Congratulations to the Andover Bookstore, Andover, Mass., which is celebrating its 200th birthday this month. As manager John Hugo proudly stated, "We've been continuously operating since 1809, the year Lincoln was born." (The country's oldest bookstore is the Moravian Book Shop, Bethlehem, Pa., which was founded in 1745.)

Events coordinator Karen Harris noted that although the store has been located in several locations over the years, it has always supplied textbooks for the students at Phillips Academy, which probably accounts for the store's longevity. "We are still the official bookstore for Phillips Academy, and we supply their logo clothing, mugs, binders, etc."

Harris told the Andover Townsman, "There's just something very magical about this place. It's one of those precious things."

The official birthday cake will be cut tonight and a larger celebration takes place next Thursday, November 19, when the store invites people to "come and join us around the fireplace as our own Susan Lenoe and Karen Harris take us on a journey back through time into the history of the Andover Bookstore. There will be memories from the earliest years, vintage images and funny stories from more recent times."

Shelf Awareness's John Mutter offers special congratulations: the Andover Bookstore was likely the first bookstore he ever set tiny foot in, during the six months or so he was first alive and living with his book-loving mom and book-loving grandparents down the road, and then later while visiting. For the longest time, he thought a big stone fireplace was a standard bookstore fixture.

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More on Flyleaf Books (Shelf Awareness, October 24, 2009), which opens in Chapel Hill, N.C., this coming Monday, November 16:

Indy Week has a Q&A with the three owners. Concerning the challenge of opening in a down economy, one of the trio, Jamie Fiocco, commented: "I will in hindsight be curious to see how that plays out. But I think it's safe to say, for us personally, we think that this is just the right place no matter when."

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Merchants in Santa Cruz, Calif., hope that the holiday season and promotions "like 'Downtown Tuesdays' will bring in consumers despite a recent spike of violence in the area," according to KSBW-8, which reported that "some businesses said they think the weekly discounts and specials are catching on with the community."

"I think downtown is a way to bring people back to reclaim the streets. So, I think people are looking at in that way," said Casey Coonerty Protti, owner of Bookshop Santa Cruz.

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The inaugural winner of the Jean Srnecz Memorial Scholarship, sponsored by the Baker & Taylor Foundation and Baker & Taylor and honoring the company's late senior v-p of merchandising, is Misty Mae Parker, a sophomore at North Georgia College & State University. The scholarship is worth $3,000. Parker's mother, Ponda Parker, works in B&T's customer services requirements department in Commerce, Ga.

"We are pleased to honor Jean in a way that empowers a dynamic individual from the Baker & Taylor family," CEO Tom Morgan said. "Misty represents the desire for learning that Jean would have appreciated."

Srnecz was on the plane that crashed in Buffalo, N.Y., February 12. The annual college scholarship was set up in her honor and supports the education of a child of a B&T employee.

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Pop Matters traces the close connection between Edie Falco, actress best known as Carmela Soprano and Nurse Jackie, and her uncle, Ed Falco, who's director of Virginia Tech's MFA writing program and author of Saint John of the Five Boroughs, published by Unbridled Books last month.

"Ed has been to the premieres of many of Edie's stage productions and has visited his niece often on the sets of her TV shows," Pop Matters wrote. "Edie relishes any opportunity to crow about her uncle's talent, including at a recent BookExpo America, where she shared her enthusiasm with an equally enthusiastic standing-room-only crowd at New York's famed Algonquin."

The piece includes a Q&A with the Falcos about their family, religion, violence and the novel.

Marshall Smith, who founded CIROBE with Brad Jonas in 1991 and built it into the preeminent remainder book show in the U.S., died on Tuesday in Franklin, Ind. He was traveling back from the most recent CIROBE show to his bookstore, Key West Island Books, in Key West, Fla.

Smith began his career as a traveling remainder salesperson covering the Southeast and Midwest territories for Outlet Book Co., Texas Bookman, Assorted Book Company, Marboro and other remainder firms. Since the late 1990s, he owned and operated Key West Island Books, where he shared his love of Hemingway and pirate books.

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Today's New York Times called Donald Harington, who died Saturday at age 73, an author "who never achieved popular success but attracted a devoted cult following, blended myth, dreamscape and sharply observed Ozark speech and manners to depict a rural society whose richness and eccentricity drew the inevitable comparisons to William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County."

His fictional Ozark town of Stay More "turned out to be a strange one, populated by shrewd hillbillies, reclusive millionaires, an itinerant motion-picture projectionist, a candidate for governor who wants to abolish hospitals and schools, and, in The Cockroaches of Stay More, talking insects who constitute their own Ozark subsociety."

The Times added that Harington "moved elusively among fictional categories, making him hard to place and hard to sell, which is one reason he taught history at the University of Arkansas from 1986 until 2008. His work seemed regional and in some respects traditional, but his narratives unfolded in a magical-realist haze with metafictional twists and turns and excursions into nonfiction territory." All of his 15 Stay More novels are available from the Toby Press.

We were fortunate to hear Harington speak at length at Toby Press's fifth anniversary party--he gave a hilarious peroration on the subject "Are Salesreps Human?" (Shelf Awareness, April 17, 2006).

He began by mentioning mythical local monsters he had heard about as a child, then said, in part, "Growing up with all the reports and stories about these fabulous critters, I was susceptible when my first editor, forty years ago, told me about a monster called a salesrep. The editor didn't call the salesrep a monster but painted such a horrid verbal portrait of it that it was easy for me to imagine a fearsome freak that would scare the daylights out of any Ozark monster.

" 'We can't include this paragraph,' my editor would say to me, 'the salesreps would be all over us if we tried.' Or I would submit a book proposal, and the editor would say, 'If I showed this to the salesreps, they would crush it flat.'

"Years after I had escaped from that particular editor and his terrifying tales of salesreps, I discovered that other editors also believed in salesreps and believed they were horrifying. 'You'd just better cut this whole chapter,' an editor told me, 'because the salesreps would tear it to pieces.'

"I never met a salesrep, and so I couldn't verify that they had a supernatural sense of smell that would account for one editor telling me that certain sentences of mine 'stunk to high heaven.' Another editor told me 'If the salesreps ever got a look at this, they'd kill you.' "

Tomorrow morning on Good Morning America: Frank Beddor, author of ArchEnemy: The Looking Glass Wars (Dial, $17.99, 9780803731561/0803731566).

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Tomorrow morning on the Today Show: William J. Bennett, author of The True Saint Nicholas: Why He Matters to Christmas (Howard Books, $16.99, 9781416567462/1416567461).

Also on Today: Mireille Guiliano, author of Women, Work & the Art of Savoir Faire: Business Sense & Sensibility (Atria, $24.99, 9781416589198/1416589198).

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Tomorrow on the View: Duff Goldman, author of Ace of Cakes: Inside the World of Charm City Cakes (Morrow, $35, 9780061703010/006170301X).

Also on the View: Stephen King, author of Under the Dome (Scribner, $35, 9781439148501/1439148503).

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Tomorrow on Chelsea Lately: Valerie Bertinelli, author of Finding It: And Satisfying My Hunger for Life Without Opening the Fridge (Free Press, $26, 9781439141632/1439141630).

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Tomorrow on NPR's Marketplace: Lee Eisenberg, author of Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer Will Keep on Buying No Matter What (Free Press, $26, 9780743296250/0743296257).

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Tomorrow night on the Late Show with Jimmy Fallon: Steven Ward and JoAnn Ward, co-authors of Crash Course in Love (VH1, $17.99, 9781439177334/1439177333).

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Monday and focuses on political and historical books as well as the book industry. The following are highlights for this coming weekend. For more information, go to Book TV's website.

Saturday, November 14

9:30 a.m. Live coverage of the 2009 Miami Book Fair includes events featuring Al Gore, Francine Prose, Mary Gordon, Taylor Branch, Gwen Ifill and Tracy Kidder. (Re-airs Saturday at 11 p.m.)

4 p.m. Former Tennessee Senator Bill Frist discusses his political career and his book, A Heart to Serve: The Passion to Bring Health, Hope, and Healing (Center Street, $24.99, 9781599950167/1599950162). (Re-airs Sunday at 6 a.m.)

4:45 p.m. Mark Moyar, author of A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq (Yale University Press, $30, 9780300152760/0300152760), argues that good military leadership is the key to winning counterinsurgency wars. (Re-airs Sunday at 7 a.m.)

7 p.m. David Hoffman, author of The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy (Doubleday, $35, 9780385524377/0385524374), recounts the final decade of the Cold War and the nuclear and biological munitions that remained following the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

8 p.m. Greg Jaffe, co-author of The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army (Crown, $28, 9780307409065/0307409066), profiles Generals George Casey, Peter Chiarelli, John Abizaid and David Petraeus. 
   
10 p.m. After Words. Minnesota Congressional Representative Michele Bachmann interviews Peter Schweizer about his book, Architects of Ruin: How Big Government Liberals Wrecked the Global Economy--and How They Will Do it Again if No One Stops Them (Harper, $24.99, 9780061953347/0061953342). (Re-airs Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m., and Monday at 7 a.m.)

Sunday, November 15

10 a.m. Live coverage of the 2009 Miami Book Fair continues with events featuring Ralph Nader, George Packer, Sam Tanenhaus and Norman Podhoretz. (Re-airs Sunday at 10 p.m.)

8 p.m. Rich Benjamin, author of Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America (Hyperion, $24.99, 9781401322687/1401322689), explores the growing phenomenon of self-imposed residential segregation.

Suggesting that there are "still some signs of life in the material market--especially if you've got a brand name author launching a franchise with reincarnation and young protagonists," Variety reported that New Regency and Peter Chernin acquired the screen rights to My Name Is Memory, the first installment of a three-book series by Ann Brashares.

The novel, which will be published next June by Riverhead, "begins as a college age couple meets, and a young man makes a startling confession. Turns out their souls have been reincarnated over hundreds of years, but these soul mates keep losing each other. While he remembers the details of their previous lives--and his often exasperating attempts to connect with her romantically--she cannot recall the events of those past lives, nor the rivalry that exists with another soul that keeps getting in the way. The book has elements of Twilight and The Time Traveler's Wife," Variety wrote.

The winners of the 2009 National Outdoor Book Awards, sponsored by the National Outdoor Book Awards Foundation, Idaho State University and the Association of Outdoor Recreation and Education, are:

• History-Biography: Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America by Douglas Brinkley (Harper).
• Nature and the Environment: Our Living Earth by Yann Arthus-Bertrand (Abrams Books for Young Readers)
• Design & Artistic Merit: Lars Jonsson's Birds illustrated by Lars Jonsson (Princeton University Press)
• Outdoor Literature: Halfway to Heaven by Mark Obmascik (Free Press)
• Natural History Literature: Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys by Rob Dunn (Smithsonian Books)
• Instructional: Girl on the Rocks: A Woman's Guide to Climbing with Strength, Grace and Courage by Katie Brown, photographs by Ben Moon (Globe Pequot Press/Falcon Guides)
• Outdoor Adventure: Guide to the Green and Yampa Rivers in Dinosaur National Monument by Duwain Whitis and Barbara Vinson (RiverMaps)
• Nature: Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America by Roger Tory Peterson (Houghton Mifflin)
• Children's: Whistling Wings by Laura Goering, illustrated by Laura Jacques (Sylvan Dell Publishing)

For reviews of these titles and honorable mentions, go to noba-web.org.

Louis Armstrong explained his enduring popularity and appeal as a jazz trumpeter, singer and bandleader simply: "They know I'm there in the cause of happiness." With wit, authoritative musical knowledge and solid research, Terry Teachout lovingly chronicles Armstrong's career delivering happiness from his emergence in 1921 as a premier New Orleans jazz musician through his later fame as a popular entertainer: this was a man so versatile that he could create the 1938 jazz standard "When the Saints Go Marchin' In" and then make his sassy version of "Hello, Dolly" a No. 1 hit in 1963.

A tireless worker who expanded his range and repertoire over four decades, Armstrong broke one barrier after another for jazz musicians and black performers in America. He was the first jazz musician to be heard widely on radio, to appear on the cover of Time and on network TV; he was also the first black performer to receive star billing in a Hollywood movie. As Teachout points out, not everybody considered these achievements good things--his popularity, in fact, made him suspect in many quarters.

Bebop jazzmen like Dizzy Gillespie dismissed Armstrong as old-hat, and jazz critics and producers like John Hammond were "unable to see that the virtuoso clown and the fertile improviser were one and the same." In public, Armstrong ignored his critics because, as he stated, "showmanship does not mean you're not serious." In the privacy of his own home, though, he was more candid. Using Armstrong's personal writings and hours of tape recordings, Teachout reveals the scathing opinions Pops held of those knocking him and his success.

Audiences may have seen Armstrong as perennially happy and uncomplicated, but Teachout makes us aware of many crises behind the scenes. He discusses the influence of mobsters in jazz clubs and dance halls, the demeaning daily reality of segregation during Armstrong's early touring years and the in-fighting among leading jazz performers. There was an ongoing issue with Armstrong's upper lip, too. He teased out remarkable sounds in the way he played the trumpet, but his lip placement caused such damage that, by 1934, he had serious problems with "lip-shredding."

Armstrong wasn't going to let mere physical ailments stop him--he was always ready to embrace more music and more life. Asked what he liked in a woman, a smiling Armstrong once confessed, "First thing I look at is her general shape. It must be sharp and full of nice curves. . . . Then I dig her lips. A woman's lips must say, 'Come here and kiss me, Pops.'" The man and his music were irresistible, and Teachout's biography captures all of that magic.--John McFarland

Shelf Talker: An exhilarating biography of an American original that also charts the way the U.S. and popular entertainment changed from 1921 to 1971.