This is our first anniversary! To read all about it, see the last article below.

In a bit of serendipitous news from the Bay Area, Books Inc., which has nine stores in and around San Francisco and one in Disneyland, is opening a new store in September in the Opera Plaza space in downtown San Francisco that A Clean Well-Lighted Place had for 24 years and is now closing.

At 5,500 square feet, the space is larger than most of Books Inc.'s city stores and "will be a good location for us," Michael Tucker, president, CEO and co-owner of Books Inc., told Shelf Awareness. "The other city stores are 2,700 to 3,500 square feet, which limits what we can do with onsite author events."

Books Inc. hopes to take possession of the store in mid-July and open in mid-September. Although the company "will change the configuration, carpeting and lighting," it will for the time being use A Clean Well-Lighted Place's fixtures. "We have only a 60-day window," Tucker said, adding that Books Inc. is doing "a complete remodel" on its store in the Marina, which is another major commitment. "No one was expecting" to open yet another store at this time, he emphasized.

Books Inc. will add some staff members from A Clean Well-Lighted Place as well as Cody's Books, which is closing its Telegraph Ave. store in Berkeley. "It's very nice to pick up some of that experience," Tucker commented.

Neal Sofman, the main owner of A Clean Well-Lighted Place, is opening a smaller store called Bookstore West Portal. Tucker said he is happy that Sofman is continuing as a bookseller and provided a bit of perspective on some of the recent bookselling changes in the Bay Area. At one point in the 1990s, Books Inc. itself, which used to have much larger stores than it does now, had to close 10 of its 12 stores. "We had to reform," he said.

In other Books Inc. news, the company will now handle book sales for City Arts & Lectures, the longtime San Francisco author program whose book sales were handled for many years by A Clean Well-Lighted Place.

Cool idea of the day: Alex Dawson, owner of the Raconteur, a used bookstore in Metuchen, N.J., has started a literary motorcycle club whose first trip earlier this month was to the house in Burlington, N.J., where James Fenimore Cooper was born, today's New York Times reported. Five people took the ride; the next trip, Dawson hopes, will be an overnight to the Robert Louis Stevenson cottage at Saranac Lake, N.Y.

Dawson opened the store, now "slightly famous in literary circles in Brooklyn and Manhattan as well as Edison and New Brunswick," in November 2004. The Raconteur sells used books, rents DVDs, stages readings and film events and offers writers' workshops. The store's Wordfest, which featured 15 writers reading for five hours, drew 400 people to a nearby theater recently.

Business has been as expected, Dawson told the Times. "But you have to remember that I ran a theater company for the last six years, so this isn't a financial step down, it's a financial step up," he said.

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Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, has written a rare published item--"a letter for Oprah Winfrey's magazine on how she became a reader as a child in a rural, Depression-era Alabama town," according to the AP via CNN.

In the letter, Lee tells that she became a reader early on. Her older sisters and brother read to her; her mother read a story a day; and her father read newspaper articles to her. "Then, of course, it was Uncle Wiggly at bedtime." In Monroeville, Ala., books were scarce in the '30s, making her treasure them all the more.

"Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books," she wrote.

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The $40 million Eastern Michigan University Student Center opens in November and will include a new bookstore managed by Follett that will have "a lounge, coffee area, general reading area and more access to used textbooks," according to Eastern Echo, the university newspaper.

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Several newspapers look at changes in used book sales. The conclusion seems to be that stores selling used books that don't sell online don't sell as many books as they used to.

Gil's Book Loft has abandoned its bricks-and-mortar site in Binghamton, N.Y., and now sells only online from a spot in nearby Johnson City that is close to the post office, the Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin reported.

Since 1995, the New Hampshire Antiquarian Booksellers Association has lost 17 members, down from 80 to 63, according to the Concord Monitor. Sales at Homestead Bookshop in Marlborough, N.H., owned by NHABA president Robert Kenney, have dropped 30% since 1995. And Tom Stotler of Old Paper Collectibles in Warner, N.H., has seen his business gradually drop off. Other used booksellers without e-commerce sites told the paper they had similar sales declines.

But among the Monitor's examples of booksellers taking advantage of the Internet: Bill and Karen Carruth, who just closed the retail establishment Old Forge Books, Epsom, N.H., but continue to sell online--and plan to move to Newbury, where they will open a B&B and another bookstore.

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Effective July 5, Jennifer Sheridan joins HarperCollins as sales rep for the New York region, selling adult lines to Bookazine, Barnes & Noble College Stores and independent bookstores. She has been a buyer for Bookazine; a manager and buyer for the children's department at Unabridged Books in Chicago; a bookseller at other stores; a freelance editor; and taught fiction writing at Columbia College in Chicago.

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Advanced Marketing Services has named Tara Catogge executive v-p, sales and merchandising. She joined the company in 1994 as marketing manager for Sam's Club, was promoted to general sales manager, director, club sales and was most recently v-p of sales. She will continue to be responsible for wholesale sales and merchandising with AMS's core suppliers and warehouse club customers. Earlier Catogge was sales director at Academic Press.

Today on the Today Show, Sarah, Duchess of York, discusses her new book, Little Red's River Adventure (S&S, $15.95, 0689855621).

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The Book Report, the new weekly AM radio book-related show organized by Windows a bookshop, Monroe, La., will feature two author interviews on today's show, whose theme is great beach books:

• Ronlyn Domingue, author of The Mercy of Thin Air (Washington Square Press, $14, 0743278828).
• Deborah Wiles, author of Each Little Bird That Sings (Harcourt, $5.95, 0152056572).

The show airs at 8 a.m. Central Time and can be heard live at thebookreport.net; the archived edition will be posted this afternoon.

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Today on NPR's Morning Edition: Steven Miles, author of Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror (Random House, $23.95, 140006578X).

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Tonight on Larry King Live, Ann Coulter rants about her new book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism (Crown, $27.95, 1400054206).

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Tonight on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Al Gore, author of An Inconvenient Truth (Rodale, $21.95, 1594865671).

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Tonight on the Colbert Report: Robert Baer, author of Blow the House Down (Crown, $25.95, 1400098351).

 
The stars seem to be aligning for crossword puzzlers. Wordplay (the documentary) has opened to well-deserved rave reviews, Griffin has published a tie-in with the same title, Thunder's Mouth Press has Matt Gaffney's Gridlock, and in this Sunday's New York Times Style section, the featured couple in "Vows" met at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in 2005. (We may want an update in a few years: she does her puzzles in pencil, he uses ink.) While this may not wrench sudoku fans away from their grids, it does give crossword enthusiasts some fun books and a witty, intelligent movie.
 
Wordplay is obviously a tie-in, and will enhance the moviegoer's experience, but can be enjoyed by any crossword puzzle solver in spite of its paste-job effect. Centered on the 28th annual ACPT held in Stamford, Conn., it features interviews with ACPT winners past and present, like Jon Delfin, Ellen Ripstein, Trip Payne and Tyler Hinman. Celebrity puzzlers are also profiled, most notably Jon Stewart, who asked Will Shortz for help constructing a puzzle with theme answers that were a marriage proposal. He feared that he would make a hash of the puzzle himself, causing his girlfriend to think someone else was proposing. Merl Reagle contributes a droll piece on how to construct a puzzle. He leaves hanging the question of why people create them, but does go through the steps of creation, which involve paper, pencil and often a coffee shop. He says it's a challenge to explain, and "that's a mind-numbing anaesthetic for most people, actually. But at least it doesn't involve a lot of soul-searching . . . I just wrote soul-searching into one of my little notebooks because it contains all the vowels once. Kind of a reflex thing. Ignore it." Many interesting facts are scattered throughout; for instance, Shortz changes about 50% of the clues for clarity, accuracy and degree of difficulty, and the same puzzle can be clued from easy to diabolical.
 
Gridlock, written by Matt Gaffney, a premier puzzle constructor and ACPT judge, features the 29th annual tournament of 2006, where the winner takes home $4,000 and a "boatload of geek street cred, the latter of which is probably the greater incentive." That story is especially interesting for those who have seen or read Wordplay, and Gaffney's edgy, witty writing is entertaining. His favorite wrong answer in the tournament comes in Round 4, when, "instead of the correct EARLOBE for the clue 'Stud's place,' one contestant inexplicably writes in ESTONIA." He writes at length about the history of crosswords, introduces other crosswords to New York Times-centric puzzlers, most notably those of the New York Sun and editor Peter Gordon, and discusses how computers have changed constructing a crossword (they're good at filling in a grid, but can't pick a theme or write clues). He mentions the backlash against sudoku: for people who've spent much of their lives perfecting their craft, a completely computer-generated fad that has tons of fans creates resentment (Will Shortz, interestingly, has brought out a number of sudoku books which have sold very well because of his brand). He interviews a reclusive Henry Hook, the third greatest American constructor of all time according to a cruciverb.com poll, and details the construction of a puzzle. In explaining how themes come to be created, he says, "Like a city rat that thinks he smells lunch in the trash can down the alley, the crossword constructor is happy to follow a promising trail for a block or two . . . If it shakes out, you've got a theme; if it doesn't, you . . . go back to your life, keeping your whiskers primed for the next lead."
 
Cruciverbalists will want to buy these books together. Gridlock has a lot of information, but its drawback is the absence of puzzles to solve. Wordplay contains 50 crosswords to solve, some historical, some champion favorites, some from the 2005 tournament. The puzzles are interspersed throughout the book, and can stop the story, but they are superb, like "The Greatest Puzzle Ever," written by Jeremiah Farrell for Tuesday, November 5, 1996. If you don't know about this puzzle, you are in for an exceptional treat; Shortz considers it the best crossword puzzle he's ever seen. Both books talk about Eric Albert's "Night Lights," another exceptional creation. Keep these titles on your list for your holiday gift book display--wrapped in ribbon as a set: perfect.--Marilyn Dahl

Exactly a year ago today, with barely 600 subscribers (thank you to our many friends and families for signing up early and often), we began publishing Shelf Awareness. Now, 236 issues later (the official numbering is off by one because of an editorial mishap on the first day), we have 10 times as many subscribers, a number that continues to grow daily.

At BEA in New York last year, we had told many people what we intended to do, using the words "planning to" and "hope to" and "if" a lot. We thought the newsletter would work editorially, since there was nothing quite like it and many people said they wanted a newsletter with an emphasis on information of interest to booksellers and librarians. As for the business model, we spent many a restless night pondering the future. But things are going very well in that area, too, in large part because of the amazing outpouring of industry support--and Jenn's amazing business abilities.

Shelf Awareness began in essence at the end of March last year, when John, to borrow Jimmy Carter's phrase about the 1980 election, was involuntarily retired from Publishers Weekly after nearly 24 years there. The company had shut down PW Daily for Booksellers, which, in its first incarnation, had drawn tens of thousands of subscribers and lots of advertising.

From the first moments after being let go, John wanted to put out something like the old PW Daily for Booksellers again. Several booksellers encouraged him without knowing he had the same thought, and when he considered finding a different corporate home for such a venture, his dear wife said her now-immortal words: "You should just do it on your own."

But he needed a partner to handle sales and the business side of things, and within days of being fired, his longtime friend Jenn called to find out what was happening. He explained about the changes at PW, the firings, leads he'd gotten for regular jobs, and then told her what he really wanted to do. Jenn who was taking a sabbatical from sales and marketing in the publishing world after giving birth to her lovely daughter, paused and then in an atypically shy voice responded, "If you're really serious about that, I'd be very interested in working with you."

Here we are a year later, and even though we joke about changing the name to Shelf Awakeness, it's been a truly great experience.

We have so many friends and others who have been there from the beginning to thank:

• Braden Vinroe for his technical support and drawing the first images of Vik, our book-reading Buddha.
• Alex Baker for bringing Vik to life with his wonderful design eye and sense of humor in "dressing" him up.
• Richard Jobes, our ever-watchful and sly CFO, who has given a great idea solid business planning and measurements--and some very amusing comments.
• Marilyn Dahl, who has singlehandedly built up a solid, witty, elegant book review section.
• Larry Portzline, founder of Bookstore Tourism, who bravely took out our first ad.
• The regional booksellers associations, the American Booksellers Association, the National Association of College Stores, the Association of Booksellers for Children, all of whom mentioned us to their members and were supportive in many other ways.
• And so many friends in the industry and former colleagues, including Mark Suchomel, Cris Cooke, Nora Rawlinson, Fred Ciporen, Joe Tessitore, Roger Williams, Chris Kerr, Sean Concannon, Don Sturtz, Mary Bisbee-Beek, Ann Merchant, Brian Heller, Lisa Gallagher, Kuo-Yu Liang, Carl Lennertz, Richard Hunt, Jamey Bennett, Donna Paz, Mark Kaufman, Miriam Sontz, Gary Lothian, George Carroll, Gloria Genee, Howard Wall, Diana Van Vleck, Jan Nathan, Ron Rice, Jessica Dyer, Mike Dyer, Robin Pinnel, Ruth Liebmann, Jim DiMiero and so many supportive booksellers, librarians, wholesalers, publishers and others.

We also have a special spot in our hearts for bookstores that opened within days of our first issue, all of whom we featured in the first few weeks: Voices & Visions: Books, Arts and Community in Philadelphia, Pa., Salty Dog Books & Music in St. Michaels, Md., Bridge Street Bookshop in Phoenixville, Pa.--and for a store that around the same time was sold and began to be reinvented, Good Yarns, Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. May they prosper, too!

We plan to add more features and services to continue to ensure that Shelf Awareness remains an important part of your workday. We'd love to hear your comments, suggestions, potshots--and maybe birthday greetings at info@shelf-awareness.com.