Bookworks, Aptos, Calif., has found a model for coping with difficult competitive times: the store has downsized but to a better location. Bookworks has moved within the Rancho del mar Shopping Center to a space of about
1,000 square feet from 3,000, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported.
"Now, we have square footage generating income. We're sitting on a couple thousand books and the shelves are full," said Traci Fishburn, who, with Diana Mejia, bought the store seven years ago. It had been founded as Green Dolphin in 1976.
While the old store was between a bank and parking lot and was "a little sleepy in the evening," Fishburn said, the new store is surrounded by a cafe area. "Now we get a lot more of the pre-movie crowd and browsers who stay until 8 p.m. We see more foot traffic than we ever had."
"We love it," Mejia said. "It's cozy; just perfect for us now."
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A tea party by any other name. Weary of questions about its nonexistent
ties to the highly publicized political movement, the owner of Tea Party
Bookshop, Salem, Ore., will change the store's name and celebrate
the move with a party of the distinctly nonpolitical variety.
The
Statesman Journal reported that JoAnne
Kohler, who has not publicly announced the new name yet, said, "I tried
to let them simply go away, but no, they continue to gather on the
National Mall, with their slogans. And as much as I advocate freedom of
speech, and as much as I endorse the political process, I just do not
wish to have to keep apologizing for the name of the shop."
Even
local Tea Party project leader Russ Walker sympathized: "I drove by
about a week ago, and I remember thinking to myself, 'I wonder if people
are confusing it with the movement.' "
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Cool idea of the day: next Sunday, May 16, at 5 p.m., Idlewild Books in New York City is hosting a reading, booksigning and reception to benefit Adoption-Link. It's quite a lineup: Peter Carey will read from his new book, Parrot and Olivier in America, and John Irving and Edmund White will read from works in progress.
Adoption-Link was founded by White's sister Margaret to find loving homes for vulnerable children.
Tickets are $45. RSVP to 212-414-8888 or david@idlewildbooks.com.
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On She Is Too Fond of Books's Spotlight on Bookstores, novelist Gabrielle Burton pens a love letter of sorts to Talking Leaves, Buffalo, N.Y., "one of my all time favorite bookstores" and praises in particular Jonathon Welch and Martha Russell. "This store would not have come into being or stayed in existence without the best of the 60's philosophy as manifested" in them, she wrote.
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Another car has gone through a bookstore window. This latest was in Midvale, Utah, where a man drove through the front of a Barnes & Noble on Saturday, KSL.com reported. Police said that luckily only one customer was near the window, in the magazine section, and was able to stay out of the way.
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More from Nashville: Davis-Kidd and Borders both closed early a week ago Sunday, at the height of the flood, but suffered no damage beyond some wet carpets. Thomas Nelson and Howard Books were closed for at least a day. Also, local writers offer their impressions of the flood at chapter16.org.
Thanks again in part to Mary Grey James, a principal at the East/West Literary Agency and v-p, president-elect of the Women's National Book Association, whose offices are in Nashville.
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In Mumbai, India, book buyers go to the "uber-cool" Landmark
bookstore "when you know it's just about time for the new Alice Sebold
to arrive in India or when, after reading the Lounge column Cult
Fiction, you want to get your hands on AbsoluteWatchmen. No
bookstore in Mumbai--perhaps even in India--can match Landmark's
eclectic collection of literary fiction and graphic novels. It has been
the zany, cool intellectual's destination," livemint.com wrote.
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"What book
changed your life?" Entertainment Weekly's Shelf Life blog asked Dave Barry, whose latest is I'll
Mature When I'm Dead. Barry's reply: "The Brothers Karamazov,
by Dostoevsky. I was supposed to read it my freshman year in college,
but it's 18 million pages long and I could never get past the first 43.
Nevertheless I wrote a paper about it, and I got an OK grade, which
taught me that I could write convincingly about things I did not
remotely understand. This paved the way for my career in journalism."
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Experts offered Britain's new government a suggested reading
list of "essential books" in the Guardian.
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John Crutcher, who co-founded Bloomberg Press and was most recently global director of trade sales, has left Bloomberg following the sale of the press to Wiley. He may be reached at jcrutcher@gmail.com.
Borders has moved closer to joining the e-reader ranks: it has begun taking orders for the 
A selection of the more newsy sessions sponsored by the American Booksellers Association during the Day of Education on Tuesday, May 25, at the Javits Center follows below. We'll have a roundup of the nuts-and-bolts bookseller sessions tomorrow.
Try explaining to a college student that Tet was, in fact, an American military victory. Or, in contrast, suggest that the Vietnamese offensive of 1968 was a stunning enemy success. Either way, you will not provoke a counterargument--let alone an assent--but a blank stare: Who or what was Tet?