Four of the five Canadian publishers with titles on this year's shortlist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize "have spent weeks pondering the right number: Is it another 30,000 copies? Or another 50,000? Meanwhile, one lone Canadian publisher is wondering why it should be expected to play the Giller game," the Globe & Mail reported.
That publisher is Gaspereau Press, "where each book is printed and bound on the premises, where Johanna Skibsrud's Giller-nominated The Sentimentalists has been sold out for weeks and where publisher Andrew Steeves has declined an offer from a big publisher to rustle up more copies for him."
"It would no longer be a Gaspereau Press book. If you are going to buy a copy of that book in Canada, it's damn well coming out of my shop," said Steeves. The initial print run for The Sentimentalist "was in his usual modest range of 600 to 1,500 copies, and that the 
book had sold 400 copies before the Giller longlist was announced. He has printed just over 2,000 more copies of the inside pages but is waiting on a delivery of paper for the cover. He hopes to be printing the cover and binding the books next week and filling orders the first week of November," the Globe & Mail wrote.
"The Giller Prize, it does put you in great peril," Steeves observed. "You have to make sure you serve your author as best you can, that it doesn't impede their career that they are with a small press, but without abandoning who you are.... If we decide this is an opportunity to capitalize, the temptation is to put out some mass-market cheaper copy." Skibsrud expressed disappointment there weren't more copies available, but said she respected her publisher's decision.
"I know it is supposed to freak me out, I am supposed to be selling as many books as possible," said Steeves, who rejects "the thinking that you have to fool people into buying books: If you don't get it out there right now, you will lose the sale; they will be distracted by something else. The reader who is here today will be here in three weeks."
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James Patterson has joined Stieg Larsson in the "Kindle Million Club."
Amazon said that, as of Tuesday, Patterson had sold 1,005,803 Kindle
e-books.
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Powell's Books, Portland, Ore., has purchased 7,000 books from Anne Rice's personal library and set up a dedicated page on its website to sell them, the Oregonian reported.
Powell's From the Library of Anne Rice section notes that the collection includes "editions signed or annotated by Ms. Rice, and many have her library markings on the spines. The collection showcases her love of literature and writing and reveals a true intellectual curiosity--classic philosophy, the Brontes, biblical archaeology, and Louisiana history are just a few of the subject areas represented."
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This month Kathe Heinecken is celebrating a year in business as owner of Barbed Wire Books, Longmont, Colo., where "armchairs at the front of the store feature embroidered horse's heads, and both walls and shelves are adorned with Western art and crafts done by local artists," the Boulder Daily Camera reported.
"The store's name pays homage to the West. We do live in the Wild West, or it was the Wild West anyway, and my interest comes from my background," said Heinecken, who, in addition to 15 years experience in the book business, had also worked on ranches. She noted that opening a used bookstore last year seemed like a logical move.
"I felt it was a good time because of the recession," she said. "I thought people would be trending toward secondhand books."
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An unusual issue--bookstore discounts--made news in a Maine political race. The Kennebec Journal reported that Robert Sezak, owner of Re-Books, Waterville, and the Democratic candidate for House District 84, was fined $25 by the Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices for violating state ethics rules when he combined "a discount offer to his used bookstore along with an election brochure."
"It was a dope-slap moment; I hope it becomes an object lesson for everybody else," Sezak said. "It was misplaced generosity and I should have never done that."
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City commissioners in Grand Rapids, Mich., "are considering a secondhand dealers ordinance that will not require consignment shops, used bookstores and antique shops to photograph and register their inventory with police. The ordinance would replace a proposal that would have required all stores selling used merchandise to participate in an Internet-based system that collects information on used merchandise for local police departments," the Grand Rapids Press reported.
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's once-banned chronicle of crimes against citizens during the Soviet regime will now be required reading for high school seniors in Russia. The Wall Street Journal reported that, "with the blessing of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin," Solzhenitsyn's widow, Natalia, unveiled an abridged version of the exhaustive work and "recalled her husband's reluctant acceptance, late in life, of the need for a shorter Russian-language version."
"Not without bitterness, Aleksandr Isayevich entrusted me to arrange a one-volume Archipelago--a volume for schools," she said. "I had to make it four times shorter, but I think I managed to preserve the power and light of this book, along with its gravity. I think our schoolchildren and adults who have no time for the entire three volumes will gain wisdom and strength when they read it."
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Writer's Halloween I: Author Kate Mosse chose her of top 10 ghost stories for the Guardian, noting: "Spirits and apparitions, headless monks and white ladies, the traditional ghost story still exerts a hold on our imaginations. Their habitat is ancient woods, ruined abbeys, isolated old houses and crumbling monasteries. But what makes a ghost story? Though purists might quibble, I'd say there are three distinct types of ghost story--as opposed to tales of horror, which have a different dynamic and purpose, or novels that have ghosts in them, such as Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude or Ben Okri's The Famished Road."
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Writer's Halloween II: Flavorwire showcased "Horror Writer Graveyard: A Halloween Tour of Famous Memorials."
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Writer's Halloween III: Author Antonya Nelson, whose most recent novel is Bound, lives with her husband in a Colorado mining town she called a ghost town in the New York Times, while clarifying, "And as for the ghost town part? It’s more like a town inhabited by hermits, which would seem oxymoronic, yet rumor has it--and personal experience has borne this out--that these people do not socialize with one another. Feuding might be too strong a word for what they do, but there are only 12 of them (officially), and you never see two together. Ever. For all I know, it’s one guy with a lot of costumes."
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To celebrate the National Basketball Association's opening week, the Huffington Post featured "7 Big Books by Basketball's Greatest Coaches."
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Ever wonder what it would be like to hang out with Frankenstein? U Star Novels offers "a range of romantic novels that are fully personalized to include up to 30 of your personal details, making you and your partner the stars of your very own novel.... With U Star Personalized Classics, the plot remains the same, the only thing that changes is that it could be you following the yellow brick road, or your brother hunting vampires in the darkest depths of Transylvania, or your best friend starring in one of the best-loved romances of all time alongside her own Mr. Darcy!"
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(Funny) book trailer of the day: Extraordinary Renditions by Andrew Ervin (Coffee House Press).
Melville House Publishing recently hosted a party at its Brooklyn offices/bookstore for Jessa Crispin, Bookslut's founder (in 2002) and editor-in-chief. The event, celebrating the 100th issue of Bookslut, featured author Daniel Nester serving as master of ceremonies, Shalom Auslander and Kathryn Davis reading passages from new works and Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson interviewing Crispin. Pictured (l.-r.) are Auslander, author Steve Stern, Davis and Crispin.
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Last
Thursday at the Society of Illustrators in New York, the children's books
community marked the opening of the Original Art Show's 30th anniversary. The exhibit was
founded by Dilys Evans, a past art director at Cricket magazine who
founded her own agency and has represented some of the most esteemed artists in
the children's book field, including three-time Caldecott Medalist David
Wiesner. At Thursday's opening, Evans received the 2010 Visionary Award.
The
Society gave two lifetime achievement awards. One went to Alice and Martin
Provensen, the husband-and-wife team who collaborated for more than 40 years
and produced, among other titles, the 1982 Caldecott Honor Book A Visit to
William Blake's Inn by Nancy Willard and the 1984 Caldecott Medal–winning The
Glorious Flight: Across the Channel with Louis Bleriot, which they wrote
and illustrated. Viking's Regina Hayes accepted the award on Alice
Provensen's behalf, reading the artist's words: "Martin and I were lucky
to find each other and lucky to work in the best of careers."
The
other lifetime achievement award went to Eric Carle. In his acceptance speech,
Carle described his beginnings, when Bill Martin, Jr., called him after seeing a
lobster advertisement Carle had created and asked him to illustrate Brown
Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? He thanked "my wife for putting up
with me" and Ann Beneduce, his editor throughout his career. He noted that
Beneduce "didn't like the green worm" he'd created for one of his
books and insisted he turn it into a caterpillar. That book went on to be the
bestselling The Very Hungry Caterpillar. 
New Zealand officials agreed to a deal "under which they will contribute special financing and introduce labor legislation" to discourage Warner Brothers and Peter Jackson from taking the production of the two movies adapted from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit out of the country. The 
Before international adoptions were halted in late 2008, Guatemala was second only to China in adoptions to the United States (and fourth in the world), with an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 adoptions per year. However, in terms of the absolute corruption of its adoption system, Guatemala ranked right at the top. Long riddled with bribery and graft, allegations of coercion and outright kidnapping finally forced a complete shutdown of the system almost two years ago, leaving thousands of pending adoptions in the worst kind of limbo. In 2002, Jessica O'Dwyer experienced this notorious system firsthand when she and her husband flew to Guatemala to meet the infant girl they assumed they would soon be bringing home, but actually beginning what would become an often-hellish two-year ordeal.