"Nationally, the network of independent bookstores has seen and is continuing to see real, sustained growth. This vitality is the result of your hard work, innovation, and a commitment to selecting and showcasing titles that we passionately believe in and that we know will find readers in our communities.... Believe me, I know you can't pay your bills with press clips and that there will be many, many hectic hours before you make that last sale on December 24, but I hope that you can take a moment to appreciate that the public narrative about our industry has changed in a very critical way, as more consumers recognize the importance, vitality, and health of indie bookstores.... All best wishes to you for a busy and profitable holiday season from all of us at ABA. Thanks for all you've done--and are doing--to keep indie bookselling strong."

Williams College, which is assessing its bookstore operation and envisioning changes to its structure, operation and location, has "begun distributing a Request for Information (RFI) to members of the surrounding community as well as the bookselling industry at large," Bookselling This Week reported. The college, located in Williamstown, Mass., "is asking independent bookstores as well as corporate entities to offer their visions for a bookstore/campus store associated with the college and what it would involve."

"There's a general feeling among faculty that there are a lot of great independent bookstores in the local area that are thriving," said Matthew Sheehy, associate v-p for finance and administration. "An independent bookstore might be able to offer what we need, and the community might be more inclined to support it than if it were a corporate entity.... We're looking for someone to come in with a business model that serves the college and the local community and who is ready to run the operation. We'd be willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen."

For more information and to view the RFI, booksellers can contact Sheehy at 413-597-4775 or matthew.sheehy@williams.edu.

The UConn Co-op has opened its new 15,000-square-foot location in downtown Storrs, Conn. All general books and art books are in the new location, while textbooks, clothing, computers and art supplies have remained in the old, on-campus location. The new space will be shared with the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and a cafe, both of which will open by the end of the month.

"One thing that's immediately noticeable is that we're easier to get to," said Suzy Staubach, the Co-op's manager of general books. Since the new location's opening on November 25, the response has been good. "Some people used to not like driving on campus, but now we're getting people who we didn't see that often, or who live a little further away," Staubach said. "And people think that we have way more books. We actually don't; you can just see them now."

Sales have risen compared to this time last year, which Staubach attributes to being in the heart of Storrs's downtown and the extra room that the new space provides. Thanks to the available floor space, she's nearly tripled the size of the kids' section, and sales of children's books have increased accordingly. She added: "A lot of it, honestly, is just that the space feels so good. And people can actually see the books. It was so crammed before."

The Co-op has held several events in the new space; the biggest was the store's Indies First/Small Business Saturday festivities. Authors Pam Lewis (A Young Wife), Gina Barreca (It's Not That I'm Bitter), Norman Stevens (A Gathering of Spoons: The Design Gallery of the World's Most Stunning Wooden Art Spoons) and the married duo of Ann and Sam Charters (Brother Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation) all visited the store. Tomorrow, the store will host a visit from both Santa Claus, who will arrive riding in an old-fashioned milk truck, and author Robert Sullivan. At the old location, Staubach did not schedule readings or events during UConn's semester breaks. But thanks to the increase in traffic, she'll bring in authors and plan events all year.

In late January, once the cafe and Puppetry Museum are both fully up and running, the Co-op will host its grand opening celebration. There will be authors, puppetry exhibitions, readings and, of course, generous amounts of food and drink.

The Co-op and the Puppetry Museum will share a theater, and they'll co-host readings, signings and puppet shows. The cafe, meanwhile, will provide an assortment of French food along with the usual fare. Staubach looks forward to the day when they'll all be operating in sync: "With the three of us together, it will just be a real destination: very cultural, very artsy, with literature and music and the visual arts." --Alex Mutter

Kobo has expanded its distribution channel in France with the addition of retailers Pixmania, Cora, Casino, Auchan and Boulanger, making the company's e-readers available at hundreds of stores across the country.

"The appetite for digital reading is gaining momentum in France," said Jean-Marc Dupuis, managing director of Europe, the Middle East & Africa, Kobo. "Expanding on our partnership with FNAC France, we're excited these new retailers will make Kobo available to people passionate about reading."

Next year, when the Man Booker Prize begins allowing English-language authors of any nationality to compete for the first time, the judging panel will include two people who were born in the U.S., "a figure which matches the number of American Booker judges over the past 10 years," the Guardian reported.

Chair of the judges A.C. Grayling is joined on the panel by critic Sarah Churchwell, who was born in Illinois and is a professor of American literature at the University of East Anglia; and Erica Wagner, the former literary editor of the Times who was born in New York.

The panel also includes English professor Jonathan Bate, neuroscientist Daniel Glaser and Alastair Niven, former director of literature at both the arts council and the British Council.

On Wednesday, the German Book Office in New York City celebrated its 15th anniversary. Pictured (from l.): Riky Stock, director of the GBO since 2002; Michelle Turnbach, Frankfurt Book Fair sales manager for the English-language world, based in New York; and Thomas Minkus, v-p  for emerging markets and English-language markets of the Frankfurt Book Fair. The GBO promotes German literature to North American publishers and serves as the American outpost of the Frankfurt Book Fair.

"The following video contains false information about a sale. There is no actual sale. At least not one involving books being hurled at customers." Thus begins "Martin-Banned Holiday Ad Campaign #4," the latest YouTube video from Common Good Books, St. Paul, Minn. The staff dodges falling books as it "gears up for the holidays with the (extremely fake) 'If You Can See It, It's On Sale!' event" and shares the always important indie sentiment for the season: "There's more to life than a 'good deal.' "

Last Saturday, a cash mob hit Canio's Books on Main Street in Sag Harbor, N.Y., and "the narrow passageways between shelves were even more crowded than usual. Shoulder to shoulder people stood, ready to flood the store with a holiday boost," the Sag Harbor Express reported, adding that Canio's was selected "because of its importance to the culture of the town. Since its founding in 1980 by Canio Provone, Canio's has served as a cultural hub as well as an independent book seller."

"When Canio's first opened it was a different time in Sag Harbor," said co-owner Kathryn Szoka. "There were some oases for literature and art but not a great many, and Canio's became a meeting place for the creative arts."

Among the many initiatives Szoka and her partner, Maryann Calendrille, established was the Cultural Café, a not-for-profit devoted to bringing educational and cultural offerings to the public.

"We see Canio's as a community center for creativity and the arts," Szoka said. "The idea is that engagement is a great way to learn. It creates great ownership of the material on everyone's part."

She added that they "were thrilled by the cash mob and grateful for our friends who put it together. I think what a lot of people like about Canio's is the intimate atmosphere, and that all books are hand selected. Every book counts and has a story and allows for the opening of an imagination. It takes a village to make something like Canio's thrive and we are grateful that the effort is there in our community. The cash mob felt like a warm hug."

Patrick Thomas has been named managing director at Milkweed Editions. Thomas joined the publisher as an intern in 2003. The next year he was hired as a sales and customer service assistant and in 2005 was promoted to sales associate. After a brief respite, he rejoined the company as assistant editor in 2006, and was promoted to associate editor, then editor, and was most recently editor and program manager. Milkweed publisher and CEO Daniel Slager noted that Thomas has "excelled in this role as well, eventually curating a distinctive list of books, and working with writers to develop manuscripts into books. More recently, he has also been building our budgets, directing content management, and helping me manage our business operations."

The Pagan Lord by Bernard Cornwell (Harper), the latest installment in the Saxon Tales series.

Tomorrow on CBS This Morning: Howard G. Buffett, author of 40 Chances: Finding Hope in a Hungry World (Simon & Schuster, $26, 9781451687866).

Also on CBS This Morning: P.J. O'Rouke, author of The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way… And It Wasn't My Fault… And I'll Never Do It Again (Atlantic Monthly Press, $25, 9780802121974).

Jason Segel will play David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour, based on David Lipsky's book Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. The Wrap reported that James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now) will direct from a script by playwright Donald Margulies, with Jesse Eisenberg playing the role of Lipsky. Production is tentatively scheduled to begin in February/March.

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The first images have been released from Child 44, the film adaptation of Tom Rob Smith's novel starring Noomi Rapace, Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman. Indiewire reported that the project, directed by Daniel Espinosa (Safe House), features "an awesome ensemble including Jason Clarke, Joel Kinnaman, Paddy Considine and Vincent Cassel.... No word yet on a premiere or release date, so instead just put this on your list for 2014 for now."

Margaret Wrinkle has won the 2013 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize for her novel, Wash (Atlantic Monthly Press). Sponsored by the Center for Fiction, formerly known as the Mercantile Library, the prize carries a $10,000 award and was presented Wednesday night at the Center's annual benefit and awards dinner in New York City.

The Center also awarded its 2013 Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction to Robin Desser, v-p, editorial director, of Alfred A. Knopf.

Selected new titles appearing next Tuesday, December 17:

The New Countess by Fay Weldon (St. Martin's Press, $25.99, 9781250028020) concludes the Habits of the House trilogy, set on a Victorian English estate.

We Hold These Truths by Andrew Clements and Adam Stower (Atheneum, $14.99, 9781416938903) continues the Keepers of the School children's series.

Dog Days: The Carver Chronicles, Book One by Karen English, illustrated by Laura Freeman (Clarion, $14.99, 9780547970448) is a children's series about a skateboarding kid and an obnoxious dog.

The Haunting of Twenty-First-Century America by Joel Martin and William J. Birnes (Forge, $29.99, 9780765328373) adds a paranormal dimension to U.S. government policies.

Rafael Campo teaches and practices internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. His new book of poetry, Alternative Medicine, is available from Duke University Press. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Poetry Series award and a Lambda Literary Award; his third book, Diva, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His previous collection The Enemy (Duke, 2007), won the Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club, one of the nation's oldest poetry organizations. His poem "Morbidity and Mortality Rounds" recently won the Hippocrates Open International Prize, for a poem on a medical theme.

On your nightstand now:

I'm re-reading the poet Amy Clampitt's letters (Love, Amy), edited by Willard Spiegelman--I studied and wrote poetry with her when I was an undergrad double-majoring in English and neuroscience at Amherst College. Also U.K. physician-poet Jo Shapcott's most recent collection, Of Mutability, Sharon Olds's Stag's Leap, Stephen Burt's Belmont and David Biespiel's Charming Gardeners.

Favorite book when you were a child:

The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein.

Your top five authors:

Now: Marilyn Hacker, Derek Walcott, Thom Gunn, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Pablo Neruda.

Then: Shakespeare, Dickinson, Chekhov, Whitman, Lorca.

Book you've faked reading:

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (give me a break, that was in high school!).

Book you're an evangelist for:

Margaret Edson's extraordinary play Wit.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Martin Espada's The Trouble Ball (the poems inside are stunning, too!).

Book that changed your life:

Atlantis by Mark Doty and Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors by Susan Sontag. I read these two books side by side, and the dialogue they create addresses one of the central themes in my life's work: Can creative self-expression heal? Are all humane attempts to make sense of suffering and to heal ultimately insufficient, as compared to the strictly scientific or medical approach to curing disease?

Favorite line from a book:

"English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something laughable." --From Virginia Woolf's On Being Ill.

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

Mary B. Campbell's The World, the Flesh and Angels--I would give anything to feel such a sense of discovery and newness in the world, as I did at that time in my life, so early in my struggle to balance my twin vocations of poetry and medicine, when I read these indelible, incandescent poems. Though not specifically addressed to the experience of illness, Campbell's poems are full of wonder at our own humanity, our fragility and perseverance in a deeply troubled but spectacularly beautiful world.

Seventeen-year-old Sean Strub left Iowa City in 1976 to attend Georgetown University and--more importantly for his future--to become an elevator operator at the Capitol Building. He worked to meet as many powerful figures as possible, with his own political career in mind, yet he was haunted by a secret he feared would make him unelectable: he was attracted to men.

Three years later, the colorful, growing gay community of New York City encouraged the aspiring politico to begin to explore his own sexuality and acknowledge it as a permanent feature in his life. As an increasingly "out" gay man, he shifted his focus away from the idea of running for office and became a committed activist in the pursuit of gay rights. Strub's second passion and skill was for entrepreneurship, and he eventually started up an impressive number of companies, including direct-mail ventures and publications that supported his causes.

In the early 1980s, "gay cancer," eventually known as AIDS, was suddenly everywhere. Strub couldn't attend every funeral and memorial service, he writes, but he always made sickbed visits; sometimes he walked the halls of a hospital without a specific friend in mind, reading names on rooms, sure he'd find people who needed him.

Strub had known he was HIV-positive since 1985, when he was given a prognosis of "maybe" two years, but his partner Michael died with no warning, not even getting sick first. The need for AIDS activism to push for quicker access to new drugs and fight discrimination naturally dominated Strub's attention in the years following his diagnosis and Michael's death.

In Body Counts, Strub relates the joys and struggles of learning self-love, political aspirations and disillusions, activism and relationships with countless men and women he loves, with cameo appearances by Tennessee Williams, Bobby Kennedy, Gore Vidal and Bill Clinton (among others). Body Counts is a powerfully moving personal memoir with the added value of a fine and feeling primer on the history of gay culture and AIDS in the United States. Strub's subject matter could have been morbidly tragic, but he retains a sense of humor and celebration, honoring the dead with love and hope. Now an AIDS survivor for nearly 30 years, Strub notes that he is on his way to matching, in same-sex weddings, the number of funerals he attended in the 1980s and '90s. --Julia Jenkins

Shelf Talker: Sean Strub's earnest, evocative memoir of political activism, coming out and the AIDS epidemic will appeal to diverse readers.

It struck me that the popularity of Christmas is a matter of web-like consciousness. Childhood conditions us to relax and expand at Christmas, to forget petty worries and irritations and think in terms of universal peace. And so Christmas is the nearest to mystical experience that most human beings ever approach, with its memories of Dickens and Irving's Bracebridge Hall.

Colin Wilson, who died December 5 at the age of 82, wrote these words in his novel The Philosopher's Stone, first published in 1969 and a book I never considered handselling when I was a bookseller, even though I first read it nearly 40 years ago and have had a copy somewhere on my shelves ever since. Curious.

The Guardian's obituary called him "Britain's first homegrown existentialist star." Like most other obits, it focused upon his first book. Published in 1956 when Wilson was 24 years old, The Outsider garnered "phenomenal reviews and sales" and "led him to be seen as a potential savior of the human spirit, a thinker who might find a way through the spiritual nullity of the postwar years." Recently, David Bowie included it on his highly-publicized "Top 100 Must Read Books."

Wilson's "passionate inquiry into his themes continued but critics deserted him," the Guardian noted. "He went out of fashion and--though he published more than 100 works--he survived financially only because many of those dealt with murder or the occult as pathways to the insights that fascinated him."

Why should I care? I never thought Wilson was a great writer, but one of the reasons his death struck me is tied, I suspect, to a list meme that has been dominating Facebook lately, at least among its bookish members. You may know the drill. A Facebook friend tags you and shares a list of "10 books that have stayed with you in some way." You craft your own, tag some of your bookish crew, and the virtual world grinds on, literary karma intact.

I was tagged a few times and dutifully created a list. After posting, however, I began to think about that phrase "stayed with you" and Wilson's death. I hadn't listed The Philosopher's Stone, and suddenly realized the book had indeed stayed with me for decades.

It isn't as if Wilson disappeared from my reading life. As recently as 2011, I mentioned him in a Shelf Awareness column, noting that I'd discovered Bruckner's symphonies in the pages of The Philosopher's Stone, which also introduced me to composers Sibelius and Elgar; philosophers Bertrand Russell and Hegel; and even the psychologist Abraham Maslow.  

There are some books you can only read in your 20s. Maybe this is one of them, but certain passages do still resonate: "Then I looked across the room at my bookcase.... The sunlight on the bright paper covers produced a sense of euphoria for a moment, but it vanished almost immediately... The sight of the books caused an after-image on the inside of my eyelids. And then, in a flash, I saw with perfect clarity the solution of the problem that had almost driven me to suicide. It was as if I had seen to the inner-nature of the books, and understood that they were not books at all, but a part of the living universe. Each one of them was a window on 'other-ness,' on some place or time not actually present."

So the Philosopher's Stone has stayed with me, weaving that spell certain books cast, as most readers will understand. "Through books, man has conquered time," Wilson wrote. "The insights of poets and saints are still alive. For two million years, man ascended the evolutionary ladder slowly and painfully, changing hardly more than an ape of the horse. With the invention of books, he took a giant step into the realm of the gods."

In her foreword to an American edition of the novel, Joyce Carol Oates praised John Fowles, Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble and Wilson for "consciously attempting to imagine a new image for man, a new self-image freed of ambiguity, irony and the self-conscious narrowness of the imagination we have inherited from nineteenth-century Romanticism."

That was a tall order, written on the cultural tailwind of the late 60s, but it may well have pushed me closer to The Philosopher's Stone. In an obituary published this morning, the New York Times notes Wilson "argued that it was possible for mankind to achieve this exalted state through the kind of transcendent experience that comes, for instance, in the presence of great works of art."

Unanticipated transcendence is precisely what I recall about reading the novel in my youth. Maybe this year's Christmas season is the perfect time to sink again into that "web-like consciousness" and re-read The Philosopher's Stone, one of those precious books that just "stay with you." --Robert Gray, contributing editor

The bestselling self-published books last week as compiled by IndieReader.com:

1. The Elf on the Shelf by Carol V. Aebersold and Chanda B. Bell
2. Forever Us by Sandi Lynn
3. Broken by Kelly Elliott
4. Trouble by Samantha Towle
5. Wise Men and Other Stories by Mike O'Mary
6. The Alpha's Touched Box Set by Various
7. Hot, Sexy and Bad by Various
8. The Atlantis Gene: A Thriller by A.G. Riddle
9. The Atlantis Plague by A.G. Riddle
10. Her Indecent Proposal by Judy Angelo

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]