Assouline Publishing, which publishes illustrated books and luxury editions and has a gift line, is opening a 1,246-sq.-ft. boutique in the Nordstrom Wing of South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, Calif., according to the Daily Pilot. The boutique should open in early October.
Assouline has a dozen stores around the world (pictured: the Las Vegas branch).
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On successive Sundays this month, September 12 and 19, Karen Lillis, a librarian and former bookseller, is leading tours of libraries (the first Sunday) and bookstores (the second Sunday) in Pittsburgh, Pa., according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Both tours cost $10 and will travel via trolley. The bookstore tour includes visits to Copacetic Comics, Awesome Books, Caliban Books, Phantom of the Attic, Eljay's Books and Joseph-Beth Booksellers.
Larry Portzline, founder of Bookstore Tourism, has revived the concept and on October 9 will lead a group from Harrisburg and Lancaster, Pa., to bookstores in Greenwich Village in New York City.
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Larry Ashmead, a veteran editor at Doubleday, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins, died last Friday of pneumonia. He was 78.
In a New York Times obituary, Susan Isaacs, whose books Ashmead edited, nicely summed up his editing skills: "Besides finding what was wrong, he also knew what wasn't there."
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4 1 week, recipes frm Workmans Eat Tweet/Maureen Evans (1020 rcps n 140 chars), gd 4 busy bookseller&publisher parents. Tx: CraigPopelars!
First recipe: Busy Shepherd's Pie
Brwn2c grndbeef. Toss w lb mixdfrozenveg/can shroomsoup/s+p; top w 3c MashedPotatoes. 25m@400°F.
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Included among the five literary destinations in Florida recommended by the Orlando Sentinel were O Brisky Books in Micanopy and Haslam's Book Store
in St. Petersburg: "When it comes to old-school browsing, it's hard to
beat Haslam's.... An institution for more than 75 years, this
30,000-square-foot store bills itself as a legitimate tourist stop:
'Florida's Greatest Rainy Day Attraction!' But don't wait for a rainy
day."
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"With Upper West Siders still mourning the
announcement of the looming closure of the Barnes & Noble across
from Lincoln Center, it seems petty to point out that only 15 years ago
they picketed its opening," the New York Observer wrote in introducing its slideshow feature, "Requiem for the Manhattan Bookstore, Large and Small."
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What will Oprah pick? Hint: It won't be Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.
For the first time in more than a year, the talk show host will name a
new Oprah's Book Club pick September 17, during the first week of her
final season. The Associated Press
reported that the announcement of her 64th pick will occur "14 years to
the day that Winfrey announced her first book club selection--Jacquelyn
Mitchard's The Deep End of the Ocean on Sept. 17, 1996."
Entertainment Weekly's Shelf Life blog speculated that "there are two possible routes: She could pick a new work, like she did with, say, A Million Little Pieces, or she could go for the reconstituted classic like she did with Love in the Time of Cholera or East of Eden. Personally, I hope she does the former, if only to avoid the slightly saddening prospect of a sticker that reads 'Crime and Punishment: As Seen on Oprah!' "
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The writing life has been a mixed blessing for Tony Blair, former U.K. Prime Minister and now an author on tour for A Journey. Despite the bestseller status of his new autobiography, Blair had eggs and shoes thrown at him during his first signing event in Dublin, and a new Facebook page, "Subversively move Tony Blair's memoirs to the crime section in book shops," has already drawn nearly 10,000 fans.
Blair
has canceled a book signing in London Wednesday, telling Daybreak on
ITV it was "not as if we need" to do signings and "I don't want the
public to be inconvenienced by the inevitable hassle caused by
protesters," BBC News reported.
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The Huffington Post featured "13 Books Nobody's Read But Say They Have."
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How-to advice for future generations? Boing Boing offered "How to open a new book."
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The Caribbean edition of My Story 9.58,
a memoir by Jamaican sprinter and "world's fastest human" Usain Bolt
that is already a bestseller in Europe, will be published in Bolt's home
country by Ian Randle Publishers, according to the Gleaner.
Christine
Randle, the company's managing director, said, "HarperCollins U.K.--who
Bolt signed his original publishing deal with--they came to us. They
contacted us through our website and asked if we'd be interested in
taking on a local edition. The answer was an easy yes.... This is such a
major accomplishment for the company as we move to commemorate our 20th
anniversary in 2011."
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Book series trailer of the day: the Cedar Cove series by Debbie Macomber (Mira). The series, set in "the town you'd love to call home," celebrates its 10th anniversary with the publication of 1022 Evergreen Place. The site is set up like a Chamber of Commerce site and includes a downloadable map with points of interest, a social media spot called Covebook, news from the Cedar Cove Chronicle, a guide to restaurants and more.
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HarperCollins is renaming Eos Books and adding the Voyager imprints in the U.K. and Australia/New Zealand to create a new global science fiction and fantasy imprint called Harper Voyager. The change will be effective on Eos books, e-books and audios January 1.
HarperCollins Worldwide president and CEO Brian Murray said that the creation of Harper Voyager "allows readers globally unparalleled access to books and authors. This move enables us to offer authors a strong global publishing platform when signing with HarperCollins, whether the acquiring editor is in New York, Sydney or London."
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U.K. publisher Quercus Publishing and Barnes & Noble's Sterling Publishing are creating a joint imprint named Sterling Oak that will publish books selected by Quercus from its fiction list, currently about 80 titles annually, to be distributed and marketed by Sterling in the U.S. and Canada.
The first Silver Oak title will appear in January:
Three Seconds by Swedish authors Anders Roslund and Borge Hellström.
"There are a lot of books coming out from writers who traditionally do really well, books that will perform. Some are fun, like the Jon Stewart and Amy Sedaris, and some of them are a little more thoughtful. I know there's a lot of trepidation with the economy and what's happening with e-books, but I feel like publishers are bringing out some really solid titles that we're going to sell really well."
Among the winners of the 
Had I done my research, I might not have been so surprised
to see a chicken peeking out from behind the sales counter at Wild Rumpus in
Minneapolis. Before visiting the bookstore, [my husband] Mark and I had met up
with my friend Anna, who was acting as our Minneapolis tour guide. "I've
always wanted to go to Wild Rumpus," she said, but she'd never gone
because she'd thought it would be weird for a childless adult to go to a kid's
bookstore. But when the bookstore in question has four store cats, three
chickens that wander the floor, a collection of rats, ferrets, chinchillas,
birds, a lizard and a pet tarantula, in addition to a ceiling that looks like a
sheet of ice breaking into a river (complete with upside-down canoe), you're
going to have to work really hard as a patron to appear weird.
Though he's one of the great sages of the Jewish people, save for an often misquoted aphorism or two, Hillel's true significance is a mystery to many Jews and members of other faiths. In this brief but rich intellectual biography addressed to a non-scholarly audience, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin attempts to fill that gap, offering a thoughtful exploration of this remarkable rabbi's teachings.