet, miraculously, bring us closer to them.--John McFarland

Shelf Talker: Superstars Bob Dylan and Steve McQueen get loving close-ups in highly illuminating and idiosyncratic biographies.

Mary Gordon is the author of the novels Spending, The Company of Women, The Rest of Life, Final Payments, The Other Side and Pearl, as well as the memoirs The Shadow Man and Circling My Mother. She has received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 1997 O. Henry Award for Best Short Story and the 2007 Story Prize for The Stories of Mary Gordon. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City. Her new book, Reading Jesus: A Writer's Encounter with the Gospels, was published by Pantheon this week.

On your nightstand now:

Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith and Revolution.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Little Women.

Your top five authors:

Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Anne Porter, Marcel Proust, W.H. Auden.

Book you've faked reading:

Buddenbrooks.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Jean Stafford's The Mountain Lion.

Book you've bought for the cover:

The Fountains of Rome by H. V. Morton.
 
Book that changed your life:

Franny and Zooey.

Favorite line from a book:

"The reign of chaos is over. Life is possible. Knives cut."--Virginia Woolf in The Waves.
 
Book you most want to read again for the first time:

Moby Dick.
 

The Snow Tourist: A Search for the World's Purest, Deepest Snowfall by Charlie English (Counterpoint, $15.95 trade paper, 9781582435206/1582435200, November 2009)

Opening lines of books we want to read:

It is late on an autumn afternoon and I am sitting at my desk by the upstairs window which overlooks the blank gable-end of our neighbor's house, making a list of words I associate with snow. There are already several on my notepad. "Beauty" stands at the top, followed in order by "danger," "childhood," "loneliness" and "death." In a separate column, I have written "sledding," "skiing," "snowballs" and "fun," with two exclamation marks. I am considering putting a line through "fun" when the streetlight flickers into life. As dusk falls across London, the lamp's orange glow transports me back to February, when snow fell in the steep canyon between the red-brick houses.

On the way to bed that night I stood by the upstairs window watching the snow fall. Flakes burst briefly into the streetlamp's sodium light, to be hustled this way and that by the wind before disappearing into the dark . . .

In the morning the damp smell of snow permeated the kitchen, now bright with reflected sunshine--what the Japanese call yuki-akari, snow light.

--Selected by Marilyn Dahl

 

I'm scared--that's right, scared!--of William S. Pumpkin-Burroughs; of Halloween Bible book burnings; of loss-leader pricing specters and an innocent child whispering, "I see dead books."

Well, no, not really. I'm just trying to get into the spirit of the season with a shout out (scream out) to neglected ghosts in contemporary fiction and to present the first annual Halloween Book Spirits Awards.

First, I believe ghosts need some new PR. I mentioned on Twitter and Facebook earlier this week that, in a publishing world gone mad for vampires, zombies and werewolves, ghosts seem to be getting short-sheeted (even Anne Rice said recently that angels are the new vampires in the book trade). Those of you familiar with spectral vengeance know that we disrespect wraiths at our peril.

What made me think about ghosts was a visit last weekend to the Metropolitan Museum Art in New York to see an extraordinary exhibition, Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping. Although I knew something about his work, I hadn't realized that during the late 18th century, he painted "Ghost Amusement," a scroll depicting "a mélange of ghosts," as the exhibition catalogue so delicately puts it. "The conflation of two seemingly different worlds--evidential scholarship and fanciful supernatural narratives--is one reason why this painting continues to fascinate viewers today."

In 1772, on the day, appropriately enough, of the Ghost Festival, Luo Ping showed this scroll to his friend Zhang Xun, who added a "layer of interpretation" by observing that "ghosts were often vengeful or malevolent spirits and as such were feared by the living. But since Luo had the unusual gift of blue-green eyes, he was able to see and pacify these spirits by painting them. At the same time, through his depictions of ghosts, Luo was able to reflect on the misdeeds of humans and reveal the truth of their nature," according to the catalogue.

And where, the book guy in me wondered, is that book series? Where is the Stephenie Meyer of the ghost world lurking, and wouldn't this be an appropriate week for his or her manuscript to emerge from a slush pile graveyard somewhere? When I was a kid, becoming a ghost was as easy as cutting eyeholes in a white sheet. Perhaps there's a page-turning novel about a "mélange of ghosts" nested in those memories. Bestseller lists and loss-leader tables here I come.

And now to the awards ceremony. As the fates would have it, one category winner for this year's purely subjective and hastily organized Halloween Book Spirits Awards appeared just as I was pondering these questions.

Best Facebook Comment on My Post About Absent Ghosts in Contemporary Fiction

Rich Rennicks of Malaprop's Bookstore, Asheville, N.C., and Unbridled Books: "I'm reading a manuscript of a kinda creepy historical fiction about seances, hauntings and skeletons of murdered peddlers buried in cellars (Captivity by Deb Noyes, due in May from UB). Maybe ghosts and mediums will be the big thing next year. They're due a resurgence."

Best Halloween Bookstore Event Promo Copy

McNally Jackson Books, New York, N.Y. for the McNally Jackson Halloween Embarrassment: "This Halloween we hope book nerds of all sorts will join us to act like costumed fools amid our stacks. We're hosting our annual Halloween party, and that means it's time to dust off your spats and clichés, grab those fangs and poorly executed allegories. We're inviting all attendees to draw on their bookish lore to dress up as a favorite character. Or theme. Or setting? Even a title will do. Anyhow, we expect you to impress us with your book-themed costume. Uncostumed book nerds are welcome, too, they just won't have a shot to win fabulous prizes. Even our friends at The Desk Set, those nerdiest of hip librarians, will be here to get in on the action."

Best Bookstore E-newsletter Subject Line

Cornerstone Books, Salem, Mass., for the subject line to Wednesday's bookstore e-newsletter: "Fantasy Freaks Costume Party and Bernie Madoff Finish Off A Very Scary October!" If I had ever done these awards before, Cornerstone would probably be a perennial favorite due to their location in a village renowned for its witchery. But this year they earn kudos for that line promoting a pair of Thursday night events at separate venues featuring Ethan Gilsdorf, author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms; and Erin Arvedlund, author of Too Good to be True: The Rise and Fall of Bernie Madoff.

Congratulations to the winners (and the ghosts, of course) and Happy Halloween!--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)