Mark Suchomel, president of Independent Publishers Group, reports from ashland:

On the second day at the London Book Fair, the mood was mellow as people became accustomed to the slow traffic. Sophie Hopkin, head of sales at Canongate, echoed the sentiment of many attendees when she said, "I've never had such a relaxed fair in my life." There has been a certain amount of commiserating, but not a single U.K. publisher I've spoken to in the first two days of the show has complained about the less than desirable circumstances. Everyone is taking it in stride. I doubt that there will be any negative effects to future London Book Fairs.

BookExpo America can expect a few more attendees next month in New York. I have heard that several people are now planning to attend in order to see people who couldn't make it here.

Nick Smith from Canadian Manda said he has spotted fewer than 10 Canadian publishers so far. His appointments were pleasantly surprised to see that he made it. Only three of nine exhibiting publishers on the Australian Publishers Association stand made it to London.

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Daily Finance has a nice roundup of the effect of the Icelandic volcano that shall go unspoken on the book business. Besides depleting the ranks at London, some international book shipments have been disrupted and authors have been either stranded abroad or unable to make planned trips. For example, tours in the U.S. by Alexander McCall Smith and John Banville were cancelled and Ian McEwan was stranded in Toronto.

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On her blog, Miss Mingle, aka Jeanne Martinet and author of The Art of Mingling and Life Is Friends: A Complete Guide to the Lost Art of Connecting in Person, offers etiquette advice for people stuck in airports in London and elsewhere. Our favorite: "DO put your various iThings away and take the opportunity to meet and bond with as many strangers face-to-face as possible. Airport disasters may be Hell on Earth but they are also a god-given mingling opportunity. You never know; you might meet your next spouse, client or best friend. Adversity brings people together. And even if you never see the person again, good conversation is food for the soul."

 

In conjunction with the organizers of the Rock Bottom Remainders tour (Shelf Awareness, April 3, 2010), set to start tonight in Washington, D.C., Shelf Awareness is offering 10 pairs of tickets to each performance free. Please e-mail us here and put Tickets in the subject line. First come, first served!

The concerts, featuring Amy Tan, Mitch Albom, Scott Turow, Greg Iles, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, James McBride, Ridley Pearson and Roy Blount Jr., will be held tonight at the 930 Club in Washington; tomorrow night at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia; Friday night at the Nokia Theatre in Times Square in New York City; and Saturday night at the Roxy in Boston.

Kristin Moutsatson, a longtime employee at the Book Mark, the Mt. Pleasant, Mich., store with two branches that closed earlier this year, is opening the Book Shelf in the next "two to three weeks," Central Michigan Life reported.

"I worked at the Book Mark for 20 years and, when they closed, I decided I wasn't done selling books," Moutsatson said. "Everything fell together. It was just the right place at the right time."

The Book Shelf is located at 1014 S. Mission St., Mt. Pleasant, Mich. 48858 and will stock mostly new books and some used books.

Moutsatson's father, Gene, was a co-owner of the Book Mark.

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Cover to Cover Books & Gifts, Tomahawk, Wis., suffered "extensive damage" in a fire Monday night, according to the Wausau Daily Herald.

"It was a beloved meeting place," Lori Koppelmann, director of Tomahawk Main Street, said. "It had wi-fi and coffee. It was a nice gathering place for people."

Owners Dawn and Vic Brietzke were not available for comment.

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Congratulations to Paul Yamazaki, who celebrated his 40th anniversary with City Lights bookstore, San Francisco, Calif., last week.

"I started packing books," Yamazaki told the Chronicle, which said that he "attributes his longevity to the 'amazing environment' created by owners Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy Peters."

At his anniversary celebration, guests shared stories, including a classic one concerning Yamazaki's unusual application process when first joining City Lights: "Arriving in '60s-era Ess Eff, he became politically active and was arrested during a student protest at S.F. State. He needed a job to be released. So he reached out to his mentor, poet Francis Oka, who recommended him to Ferlinghetti, who hired Yamazaki sight unseen," the Chronicle wrote.

"City Lights and Paul, it's hard to imagine one without the other," said City Lights Publisher Elaine Katzenberger in her toast at the event. "You've found your place in the world, which is a huge gift to all of us."

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Book trailer of the day: Life! By Design by Tom Ferry (Ballantine).

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Amazon has filed a federal lawsuit against the North Carolina, seeking to block the state's request for information about customers and their purchases in the state since 2003. Amazon called its suit "a stand for free speech," the AP said.

Amazon added that disclosing the names and addresses of customers would harm those who bought controversial books and movies and worried that future sales will be affected.

The company said federal action would avoid varied decisions in multiple courts "in the event other states make similar demands for customer data."

When North Carolina's legislature last summer considered a law that would require Amazon to collect sales tax because of its affiliates in the state, Amazon severed all connections with those businesses in North Carolina.

In December, according to the AP, "tax collectors auditing Amazon's compliance with North Carolina laws asked for documents listing all sales to customers in the state between Aug. 1, 2003, and Feb. 28, the company said. Amazon estimated the volume at 50 million items."

North Carolina officials met with Amazon last month in Seattle and sought the personal data by Monday, the day Amazon filed suit.

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Congratulations to Lisa Peterson of Globe Corner Bookstore, Cambridge, Mass., who won the grand prize of a $1,000 American Airlines gift card from Lonely Planet in a recent contest. The publisher had asked booksellers to give their five favorite books about one of the Discover series launch destinations--France, Italy, Ireland, Spain, Great Britain, Australia, Japan and Thailand.

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In the latest episode of What's the Word? bookseller Shay Lopez of Maria's Bookshop shares his insights on a word he found in Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

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The Telegraph featured a selection of independent bookstores in Britain and noted that "small bookshops aren't dead, they're thriving, and we've hunted down the best."

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Eleanor Barkhorn suggested in the Atlantic magazine that perhaps we should want people to try banning books because "when parents complain about what their children read, it shows that books are doing their jobs: affecting young readers so much that they are transformed. It's scary to think of books being removed from libraries because they're controversial. But it's even scarier to think of a country where books are so irrelevant, parents don't even care enough to complain."

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Ether Books, which launched at the London Book Fair this week, is offering "a catalogue of short stories, essays and poetry initially via Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch, by authors including Alexander McCall Smith and Louis de Bernieres," according to Reuters (via the Washington Post).

 

Joelle Jolivet, illustrator of 365 Penguins, draws one of her signature birds on the author and illustrator wall at Hicklebee's Children's Books, San Jose, Calif., on Monday, after an event that drew more than 50 people. Jolivet is on a three-week tour for her new book, Oops!, courtesy of Abrams and the French Cultural Services Office of the French Embassy.

Photo: Valerie Lewis, Hicklebee's Children's Books

 

The inaugural Book Blogger Convention takes place on Friday, May 28, at the Javits Center, the day after BookExpo America concludes. The convention was originally going to be held at another location in New York City until Steven Rosato, BEA event director, heard about the initiative and suggested that it take place in connection with BEA.

"It seemed like a natural fit," Rosato said. "Bloggers are becoming so much more important for us, especially with newspaper coverage disappearing for books." As with New York Book Week, a series of consumer events that will be held around the city during BEA, "this is one other step for us to engage the reading public," he added.

On the agenda are panels such as Blogging with Social Responsibility and the Impact of the Relationship between Author and Blogger. The keynote speaker is Maureen Johnson, the author of Scarlett Fever and other works. The convention starts with a reception on Thursday, May 27, 4–6 p.m., open to anyone attending BEA that day.

More than 135 book bloggers, authors, publishers and public relations professionals have signed up to attend the convention. "We certainly welcome anyone and everyone who feels they would like to learn more about book blogging," said Trish Collins, who initiated the event. She blogs at Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin'? and is the co-founder of TLC Book Tours, which specializes in setting up virtual book tours. The convention is a way for book bloggers to network with online colleagues and share tips and knowledge, and it's also a chance to get to know people in the industry. "The convention will be beneficial to publishing folks as well because they'll not only have marketing opportunities, but they should be better able to find bloggers that match their needs," said Collins.

Last year's BEA lineup featured the panel Book Bloggers: Today's Buzz Builders, moderated by Jennifer Hart, v-p and associate publisher of Harper Perennial, Harper Paperbacks and Avon. "Book bloggers were at BEA in big numbers, and that made a statement to the publishing and bookselling community," said Hart, who blogs as Book Club Girl. "These are the people who, before they were doing blogs, were probably already reading a lot, buying a lot of books, going to the library. But now we know them, now we have contact with them, and they then speak to their own networks of readers."

The online marketing department at Hachette Book Group has been connecting with bloggers in niche categories since the early 2000s. "Our relationships with book bloggers are incredibly important," said Kelly Leonard, executive director, online marketing. "We value each individual connection. We also appreciate the variety of tastes and interests each book blogger has and where bloggers live so that we can try to match our book offerings with their individual and local interests." (The Book Blogs Search Engine at fyreflybooks.wordpress.com lists more than 1,200 sites.)

Many book bloggers have promoted and participated in joint endeavors like the annual Book Blogger Appreciation Week, 24-hour read-a-thons and Tweetups, and the pace and breadth of contact has accelerated courtesy of Facebook and Twitter. "I've been blogging for a year, and I would say book blogging is much different even from when I started," said Michelle Franz, who blogs at Galleysmith.com and is one of the convention organizers. "We're not just that solitary blogger who gets a few comments and communicates with people that way. We have a reach that's much further now." That includes a kind of handselling, where the mention of a title leads followers to obtain copies of it.

In order to understand the growth in blogging, Rebecca Joines Schinsky of the Book Lady's Blog and Brett Sandusky, digital marketing manager at Kaplan Publishing, have launched a survey about book blogs. (Appropriately the idea for the survey came after the two connected due to a weekly Twitter discussion (#bookmarket) about books and marketing. "I made a comment about how I'm a numbers person and would love to see data out of curiosity but also because I've been blogging for a year and a half," Schinsky said. Sandusky contacted her, and the outcome is a long-term plan to gather data on book blogging.)

The book blogger survey is open through April 20, and the results will be announced prior to the Book Blogger Convention. Schinsky and Sandusky plan to survey publishers next. "We're then envisioning another set of surveys down the road and consistent data collection until we get a full picture of what's going on," said Schinsky. "The goal is to open a dialogue between bloggers and publishers and help us work together more effectively to get books out there and create awareness for them."--Shannon McKenna Schmidt

 

Today on the Diane Rehm Show: Edward John Weiler, author of Hubble: A Journey Through Space and Time (Abrams, $29.95, 9780810989979/0810989972).

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Tomorrow on KCRW's Bookworm: Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15, 9780374532185/0374532184). As the show put it, "Elif Batuman never intended to study literature, learn Russian,or learn to speak Uzbek. That's no life for a grown up! And yet she fell passionately in love with literature and uses her enormous sense of humor, her intelligence and her robust Turkish ancestry in courting her darlings--the Russian classics."

 

The shortlist for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia's most prestigious award for fiction, consists of:

Lovesong by Alex Miller
The Bath Fugues by Brian Castro
Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey
The Book of Emmett by Deborah Forster
Truth by Peter Temple
Butterfly by Sonya Hartnett

The winner will be revealed on June 22.

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Finalists for the 2010 Locus Awards in all 14 categories may be seen here. Winners will be announced during the Science Fiction Awards Weekend in Seattle, Wash., June 25–27.

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The winners of the 26th annual PubWest Book Design Awards, recognizing "superior design and outstanding production quality of books" throughout North America, are available at pubwest.org/239.html.

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Winners of the 2010 Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism are Marcela Valdes and Adam Kirsch, who were honored last Saturday at the Conference on the Future of Criticism at the Center for Fiction. Read Valdes's remarks here.

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Among winners of the Infinity Awards, sponsored by the International Center of Photography, are: 

Writing: Luc Sante for Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905–1930 (Verse Chorus Press).
Publication: Sarah Greenough for the new, expanded edition of Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans (National Gallery of Art).

The awards ceremony takes place Monday, May 10, in New York City.

 

Ben Farmer lives in Maryland, where he was born and raised. He graduated from Kenyon College with a degree in history and has worked as a teacher, an editor and in a booking agency for musicians. Evangeline is his first novel, published this month by Overlook.

On your nightstand now:

Most recently I read The Lost City of Z by David Grann and would encourage anyone who isn't squeamish to give it a shot. What follows is a list of books from my shelf that I've already begun, that I intend to finish and that do not directly inform my writing.

The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years by Chingiv Aitmatov, Mongolia by Jasper Becker, Grange House by Sarah Blake, A.D. 381 by Charles Freeman and The Order of Good Cheer by Bill Gaston.

Favorite book when you were a child:

The Hobbit. It is difficult to not also choose this as the book that changed my life.

Your top five authors:

I'm 28 and still catching up on some older material, so instead I'll mention the five books that I read after I finished my own: The Hamlet by William Faulkner, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John le Carré, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson and Daniel Boone by John Mack Faragher.

Book you've faked reading:

I'll sometimes refer to myself as having "read" nonfiction books that I've actually only read in part. I won't admit to anything else.

Book you're an evangelist for:

I often single out John Mack Faragher's A Great and Noble Scheme, which is the finest of a number of helpful nonfiction works I read while researching Evangeline. If your interest is something besides Acadian history, give The Sagas of Icelanders from Penguin Classics a try.

Book you've bought for the cover:

I sometimes buy bottles of wine because of the label, but I've never bought a book for its cover. I know that I haven't bought books because of their cover.

Book that changed your life:

Instead of "changed my life," let's say, "ratcheted up my expectations for what a novel should be." I could choose either Heart of Darkness or One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I read, sandwiched around Hamlet, my junior year of high school. I also read Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild in that class. Everyone should be so lucky.

Favorite line from the last novel you read:

The spring rising of a glacial lake strands the characters in a flooded house in Housekeeping. Any line from the fourth chapter would suit, but here's a memorable early passage:

And here is a single line, from later in the novel: "For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires."

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

I am able to answer this question easily with movies, where my answer would be The Royal Tenebaums. Using that criterion--a work where I was unprepared for the cleverness of the humor--I might select The Sportswriter by family favorite Richard Ford.

"We are largely who we remember ourselves to be," says 17-year-old narrator Cassel Sharpe. His statement takes on a chilling irony in Holly Black's (Tithe) darkly brilliant launch to the Curse Workers series. Cassel, who counts his skill as a con artist as his greatest talent, feels overshadowed by his curse worker family. In this world, the touch of a worker's ungloved hand can manipulate his mark's emotions, conjure dreams, erase memories, even transform him from human to inanimate object. "Everyone who isn't us is a mark," according to Cassel. Cassel descends from curse workers on both his mother's and his father's side. His grandfather, a death worker (he can zap the life out of his victims with his bare hands), and brothers are aligned with the Zacharov family, one of six big worker families that divvy up turf like the Mob. Still, curse work has been forbidden since 1929, and the governor of New Jersey is championing a proposition for compulsory testing of all citizens to see if they are workers (to remain strictly confidential, of course).

Cassel is just trying to lead a "normal" existence at Wallingford Preparatory. But that life is called into question when, in the opening scene, Cassel sleepwalks onto the roof of his dorm and nearly falls to his death. He doesn't remember how he got up to the roof, and he's plagued by dreams of a white cat and by memories of having killed Zacharov's daughter, Lila, three years before. He just can't remember why he killed her--especially because he had been in love with her. Lila was a dream worker--can there be a connection between Lila and the white cat? Black plants this gnawing question in Cassel's psyche, so that every new discovery seems to illuminate a corner of the shadowy mystery surrounding Lila's murder. Alongside these serious themes, opportunities for humor abound. For instance, there is "blowback" for every curse performed (as Cassel's grandfather explains, "Every curse works the worker"); family friend Uncle Armen has Alzheimer's as a result of his career as a memory worker. Black fully imagines the experience of the curses and their fallout. Romance, betrayal and the question of whether families are born or made are just some of the themes that will keep teens turning pages. While White Cat is a complete work, snatches of backstory and tensions built into certain key relationships promise plenty more in future installments.--Jennifer M. Brown