Concerning the sales of Sarah Palin's Going Rogue, which some independents are not enthusiastic about (Shelf Awareness, November 19, 2009), Lisa Baudoin of Books & Company, Oconomowoc, Wis., writes:

My community does not often reflect my own personal politics, but it is a community that supports my bookstore. Not selling the Palin book is not going to make Sarah Palin go away (and I am not sure what will). In fact, Sarah Palin's book has been moving quite nicely, and I am pleased that my customers did not choose to purchase their book elsewhere. They know the value of having an independent bookstore in their community. It's nice to know we share that commonality. The need to read and the need to have community transcends political differences. Hurray for that.

At Books-A-Million in the third quarter ended October 31, net sales fell 0.6%, to $110.9 million, compared to the same period a year ago, and the net loss improved slightly to $1.6 million, compared to a net loss of $2.2 million in 2008. Sales at stores open at least a year dropped 1.9%.

Clyde B. Anderson, chairman, president and CEO, commented: "Comparable-store sales for the third quarter improved over the second-quarter trend. We saw stabilization in our core book business and continued growth in the bargain book and gift departments. Our balance sheet remains strong, and we are focused on maintaining fiscal discipline while preparing for the holiday season."

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Oprah Winfrey plans to end her talk show in September 2011, at the end of its 25th year on the air. The book world's best salesperson is planning to concentrate on her future cable channel, which is called OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, a joint venture between her and Discovery Communications.

The New York Times said that OWN's launch "has proved challenging: OWN was originally expected to begin in late 2009 or early 2010, but management turnover and an uncertain advertising climate have caused delays. Discovery has not specified a premiere date for the network, which is intended to replace the Discovery Health Channel in more than 70 million households."

In the Wall Street Journal, Lorraine Shanley of Market Partners International called the show's end "a blow. Oprah Winfrey has supported many authors, and her book club has had a huge impact on America's reading habits. She made Faulkner a best seller again. She also promoted an eclectic group of authors and created publishing successes for many commercial writers."

And Random House spokesperson Stuart Applebaum told the paper, "If it is the end of her daily talk show, we probably won't see something else to match its overall potential impact on book sales in the broadcast arena any time soon. She has an integrity and connectivity to her viewership that is unmatched by any other television broadcast personality. Happily she enjoys reading books and wants to persuade her viewership to enjoy them as much as she does. It's not a characteristic shared by any other TV personalities with her persuasiveness."

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The Booksellers Association of the United Kingdom & Ireland is launching a marketing campaign based on ABA's IndieBound program for members of its Independent Booksellers Forum, Bookselling This Week reported.

The BA plans to launch an IndieBound website early next year. The site will be hosted by ABA in the U.S. and offer licensed IndieBound marketing materials that will in some cases be adapted for the U.K.

ABA CEO Oren Teicher said, "The IndieBound message is universal, and we look forward to seeing how the independent bookstore members of the BA use the program's marketing materials to meet their unique needs."

Meryl Halls, head of membership services for the BA, said she was "incredibly inspired" by the program while at the ABA's Winter Institute in Salt Lake City early this year. "It makes perfect sense to me to share the inspiration and rationale behind such a powerful campaign, and our idea is to make available to U.K. independents some of the great work being done in the States around booksellers profile-raising and community building."

BA members learned about Indiebound in detail during the association's Independent Booksellers Forum at Warwick University, when ABA chief marketing officer Meg Smith made a presentation about IndieBound. With a vote of hands, booksellers in attendance indicated "near-unanimous support" for bringing the program to the U.K., the BA said.

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ABA and IndieBound has introduced the 2.0 version of IndieBound for iPhone, which allows consumers to search for and buy e-books from independent booksellers, according to Bookselling This Week.

Among other updates: bestseller lists, the Indie Next List and other book lists indicate which are also available as e-books, and the book search function now offers three types of searches: all results, books only or e-books only.

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Changes at Borders Group:

• Bill Dandy has joined the bookseller as senior v-p, marketing. He was formerly executive v-p, marketing, for Mattress Firm and earlier was chief marketing officer for Dick's Sporting Goods; senior v-p, marketing, for Jo-Ann Stores; senior v-p, retail sales and operations, Famous Footwear; and v-p, marketing and advertising, at Michaels Stores.
• Art Keeney, who has been senior v-p, marketing, since June, is becoming senior v-p, store operations. He has had a 30-year career with national retailers.
• Larry Norton, who joined the company in August as senior v-p, merchandising and distribution (Shelf Awareness, August 12, 2009) is becoming senior v-p, merchandising, for adult trade and children's books, and will now lead the book-buying teams at Borders. For many years, he held sales positions at Simon & Schuster and William Morrow.

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Headless, faceless women. No, not also rans for 2009's best authors, but the figures gracing the covers of many novels, as noted on FirstThings.com.

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Actually there was a woman who won on Wednesday night at the National Book Awards: The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor was selected as the best work to have won the National or American Book Award for fiction in the program's 60-year history, according to the New York Times. The book was chosen in an online poll conducted by the National Book Foundation.

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Sarah Palin's Just Plain Nutz, given for free to buyers of the former governor's memoirs at Bookshop Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, Calif., mentioned here yesterday, are available on a wholesale basis to other booksellers. For more information, contact owner Casey Coonerty Protti.

The Sarah Palin snack is only the latest in a tradition of not-so-delicate commentary on books by political figures on the right made by Bookshop Santa Cruz. In 1993, the bookstore weighed Rush Limbaugh's See I Told You So and sold it for the price of baloney. In 1995, the store sold each copy of Newt Gingrich's Contract with America with a custom-made barf bag. And before the 2008 election, Bookshop Santa Cruz made and sold more than 65,000 George W. Bush Countdown Clocks.

On Sunday on ESPN SportsCenter: Larry Bird and Earvin "Magic" Johnson, authors of When the Game Was Ours (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26, 9780547225470/0547225474).

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On Monday on NPR's Morning Edition, as part of a Thanksgiving food special: Marcus Samuelsson, author of New American Table (Wiley, $40, 9780470281888/047028188X). There's also a feature on NPR.org, highlighting Thanksgiving-themed recipes from the book.

Incidentally Samuelsson will be guest chef at President Obama's first state dinner at the White House next Tuesday, November 24, when the president honors India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Today is the dawning of New Moon, the second film based on Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series.

According to the Wall Street Journal, advanced ticket sales for the movie have smashed all records. Fandango, which sells tickets for some 70% of U.S. movie screens, said it had sold out "several thousand showtimes" across the U.S., most of which were shows that opened at midnight last night.

Speaking of which, the Washington Post explored the paranormal phenomenon of "good, smart, literary women" who have tried unsuccessfully to resist the allure of the Twilight series.

Literary Review named its finalists for this year's Bad Sex in Fiction Award. The Guardian reported that on a list including Philip Roth, Amos Oz and Paul Theroux, "singer Nick Cave was picked for his second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, about a sex-obsessed door-to-door salesman. 'Frankly we would have been offended if he wasn't shortlisted,' said Anna Frame at his publisher Canongate." The winner will be announced on November 30 at London's In & Out club. The 2009 Bad Sex Award shortlist includes:

• A Dead Hand by Paul Theroux
• The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave
• The Humbling by Philip Roth
• The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
• Rhyming Life and Death by Amos Oz
• The Infinities by John Banville
• The Rescue Man by Anthony Quinn
• Love Begins in Winter by Simon Van Booy
• The Naked Name of Love by Sanjida O'Connell
• Ten Storey Love Song by Richard Milward 

Mark Siegel has illustrated several picture books, including the Texas Bluebonnet winner Seadogs and the Sibert Honor Book To Dance, written by his wife, Siena. His recent Boogie Knights (Atheneum, 2008) was optioned by Dreamworks Feature Animation. Siegal is also editorial director of First Second Books, an imprint of Roaring Brook Press/Macmillan. First Second is dedicated to high-quality graphic novels for every age; among them are Printz winner and National Book Award-nominee American-Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang and the bestseller The Photographer by Emmanuel Guibert.

On your nightstand now:

The Pixar Touch by Howard A. Price; Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M.T. Anderson.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Clifford Simak's City sent me writing short stories about talking dogs for most of my sixth-grade year; Inside Outside Upside Down by the Berenstains, much earlier of course. It did something to me, though I can't say what. I couldn't seem to get enough of that one. And there was an Uncle Scrooge comic that I read in French, in which the inventor-bird-guy (what's his name?) made a special paint which allowed you to walk into the paintings once they were done. I must have returned to that issue a hundred times. Don't know what it was even called anymore. The art must have been by Carl Barks.

Your top five authors:

(From among those I'm not editing!) Gene Wolfe, Peggy Rathmann, Lawrence Wright, David Mazzuchelli, Franςois Cheng.

Book you've faked reading:

Sin City by Frank Miller.

Books you're an evangelist for:

The Rabbi's Cat by Joann Sfar, one of the most wonderful graphic novels of all; Doris Lessing's visionary science fiction novels, especially Shikasta; The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.

Book you've bought for the cover:

The Tale of the Unknown Island by Jose Saramago.

Book that changed your life:

Why is this question so hard to answer? I suppose some books had a direct application to my life, like Stephen King's memoir On Writing, which surprised me with its passion and discipline for the craft. Some of the comics by the French visionary Moebius certainly left an indelible mark on my mind, especially the Edena series. Paul Auster's Red Notebook became a companion for many years.

Favorite line from a book:

From Orwell's Animal Farm, the last line: "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

Amin Maalouf's The Gardens of Light, about a little-known prophet called Mani, the only messiah I know of who was an artist.

Although this book's subtitle suggests otherwise, the Bocuse d'Or--the ne plus ultra of cooking competitions, held biennially in Lyons, France--is virtually unknown in the U.S. The likely reason for this is that in its 20-plus-year-history, no American team has ever won a medal in this "Olympics of Food," a combination of Top Chef, Iron Chef and, well, Olympic sport. In early 2009, however, Americans Timothy Hollingsworth and his commis (assistant) Adina Guest aimed to change that status and bring more attention to both the competition and their country's culinary excellence. The many months of preparation, struggle, obsession and creative brilliance leading up to the competition make up the bulk of Andrew Friedman's captivating and beautifully precise Knives at Dawn.

The Bocuse d'Or tests the skills of 24 teams from around the world preparing dishes that represent the culinary tradition of their home countries. Each team creates one fish platter and one meat platter. The proteins are predetermined (in 2009, they were cod and beef), but everything else is entirely up to the chefs. There are no rounds or second chances; each team has only five and a half hours to produce two perfect dishes for a panel of judges while spectators from around the world jam the kitchen prep area, screaming with the passion of soccer fans. Prior to 2009, the best an American team had ever finished was sixth.

Guided by renowned chef-restaurateurs Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller, who were equally determined that someone from the U.S. win a medal, Hollingsworth and Guest (both of whom worked for Keller at the French Laundry and were selected after they won a mini-Bocuse competition at Disneyworld) trained for the competition like athletes. Friedman, who had total access to all the players in this story, writes with perfect you-are-there intensity, capturing every moment of inspiration and despair. More impressive, however, is Friedman's remarkable ability to relate Hollingsworth's creative process along with its joys and moments of darkness. And then there's the food! Mouthwatering, spectacular, sometimes logic-defying, the dishes are so well described they are practically three-dimensional. The portrait of Hollingsworth's creamy pommes dauphinoise alone is enough to set any reader's stomach growling.

Of course, there is also suspense and plenty of drama. To Friedman's great credit, the tension mounts in the narrative exactly as it must have for the contestants. And as any watcher of kitchen competitions knows, there is always something that can go wrong at the very last minute. As Hollingsworth and Guest take their places in the Bocuse d'Or pod-kitchen, our fingers are crossed.--Debra Ginsberg

Shelf Talker: A riveting account of an American team's attempt to conquer the Bocuse d'Or--the toughest and most prestigious cooking competition in the world.

He was not born to shame:
Upon his brow shame is ashamed to sit.--Juliet, Romeo And Juliet

We've been talking about definitions in an English Composition course I teach; about how easily the definition of a word can slip into the challenge of defining an elusive concept, and then release itself from your control altogether.

A word, for example, like "shame."

In his book Shame in Shakespeare, Ewan Fernie notes that the Bard used the word "shame" 344 times in his works and the word "guilt" only 33 times. "Having offered a first definition of shame, it is now necessary to distinguish it from the associated phenomena of embarrassment and guilt," Fernie writes. "Embarrassment is a weak and transient form of shame: shame is absolute failure, embarrassment failure in a given situation."

This definition conundrum occurred to me after Dan Schreffler, the buyer at Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y., observed that "the notion of a 'Shame List' has been eating at me ever since you first discussed it several weeks ago. If the Book House were the gift shop of some well-heeled cultural institution instead an independent business trying to survive this recession, I would have a different attitude. As it is, my Shame List consists of any title that customers actually want to purchase and that we do not have and cannot get in time to satisfy them. No title is sacred. If booksellers want to surround themselves with precious gems of literature (and who among us does not?), then they should collect them in their own homes. In the bookstore we are sellers of books, not curators.... I understand that every store stocks titles that do 'perform' optimally. Maybe it is just the word 'shame' which got my goat." 

He could be right. Is Shame List harsher than necessary? There are probably a dozen other terms (Guilt List? Embarrassment List?) that would do, but I heard Shame List used this fall and it seemed to raise the stakes appropriately. Maybe I've unleashed an unnecessary demon.

Or maybe not.

"I'm loving this 'Shame List' business!" noted Jennifer Moe, general book buyer for Wheaton College Bookstore, Wheaton, Ill. "Working at a college bookstore, there are certain professors' books that we definitely must have in stock in our Faculty Authors section. It can be pretty brutal to have a prof come in and ask if we have his or her title and we have to say, 'Um, not at the moment... must be sold out!' At least then that gives them a little boost while I scurry back and order another copy right away!"

And Harriet Logan, owner of Loganberry Books, Shaker Heights, Ohio, admitted: "We're running around frantically updating our Shame List now, checking inventory and ordering the vacancies. Kinda fun. It's a mish-mosh of old classics and staff favorites, and the list is largest for children's picture books. We used to call it the Essential Inventory List, but Shame List is quickly taking over. It's easier to say, for one." 

She shared some "oddballs on the Loganberry Shame List, because we recommend these books all the time (just because we like 'em)."
 
Fiction

• The Lilac Bus by Maeve Binchy
• Labyrinths Jorge Luis Borges
• Kindred by Octavia Butler
• Rose by Martin Cruz Smith
• To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Wells

Nonfiction

• The Federalist Papers
• Various and sundry titles by Thich Nhat Hanh

Children's/young adult

• Five Chinese Brothers by Claire Huchet Bishop and Kurt Wiese
• Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney
• Miss Twiggley's Tree by Dorothea Fox
• Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson 
• Ben and Me by Robert Lawson
• The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner (and she's local)

 
"Actually, I have an Excel list with several hundred titles," Logan added, "but these are in bold, and perhaps not on everyone else's list."

Betty Smith's classic novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, made Cheryl McKeon's Shame List at Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, Wash. She confessed, "I clearly recall suggesting to the customer seeking this classic, 'Perhaps it's a current school assignment and we just sold out.'"

So, if not Shame List, then what? The possibilities are many: regret, chagrin, remorse, compunction.

But there will always be those books--and those questions--and in the end, a bookseller's job is to find every way possible to say "Yes." So, in my book at least, Shame List it is.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)