"I accidentally got a job in a bookstore in college."--Ed Devereux, explaining to the Windy City Times the origins of his Unabridged Books, Chicago, Ill., which turned 25 last month (Shelf Awareness, November 11).

The Willits News has more about the Book Juggler (Shelf Awareness, December 8), the Willits, Calif., store bought by Greta Kanne and Chris Harper.

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In August 2007, Barnes & Noble plans to open a store in Highland Village, Texas, near Dallas and Fort Worth. The store will be located in the Shops at Highland Village at Highway 407 (Justin Street), FM 2499 and Chinn Chapel.

In January, when the lease runs out, B&N plans to close its store in the Triangle Square mall in Costa Mesa, Calif., according to the Daily Pilot. It will be the third major retail tenant to leave the mall in the past year.

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Last week Borders signed a lease for a 21,000-sq.-ft. location in Queens, N.Y., its first store in that borough of New York City, the New York Sun reported.

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The 2,600-volume Edith Wharton library is to "return" to the Mount, the writer's estate in Lenox, Mass., according to today's New York Times. The estate bought the collection from British bookseller George Ramsden for $2.6 million using an unusual financing scheme. Wharton fans are encouraged to "adopt" tomes for as little as $1,000 and as much as $1 million each.

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The Mystery Writers of America's Kids Love a Mystery program has created a Joan Lowery Nixon Award to honor the late writer and founder of Kids Love a Mystery. Students will be encouraged to write and submit mystery short stories; the winners in two age categories receive $150 each. To clear up any mysteries about the award, go to the MWA Web site.

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Here's a different kind of short story contest story. In its spirit, we quote directly from the Salt Lake Tribune's account. (Jayson Blair, pay attention.)

"Who says plagiarism is always a bad thing?
 
"The Salt Lake City Library, Community Writing Center and Random House are teaming up to encourage patrons to write short stories using passages taken from work already published.

"The title of the venture, Purloined Passages, is apt: Every phrase in the stories will be stolen from a book on Random House's list of the 100 Best Novels. That's the point. 'No sentence may include your own words,' the rules state.

"The library got the idea from two Utah reporters, Brooke Adams, who writes for The Salt Lake Tribune, and Elaine Jarvik at the Deseret Morning News. They created their own story a couple of years ago using nothing but borrowed phrases from the best-books list, the way musicians sample music. The result, 'The Rearrangement,' was published in 91st Meridian, an online journal of University of Iowa International Writing Program dedicated to experimental writing. (Read their story at http://www.sltrib.com.)
 
" 'We immediately said yes' to the idea, said Hikmet Loe, a manager at the library's downtown Main Branch. 'It's wacky, it involves books--it involves the 100 best books, which we thought was great.' "

For the rest of "our" story, go to the Salt Lake Tribune site.

Things were so slow immediately after Thanksgiving at breathe books, the Baltimore, Md., New Age store that "proprietress" Susan L. Weis worried, "Is the party over?" But in the past two weeks, the year-old store has regained its sales glow. "Each day is better," Weis told Shelf Awareness.

Weis has done several unusual things that have helped a season that isn't exactly a central celebration for many of the store's customers. For one, she is featuring three unlikely titles together on a table. In the center is Maya Angelou's new Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem, which she read at the lighting of the National Christmas Tree on December 1 and promoted on Oprah. Flanking it are two "classic" backlist titles by David Bader: Haikus for Jews: For You, a Little Wisdom and Zen Judaism: For You, a Little Enlightenment. "Everyone's picking up Amazing Peace," Weis said. "They don't even know it's been on Oprah."

The store is also promoting the fact that it will open on Christmas Day (12-4). "As a New Age store, we're sort of nondenominational, and as a Jew, I have nothing to do," Weis said with a laugh. Noting the Jewish tradition of eating Chinese food and seeing movies on Christmas Day, she continued, "We're saying now there can be Chinese food, movies and books!" Already, "We've gotten a great response. People say they're glad we'll be open so they'll have a place to go."

In addition, last weekend, Weis set up a table in a local independent movie theater showing The Chronicles of Narnia and sold copies of the book. (This is her second time selling books at a movie theater; see the September 28 Shelf Awareness for more about the first.) Although she said the numbers involved weren't "blockbuster" because the majority of moviegoers seem to own the books already, the $19.95 paperback set has sold "well" and several of the $45 boxed set have changed hands. Most important, she said, "It's been invaluable public relations to stand there and talk with people and have them take literature about the store, bookmarks and our calendar of events." Many people came by the store later, and some wound up buying other things.

Weis plans to sell at the theater again this coming weekend. "It's a crazy time of the year to do this," she admitted. But she makes it easy on herself by keeping the table, books and material at the theater and taking just the cash box. "Hopefully the cash box is heavier on the way back," she laughed.

Among titles selling well this season at breathe books:

"Funnily enough for a New Age store," Are Men Necessary? by Maureen Dowd and The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, both of which Weis featured on the store's Web site.

Eckhart Tolle's new book, A New Earth, Dr. Andrew Weil's new Healthy Aging and Pema Chodron's No Time to Lose.

Calendars are "doing great, too," Weis noted. The store has sold out of its Chodron calendars, and other bestsellers, all from Amber Lotus, include the Chakras and Native American Medicine Wheel calendars.

Affirmation and meditation card decks from Hay House are also "really big." These include Magical Mermaids and Dolphins; Doreen Virture; and The Teachings of Abraham.

Last but not least, as the holiday season winds down, one of the store's priciest bestsellers is the Zen alarm clock series, which retails for $100-$140. "People have looked at them all year long and are buying them now," Weis said, not at all alarmed by the delayed purchases.

Reading Group Choices has added two features aimed at making group discussions "lively and interesting," as the company puts it.

A new author/reading group discussion contest allows reading groups to register online for a chance to have one of the authors in the 12th edition of Reading Group Choices talk with the group via speaker phone. Each month six reading groups win; Reading Group Choices selects the author and helps set up the meeting. Authors available are listed in Reading Group Choices with an icon.

The new On the Bookcase program provides commentary for reading groups about books, authors, publishing trends and reading group trends. The first On the Bookcase discusses Writers on the Air: Conversations About Books by Donna Seaman (Paul Dry Books, $24.95, 1589880218), interviews of authors that Seaman conducted on her twice-a-month Open Books radio show.

For more information, go to Reading Group Choice's Web site.

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 17

7 p.m. Encore Booknotes. In a segment originally aired in 2003, the Today Show's Willard Scott talked about his book The Older the Fiddle, The Better the Tune: The Joys of Reaching a Certain Age (Hyperion, $12.95, 0786890398), for which he interviewed actors, astronauts, writers, program hosts and others about the upside of getting older. The responses are a compilation of short letters, essays, paragraphs and quotations.

8 p.m. After Words. David Wessel, deputy Washington bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal and author of the Journal's weekly "Capital" column, interviews Rep. John Linder (R.-Ga.), primary sponsor of the FairTax Act and co-author of The FairTax Book, in which he argues for replacing the federal income tax and the IRS with a retail sales tax. (Re-airs Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.)

9 p.m. Public Lives. William Sampson, author of Confessions of an Innocent Man: Torture and Survival in a Saudi Prison (McClelland & Stewart, $27.95, 0771079036), talks about his prison experience.

11:30 p.m. History on Book TV. Edward O. Wilson, editor of From So Simple a Beginning: Darwin's Four Great Books (Norton, $39.95, 0393061345), which includes The Origin of Species and Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle, talks about the founder of the theory of evolution.

Today on WAMU's Diane Rehm Show: John L. Allen, Jr., author of Opus Dei: An Objective Look Behind the Myths and Reality of the Most Controversial Force in the Catholic Church (Doubleday, $24.95, 0385514492).

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Today on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show: John Loengard, one of the great Life magazine photographers, looks back on his 50-year career, as chronicled in As I See It (Vendome Press, $35, 0865651671).

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Today on KCRW's Bookworm: part two of a two-part series with Robert Coover, author of A Child Again (McSweeney's, $22, 1932416226). In today's segment, as the show puts it, "Coover lays bare the illusions and delusions that his stories about childhood and growth are meant to dispel. He reads from a story about Puff, the dragon, and speculates about how older knights slay the dragons of their later years."

I picked up Lost Stories right after reading in What in the Word? (see yesterday's Shelf Awareness) that Dashiell is pronounced "duh-SHEEL", not "DASH-ul." Somehow, I have a hard time matching that information with classic lines like "I'll tell you right out, I'm a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk." But this collection of 21 long-lost Hammett stories took my mind off pronunciation, and back to what's important, the incomparable writing ("She wasn't exactly beautiful, but if you were alone with her you kept looking at her, and you wished she didn't belong to a man you were afraid of."). As Joe Gores says in his introduction, not only is Hammett wonderful to read, but his fiction "has affected almost all subsequent American writers' work whether they know it or not." Vince Emery presents the stories--detective fiction, satire, adventure tales--with biographical commentary and critical analysis, making this a necessary addition to any mystery library.