Today is our last day in the Pioneer Square office of the Shelf. We will miss our funky loft, the never-ending parade of the Duck Tour and even constantly having to navigate the throng of Underground Tour-goers that collected by our door. We probably won't miss that our closet always left our coats smelling of barbecue.

We're moving on up to 1932 1st Ave., Suite 300, Seattle, 98101. It's one block north of the always lively and so-Seattle Pike Place Market. Our new building was once home to Sub Pop Records, the Seattle Weekly and is currently home to Peter Miller Books. We are very excited and hope to see you there sometime soon!

"What is the value of a book? Are books beloved because of their physical nature or because of their content? At Bookshop, we don’t view it as an either/or situation. We love books for both reasons. Our first love is sensory--the smell of books, the weight of it in our hands, how it feels to discover a new book you never knew about as you browse through the aisles of a physical bookstore. This is why there is a place for independent bookstores now and in the future. The second reason we love books is because of the way the content of books can change an opinion, a relationship, or even a life. We know that this is something that will continue to exist even if the book is delivered electronically.... Bookshop Santa Cruz would like to play an increasing role in the e-book market because we want to serve our customers no matter how they 'consume' their book content. In the next few months, we hope to launch our new e-bookstore in partnership with Google Editions, providing millions of titles at competitive prices....

"E or not... either way we will continue to be obsessed about books. If you are obsessed too, come see us. We look forward to getting the perfect book into your hand--or your device."

Co-hosts Jann Wenner, Tom Brokaw, John McMeel and Hugh Andrews celebrate the launch of 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective with Garry Trudeau (second from r.) at the NBC offices at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City Wednesday night. Also in attendance: Jane Pauley, Nora Ephron, Calvin Trillin and Chip Kidd.

Carrie Obry has been named executive director of the Midwest Booksellers Association, effective December 27. She succeeds Susan Walker, who is staying on until January 7 to help with the transition.

Obry was most recently an acquisition editor for Llewellyn Worldwide and earlier was an editor at Sourcebooks and Aspen Publishers. She has also worked independently editing, writing and consulting.

The MBA board praised her "energy and commitment to independent bookselling" and said that "she brings the technical and communications skills needed, along with new ideas and a thoughtful approach toward the organization. Her leadership skills and eagerness to work closely with all of the membership are qualities that will contribute a great deal to the association."

After 23 years as executive director, Susan Walker announced her intention to leave the position last summer (Shelf Awareness, July 11, 2010), saying that "family obligations and responsibilities have increased greatly since the beginning of the year," leading her to move to North Carolina "to live close to and assist my parents on a daily basis."

This morning on Good Morning America: Lesley M.M. Blume, author of Let's Bring Back: An Encyclopedia of Forgotten-Yet-Delightful, Chic, Useful, Curious, and Otherwise Commendable Things from Times Gone By (Chronicle Books, $19.95, 9780811874137/0811874137).

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Today on NPR's Takeaway: David Eisenhower, author of Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961-1969 (Simon & Schuster, $28, 9781439190906/1439190909).

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Today on Imus in the Morning, the O'Reilly Factor and the Glenn Beck Program: Glenn Beck, co-author of Broke: The Plan to Restore Our Trust, Truth and Treasure (Threshold, $29.99, 9781439187197/1439187193).

Noting that "most films don't tap into moviegoer wallets until they reach theaters," Deadline.com reported that a film version of Donald Miller's book Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality was saved by "a 30-day campaign that raised $346,000 from 4,495 supporters. That allowed the film to overcome a budget shortfall and begin production yesterday in Nashville.... The dough was raised through Kickstarter.com, and the film's backers claim it's the largest crowd-sourced creative project ever." Fans Zach Prichard and Jonathan Frazier originally launched the campaign through Savebluelikejazz.com.

The film stars Marshall Allman (True Blood), Tania Raymonde (Lost) and Justin Welborn (The Crazies); and is directed by Steve Taylor.

CBS Films has acquired screen rights to Jennifer Egan’s novel The Keep "and is in final negotiations to acquire the adapted screenplay written by The Skeleton Key scribe Ehren Kruger," according to the Hollywood Reporter, which said that Niels Arden Oplev (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) is slated to direct the film.

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Summit Entertainment has cast several actors in supporting roles for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn movies. Deadline.com reported that although Summit hasn't said which roles they will play, the cast now also includes Olga Fonda (Love Hurts), Janelle Froehlich (Hacienda Heights), Masami Kosaka (The Runaways), Sebastiao Lemos (Brazilian TV series Força-Tarefa), Amadou Ly (The Tested, The Bridge), Ty Olsson (2012), Wendell Pierce (Ray) and Carolina Virguez (Spanish TV series Matalobos).

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Lionsgate will to adapt What to Expect When You’re Expecting "and intend to give it the Love Actually and Valentine’s Day treatment. In other words, we’ll see a series of intertwining vignettes with enough star wattage to blind most any moviegoer," Entertainment Weekly reported.

Raghuram Rajan, "one of the few economists to see the financial crisis coming," won the £30,000 (US$47,824) Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award for Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (Princeton University Press).

Lionel Barber, Financial Times editor and chair of the judges, called Fault Lines a "serious and sober book" for a time when "sobriety is a virtue."

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The £10,000 (US$15,883) Guardian First Book award shortlist includes novels Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed, Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman, Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto by Maile Chapman; and nonfiction works In Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by journalist Kathryn Schulz and Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper by Alexandra Harris. The winner will be announced on December 1 .

"This brilliant shortlist reflects one of the year's big literary themes--how to tell stories in our new era," Claire Armitstead, the Guardian's literary editor and chair of the judgessaid: Each of these books provides its own very different answer, and it is thrilling that our judges and the Waterstone's reading groups have chosen five such rich and challenging works."

Kate Bernheimer is, most recently, the author of the story collection Horse, Flower, Bird, illustrated by Rikki Ducornet (Coffee House 2010), and editor of My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin, September 28, 2010). She is also author of a trilogy of novels about three sisters: The Complete Tales of Merry Gold, The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold (which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award) and The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold (spring 2011, all from FC2). She also writes children's books. Her first, The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum, illustrated by Nicoletta Ceccoli (Schwartz & Wade/Random House), was a PW Best Book of 2008. Two more children's books are forthcoming from Random House. She is founder and editor of Fairy Tale Review, and associate professor and writer-in-residence at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette each spring. She lives the rest of the year in Tucson, Ariz., with her husband, the poet Brent Hendricks, and their daughter, Xia.

On your nightstand now:

Maria Tatar's Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood, L. Frank Baum's Queen Zixi of Ix and Roald Dahl's collected stories (which are not at all good for bedtime). Also, a boxed set of Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad volumes, which my daughter and I simply love. I identify so greatly with Toad; she's all Frog. And Scott Simon's Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other: In Praise of Adoption just arrived in the mail from my mother. My husband and I adopted our daughter in China and I've heard wonderful things about this book.

Favorite book when you were a child:

In early childhood The Lonely Doll by Dare Wright was by far my most beloved book--it was so mysterious and magical to me. How I longed to be friends with Edith and the bears. Of course as an adult, I can see how "Grey Gardens" it is for some readers, but I still experience it in a very innocent way. It remains a very big influence.

Your top five authors:

My grandfather, Art Moger, who wrote pun books, a memoir called Some of My Best Friends Are People and a book about celebrities who had changed their names called Hello! My Real Name Is... (I have always been a big Bob Dylan fan, and as a kid, thought that my grandfather must know him, because how else would he know his "real name"?--so that book really impressed me). My grandfather is a top author for me because he was a living example that it was possible to live as a literary artist, whatever form you wrote in or however you scraped it together; he also wrote and illustrated the Howard Johnson's children's menus. Other cherished literary figures for me include those who write, edit, celebrate, publish, illustrate and translate fairy tales from around the world and across the ages, especially the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Italo Calvino and thousands of anonymous others--many living today.

Book you've faked reading:

I once won a dictionary in high school--maybe the only thing I've ever won. I claimed, the next fall, to have read the entire thing over the summer. I was shy and it seemed like something to say. I still use that same dictionary. I love it!

Books you're an evangelist for:

I constantly invite people to turn back to the old, sometimes awkwardly translated volumes of fairy tales from around the world that they may never have read, because they are so strange, poetic and new; I'm an evangelist for people encountering first-hand how influential these stories clearly have been on contemporary literature. And also Joy Williams's 1978 novel The Changeling, which I believe to be one of the most astonishing and important 20th century novels. Disclosure: I'm such an evangelist that I established a teeny literary press that I run out of my bedroom to bring it back into print.

What is your favorite fairy tale?

I love them all, but especially, now, "The Story of Grandmother," the first known literary version of "Little Red Riding Hood." There are a few lines in it that have the most amazing poetics ("Are you taking the path of needles or pins?"). In it, the girl cleverly escapes from the wolf by--well, I won't give it away. It's not a story for children, I should add. Maria Tatar has a wonderful translation of it. That story haunted me as a child, too, though I only had a Golden Book version, and a topsy-turvy doll that really scared me (on one side was Little Red Riding Hood, and under her skirt, on the other side, were both the grandmother and wolf. Eek.).

Book you've bought for the cover:

I remember choosing A Very Young Dancer by Jill Krementz when I was about 10 in a bookstore--I loved watching ballet and, as a child, I was strangely drawn to children's books rendered in photographs. There was another one that was about telling time that featured a real little girl who ate lunch at a real little table, and beside her was a doll of Humpty Dumpty. My mind could not wrap itself around these books in photographs: Real children? Real dolls? They got to live in books? How I envied them! I became a writer because I wanted to live inside a book.

Book that changed your life:

The books that my parents read to me as a child gave me a sense of solace and peace--the experience of being read to, whatever the book, completely changed my life, because without that experience I think I would have had no place I felt so at home. That would have changed things for the worse.

Favorite line from a book:

 "The end." I just find it so satisfying when you turn the page and: there it is, in big, special font. I think every book should have it. It is a sad moment, when it's a book you love, but that's part of the beauty.

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

The amazing thing is, now that I am a mother, I feel that I do get to experience for the first time again books I so love. We are now reading together Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and it really does feel again, seeing the astonishment in her eyes, like the first time for me, too.

As our discussion series about independent publishers continues, I'm reluctant to abandon further exploration of that demon word "professionalism" as it defines--okay, "helps" define--"legitimate" indie publishers. So many quotation marks in play; so many innocent terms that might be considered fightin' words, but this week we'll share a few more definitions, all of which will be examined in more detail in upcoming columns. Consider these thoughts as conversation starters, or "re-starters." Ah, those quotations marks again.

Fred Ramey, co-publisher of Unbridled Books, made some intriguing observations last week. As promised, here are a few more: "Could it be that publishers are discussing 'professionalism' online and at the trade shows in order to counter the charge that we are 'gatekeepers'? That's such a facile and free-form accusation, I think, though it is based in a real frustration both with what is published and with how it is published.

"Most publishers, I imagine, are resistant to the accusation that we set ourselves the task of keeping people from being published--keeping the gates. Self-publishers publish their own works--which I think is laudable, even in some ways enviable: to have that good faith in the value of your work, to believe in it sufficiently to undertake the task of entering it to the artistic, cultural, conversational cloud.

"But, by contrast, the charge that publishers give themselves, is to bring the work of others into that indefinable reading world. We endorse that work--with our investment and our colophon; that is, we stand behind the work of others, as people who are outside of the creative literary process itself--not disinterested people, certainly more idiosyncratic than objective, but still, people who are not the creators of the work. Unfortunately, this effort seems, suddenly in these exchanges, no longer to be laudable. Sometimes it sounds as though the effort is no longer even quite fully respectable. Do we use the term 'professional' as a defense against that new (if long-welling) perception of what we're working toward? I fear that sometimes we do.

"We must admit that it’s possible—even likely—that publishers have earned their way into this situation. This seems to me to have been a two-phase development made unexpectedly significant by technologies. The first is that the industry has published such a great number of books for so long that it’s fair to say if we’ve been attempting to be gatekeepers we have been performing horribly.  The second phase has been that--as a result of that flood of books--the quality of what’s being published has fallen steadily to the point that the word 'masterpiece' can now be thrown around pretty easily and pretty early. That, too, may be a defensive term in this open-mic world."

Arielle Eckstut, an agent and the co-author of The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published: How to Write It, Sell It, and Market It... Successfully! (Workman): "Professionalism--especially when it comes to self-publishing and independent publishing--relates directly to being entrepreneurial, authorpreneurial if you will. Granted, a book is not a hair-care product, but when you go to sell one, it is a product nonetheless. I've found that all successful self-published and independently published authors do a substantial amount of the following: research, networking, writing and persevering. And these are all things that any author can do. Plus, with all the new venues and platforms available to writers, your chances of actually getting a book out there are better than they have been at any time in history. And of course, the more professional you and your package are, the better your chances."

Nancy Mills, publisher of Pie in the Sky Publishing and president of the Colorado Independent Publishers Association: "The definition of professionalism shouldn't be any different in the publishing business than any other business. There are certain rules in the business world that apply straight across the board. Because there is so much competition, in virtually every aspect of the book business, professionalism is paramount. In my opinion, professionalism is made up of equal parts of consideration and expertise. For the same reason you wouldn't arrive up at your attorney's office without an appointment you should never assume that a bookseller is sitting around, waiting for an independent publisher, author or small press representative to arrive for a pitch. 'Why don't you carry my books?' is just below 'You suck!' on the list of the least professional opening lines with a bookseller. Respect for others' time and being mindful of all the obligations and responsibilities that booksellers have today must be uppermost in the process."

Teresa Funke, author and president of Teresa Funke & Co. (and one of the panelists on the recent MPIBA trade show panel "Independent Publishers & Independent Booksellers, Can We Talk?"): "Indie authors need to be as professional as they can be. They need, first and foremost, to get their books professionally edited and designed. They need to produce good support materials and a solid marketing plan. They need at least a rudimentary website or online presence. They need business cards. And they need an established method for dealing with the various types of booksellers they will be working with. They need a good invoicing and shipping system, for example, or better yet, a distributor. And they need clear contact information on all of their materials. If an author does not provide these things, she needs to think of herself as a hobbyist, not a professional. There's nothing wrong, by the way, with being a hobbyist writer, just as there's nothing wrong with painting as a hobby or playing the piano. But if you want to take that next step into the 'real world' of selling and marketing your books, you need to be professional. And the more professionally an author behaves, the more professionally she'll be treated."

Can we finally release--or at least parole--"professionalism" from the harsh confines of its quotation marks? Stay tuned.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)