Greta Kanne and her husband, Chris Harper, recently purchased the Book Juggler, a 22-year-old used and new bookstore in Willits, Calif., about halfway between San Francisco and Eureka. Kanne wrote to Shelf Awareness that she worked at the store as a teenager before going to work at Chaucer's Books in Santa Barbara, where she met Harper. "Between the two of us, we've worked in seven bookstores and are just thrilled at last to be our own bookmasters."

Founded in Hayward and moved to Willits in 1987 by Steve and Susan Grimes, the Book Juggler houses more than 70,000 volumes, roughly 75% of which are used. The rest are new health, yoga and music books. In used books, the store's strongest categories are genre and literary fiction, history, children's and health. Kanne and Harper plan to maintain the current inventory and strengthen the home/garden, arts and biography/memoir sections.

Kanne added that Willits, a town of 10,000, has a large percentage of bibliophiles. "Willits has supported both the Book Juggler and Leaves of Grass Books, a great new bookstore, for more than 20 years. We are both proud to help carry on the bookselling tradition."

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The Day tells the sad tale of the Book Mart, Stonington, Conn., owned by Regan Morse, whose inventory was wrecked by soot after the furnace chimney became blocked one night last month. Morse has set up shop in the entranceway of her nearby home and is debating whether to reopen.

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Residents and officials in Castro Valley, Calif., celebrated after Alameda County received a $13.9 million grant from the state to help build a new 41,200-sq.-ft. library that will include computers with Wi-Fi Internet access, a multipurpose center, a café, a bookstore and outdoor patio, the Contra Costa Times reported.

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The San Diego City Beat laments that San Diego came in No. 39 out of 69 cities in the study of America's Most Literate Cities, won by Seattle (Shelf Awareness, November 30). Dennis Wills, owner of La Jolla's DG Wills bookstore, told the paper: "It's hard for intellectual entities to survive here. This is a city that has trouble maintaining a symphony orchestra."

By contrast, one resident said, "You get on a bus in Portland and seven outta 10 passengers are reading--from Kafka to graphic novels to Dick Francis thrillers."

The article also noted the decline in public library funding both by the state of California and the city. One of the effects: the city's 35 branch libraries have cut back a total of 200 hours a week.

But there was one sign of hope. On Monday a teenager stopped by DG Wills. "Clutching a three-ring binder and with intentionally ratty blonde hair and black eyeliner, she asked Wills where she might find some Sylvia Plath. 'First time here?' he asked, guiding her to the poetry section. 'Yeah,' she said looking around with a broad smile at the somewhat haphazard array of books. 'Wish my house looked like this,' she said."

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With daily prize drawings, hot cider and cookies, this weekend Northern Light Christian Bookstore, Houghton, Mich., celebrates its second move in 20 years, to the Razorback Centre, according to the Daily Mining Gazette.

[This is part one of a two-part series about Blue Willow Bookshop, a Texas store that keeps building on past successes and embarking on new initiatives. Today we cover some of what the store has done this year; tomorrow we'll talk about titles that Blue Willow is handselling.]


Every year the Blue Willow Bookshop, Houston, Tex., aims to grow 10%, a target it has reached all but one year since Valerie Koehler opened the store in 1996. (The one off year was 2002, during which Blue Willow was up over the previous year, but not 10%.) "We're on track to hit 10% again," Koehler told Shelf Awareness. "We work hard at it. We'll die young, but we like it."

The store is "not doing anything big and flashy" for the holiday season, Koehler continued, but is taking a kind of incremental approach. "We're learning each year how to do something better. Every year we get a little wiser. When we do something new, we track it and determine if it's successful and how to do it the next time. We don't reinvent the wheel if we don't have to." With a laugh, she added, "And we steal from others if we can."

One contributing factor to a good start in December is that the weather has turned chilly. "Sometimes in the South, it's hard to get into the mood when it's 200% humidity and 95 degrees," she said.

Among other initiatives, this year the store has made "a concerted effort" to take advantage of marketing coop money, which has helped the bottom line. For example, when putting out a bookmark, the store decided to have a book advertisement on it. Koehler commented: "Why not have someone pay for the whole thing?"

In the same vein, the store is getting coop for some of the titles it's now reviewing on its Web site--but not to the extent of letting coop determine selection. "We don't want to promote titles we don't like," she said. "Instead we ask, 'What did you read and like and can we get coop for it?' We pick titles we like."

During the year, Blue Willow Bookshop also hired someone to update its Web site weekly and has begun sending e-mail newsletters to educators and to general customers in an effort "to try to keep our presence in front of people." The store has had a print newsletter and cut its subscription list dramatically because many people on it hadn't shopped in the store in a long time. Blue Willow continues to send out a printed newsletter--to some 2,000 people--and now has an e-list of 600, which continues to grow. The two newsletters are identical and come out monthly, although Blue Willow did not publish a December edition; instead, it did a holiday issue similar to last year's, which was "such a success." The holiday edition featured 12 picks, mostly books but also "a game or sideline."

In general, Blue Willow "keeps pounding the same message home: that if customers want service, they should come here," Koehler said. "We can't compete with the big guys but we provide a neighborhood atmosphere. Many of our staff know the people in the area. We try to be a family and be upbeat."

Koehler aims to involve everyone in the store; even the people in the back room are part of the process of recommending and reading new titles. "We make sure galleys go far and wide on staff, and everyone knows what everyone else is reading," Koehler said. Laughing, she added, "We try to be one big happy family that fights every so often."

Stores on the main corridor in the area recently formed a merchants association, and Koehler has a sense that her "little, old-fashioned store" has a place in Houston, the fifth-largest city in the country. A Barnes & Noble is three miles away, but because of Houston's notorious and increasingly bad traffic, "it's a long three miles," Koehler said. "Many people are staying in the neighborhood, but I do know in the metro area that there are many options. If I can get a part of the pie, I'm happy."

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 Web site.

Saturday, December 10

7 p.m. Encore Booknotes. Witold Rybczynski sketches the design of his biography of the architect of New York City's Central Park, A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century (Scribner, $15.95, 0684865750).

8 p.m. After Words. Joseph diGenova, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, deposes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Haynes Johnson, whose new book, The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism (Harcourt, $26, 0151010625), draws parallels between the Red Scare of the 1950s and the post-September 11 world. (Re-airs Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.)

This morning Good Morning America talks with Emma McLaughlin, author of Citizen Girl (Washington Square Press, $14, 0743266862).

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This morning on the Early Show: Sue Grafton, author of S Is for Silence (Putnam, $26.95, 0399152970), which is out this week.

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Today WAMU's Diane Rehm Show talks with Bart Ehrman, author of Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (HarperSanFrancisco, $24.95, 0060738170).

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Today on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show: Melissa Clark, who cooked up Chef, Interrupted: Delicious Chefs' Recipes That You Can Actually Make at Home (Clarkson Potter, $32.50, 1400054400).

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Today KCRW's Bookworm features part one of a two-part interview with Robert Coover, author of A Child Again (McSweeney's, $22, 1932416226). As the show describes it: "Robert Coover, a reigning master of experimental narrative, gives a two-part interview for this, his long-anticipated first visit to Bookworm. In part one, Coover offers an overview of his career, revealing that even from the first his themes, intentions and methods were fully imagined. He then worked on these retold fairy tales and comic political allegories sometimes for a decade or more before completion and publication."

In the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, mystery writer Tom Nolan offered "a roundup of giftable whodunits, some with Christmas themes":

• A Christmas Guest by Anne Perry (Ballantine, $16.95), the third of her crime novels set in Victorian England during the holiday season. In this "satisfying tale" and "unexpected lesson about hope and honor and what love really means," Grandmama Ellison, a houseguest for the holidays in southeast England, tries to figure out who murdered another houseguest.
• Father Brown: The Essential Tales by G.K. Chesterton (Modern Library Classics, $12.95) contains 15 stories and an introduction by P.D. James. "With their pointed aphorisms, their intricate prose and their theological dimension, these tales--each centering on a case that Father Brown must solve--seem like gifts from a more civilized era."
• Philip Marlowe's Guide to Life edited by Martin Asher (Knopf, $14.95), "an irresistible pocket-sized compendium of sayings and descriptive passages from one of the most quotable of writers," Raymond Chandler.
• Discovering the Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade edited by Richard Layman (Vince Emery Productions, $19.95), "filled with essays and other material--e.g., pulp fiction of the time--that help us to grasp the full dimensions of Hammett's novel and John Huston's movie."
• Dashiell Hammett: Lost Stories edited by Vince Emery (Vince Emery Productions, $24.95), "21 tales never before published in an anthology or unavailable for decades."
• The Novels of Ross Macdonald by Michael Kreyling (University of South Carolina Press, $35), "in which this insightful scholar places the late author in the context of other West Coast myth-makers, some of whom helped to invent (and complicate) the California Dream."
• L.A. Noir: The City as Character by Alain Silver and James Ursini (Santa Monica Press, $19.95), "a photo-rich analysis of the way that crime movies have used Los Angeles."
• Behind the Mystery by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Hot-House Press, $29.95), a collection of interviews of 18 mystery writers, including Tony Hillerman, Donald Westlake, Sue Grafton, Robert B. Parker, Michael Connelly and others.
• The Best American Mystery Stories 2005 edited by Joyce Carol Oates (Houghton Mifflin, $14), "a solid collection" that leans "toward the gritty, the hard-boiled, the noir."
• Creature Cozies edited by Jill M. Morgan (Berkley, $23.95), an anthology of 12 stories "in which a dozen contemporary mystery writers tell tales in which their fictional characters encounter their authors' own real-life pets (photos included)."