We can't wait for the long, entertaining, perhaps one-sided debates: writer and actor Malachy McCourt plans to seek the Green Party nomination for Governor of New York, according to various press reports.

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The Charlotte Observer celebrates the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Thursday Book Club in Newton, N.C. The group originally decided to meet on Thursdays because that was the day their husbands met at the Kiwanis Club.

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The three daughters of Katharine Thalberg, the founder and owner of Explore Booksellers and Bistro who died earlier this year (Shelf Awareness, January 8), have committed themselves to keeping the Aspen, Colo., store open, according to the Aspen Daily News.

"My mother is irreplaceable and she was integrally involved with every aspect of the store," one daughter, Brooke Anderson, told the paper. "For the past three months there has been a strong management team in place, and that's helped in keeping the doors open."

Thalberg's close friend, Vicki Garwood, was recently named general manager.

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Since he was a freshman in college six years ago, Steve Spranzman has sold "stuff" online, a business that has grown and become a company focused on books, according to the Fairfield County Business Journal. Now Express Books, which Spranzman runs with a partner, sells retail and wholesale 20,000 new and used books a month from a 6,000-sq.-ft. warehouse in Bethel, Conn. Last month, the company reversed the usual bookselling progression and opened a 1,200-sq.-ft. storefront.

Called One Book Too Many, the store sells mainly overstock and remainder titles for either $3 for paperbacks or $4 for hardcovers. "Since we plan to move so much inventory, pricing each books is a lot of work, so we decided to do flat-rate prices," Spranzman explained.

One Book Too Many is located at 4 Library Place, across the street from the library. "We draw a lot of people going to the library," Spranzman commented.

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The large Dutch book retailer Boekhandels Groep Nederland (BGN) is opening two "fully automated" SmartStores that use RFID technology to track the books from their shipment out of the Centraal Bookhuis, the major Dutch wholesaler, to the stores and to customers, according to RFID Journal. The first store opens in Almere this week; the second in Maastricht in September.

Among other things, RFID technology (radio frequency identification made wirelessly through transmitting tags in products) can allow products to be scanned much more easily than bar codes printed or stuck on them permit--and, in the brave new world, can even allow for a kind of EZ Pass checkout.

Already the tags allowed the Almere store to be stocked with 45,000 books in three days; without RFID, stocking would have taken two weeks, the bookseller estimated. BGN will be able to take inventory twice a day by wheeling a trolley with a reader on it down the aisles. Information about the location of books will be easily available to customers and employees. The tags will be "killed" at checkout so the books will not be able to be tracked once purchased.

Borders is closing one of its oldest stores, in the Uptown section of Minneapolis, Minn., by the beginning of June at the latest. The store is in a mall that is being renovated, and the renovation will "not allow for us to remain in the type of premium position we have now," Borders spokesperson Anne Roman told Shelf Awareness. Borders has seven stores in and around Minneapolis and St. Paul and is working with employees to find places for them at those stores. Closing was, she said, "a difficult choice because it was our first store in the area and therefore is special to many customers and employees."

The Uptown store is unusual in several respects. Besides being Borders's first store in the Twin Cities, it was once an Odegard's bookstore and is one of only two Borders stores that is unionized. For years, it had a vigorous reading program and was a star performer.

One former employee saw the closing as a major loss that stemmed from corporate policy mistakes, but Roman said that while the store probably had more events in its early days, that is "simply because there are more stores now in the city--not only our stores, but other competitors--and events are spread around in the marketplace." She noted that the Uptown store hosted several major authors last year, and said that the Minneapolis market is in the top 25 of the company's "national events markets."

Like older Borders, the store for a long time had its own community relations coordinator (CRC), a position that ended when the company transferred the responsibility to district marketing managers and regional marketing managers. "As we grew," Roman explained, "we would often have several stores in one community or area. These stores, with a CRC in each, would compete for events or duplicate efforts." The group approach has helped Borders "attract better events and make sure that we spread events around so all of our store communities receive events."

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In other Borders news, the Shops at Atlas Park, a lifestyle shopping center in the former Atlas Terminal industrial park in Queens, N.Y., is opening this week, according to the New York Times. The developer hopes that the completed center will include five minianchors, one of which will be a 23,000-sq.-ft. Borders.

A trio of former booksellers and wholesalers who have set up their own businesses are launching a kind of joint venture that aims "to bridge the common gap between authors and readers." The group's strategy "targets frontline booksellers, often overlooked by mainstream publishing initiatives, shapes book projects from conception through publication, and promotes events that create motivated readers."

The principals, all of whom are in Vermont, are:

• Bob Gray, the writer and former Northshire Bookstore bookseller who has a highly regarded blog and operates Fresh Eyes Now, a marketing company that is "creating an infrastructure of frontline booksellers across the country and using them as reviewers to read for authors and publishers."
• Ellen Stimson, a former owner of Unique Books, the small press library wholesaler, who has just opened isabelpratt, a literary agency that also offers extensive marketing services before and after publication.
• Zach Marcus, a former marketer at Northshire Bookstore and Elliott Bay Book Co. who owns Maverick Media Projects, an events promotion company.

"There are tremendous synergies between the three of us," Stimson told Shelf Awareness. "We look at the industry in the same way. We want to change the adversarial relationship that often exists between authors and the rest of the industry, which can start as soon as the author signs up with a publisher."

Fresh Eyes Now will help authors, agents and publishers reach a range of booksellers, particularly those interested in certain genres and categories, and help build word of mouth about titles and encourage effective handselling.

Maverick Media Projects puts together events across the country and does a great job "matching titles and community events," Stimson said. Marcus will begin planning events early in the publishing process.

One example of the joint initiative involves Bruce Hallett, an isabelpratt client and former president of Time magazine and president of Sports Illlustrated whose novel, Cope of Heaven, will be circulated next week--and is already being read by movie agents and frontline booksellers to that they can "generate chatter very early." And he will likely have some good events after publication.

Stimson, who worked at Booksource, the St. Louis wholesaler, recalled that staff members would fall in love with a title and call booksellers around the country imploring them to read and sell the title--and helped many books take off. In the same way, she said, with the new collaboration, "We want to make books happen."

Attention all booksellers and librarians:

ReadingGroupGuides.com offers book clubs more than 1,800 reading guides and features that include advice and ideas on starting and sustaining reading groups. The site, which attracts more than 200,000 unique visitors each month, also shares monthly interviews with groups across the country, and to date has interviewed more than 135 groups. RGG understands the power of booksellers and librarians to influence book club selections, so it is adding, as of May, interviews with booksellers and librarians to its editorial features. If you are a bookseller or librarian who hosts a book club at your store or library--or helps facilitate book club selections for groups in your area--and would like to share information with others, click here for the interview info for booksellers and click here for the interview info for librarians. ReadingGroupGuides.com will share your feedback about what groups are reading and what you are excited with Shelf Awareness.
 
And if you offer special discounts or offers to book clubs, please outline these and get them to Carol@bookreporter.com because RGG would like to add a page on the site that spotlights offers for book clubs.

This morning the Today Show treads cautiously with Caitlin Flanagan, whose new book is To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife (Little, Brown, $22.95, 0316736872). She also appears tonight on the Colbert Report.

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Today long after dawn, on NPR's Fresh Air: Nicholas Wade, author of Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (Penguin, $24.95, 1594200793).

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Today, on behalf of the Small Press Center of New York, World Talk Radio's Antoinette Kuritz talks with Gregg Near of Borders about "maximizing your relationship with Borders stores and hosting effective, successful events."

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Today on the View Jane Fonda continues to talk up her My Life So Far (Random House, $16.95, 0812975766).

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Tonight on the Late Show with David Letterman: Craig Ferguson, host of the Late, Late Show and author of Between the Bridge and the River (Chronicle, $24.95, 0811853756).

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Tonight on the Charlie Rose Show tonight, guest host James Fallows, national correspondent of the Atlantic Monthly, interviews New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, whose The World Is Flat (FSG, $30, 0374292795) has just come out in a revised and updated edition.

Poet and translator Richard Wilbur has won the 2006 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and worth $100,000. Wilbur has been Poet Laureate of the U.S. and won two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award and the Bollingen Translation Prize.

Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine and chair of the selection committee, commented: "If you had to put all your money on one living poet whose work will be read in a hundred years, Richard Wilbur would be a good bet. He has written some of the most memorable poems of our time, and his achievement rivals that of great American poets like Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop."

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The Overseas Press Club annual awards include the following book honors:

George Packer, author of The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq (FSG), has won the Cornelius Ryan Award for best nonfiction book on international affairs.

Alan Burdick, author of Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion (FSG), has won the Whitman Bassow Award for best reporting in any medium on international environmental issues.