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Roxanne Coady

"On July 12th when Amazon is attempting to seduce you, we will celebrate what WE (our community and R.J. Julia) have created: a place that cares for one another. On July 12th, 10% of all our sales (both in-store and online) will be distributed to non-profits in our community. I hope you will show your support and help us make a statement and a difference.

"Thank you for your continued enthusiasm and loyalty, which allows all of us at R.J. Julia to be proud members of our community. Madison is still a center, a place where one sees friends and neighbors, goes to the (independent!) movie theater, dines in wonderful establishments, has (local!) ice cream and wanders into the bookstore to enjoy the profound pleasure of exploring and discovering the book that could change your life--or at a minimum, charm and engage you."

A fire apparently set or caused by a burglar or burglars will likely cost Battery Park Book Exchange & Champagne Bar, Asheville, N.C., about $50,000, the Asheville Citizen-Times reported. The costs include damaged books, cleanup and lost business.

The break-in occurred early Friday morning, and somehow a long unused vacuum cleaner was pulled out of a closet and caught fire, which set off sprinklers that damaged 2,000-3,000 books. Owner Thomas Wright told the newspaper that the damage occurred in the mezzanine in the biography, religion and metaphysics sections. He lamented particularly the loss of the books on metaphysics, which the paper wrote is "a collection that the store had recently beefed up and was selling well."

The burglars took about $500 in cash and some alcohol, according to police. Wright commented: "It's Dumb and Dumber break into the bookstore. They left $10 rolls of quarters, and that's the most valuable thing I have. We've got to feed the meters."

Battery Park Book Exchange & Champagne Bar is a large, inviting, elegant store in the Grove Arcade specializing in used books that features a wine, sparkling wine and champagne bar.

U.S. private equity firm Advent International has sold its majority interest in Thalia, which has more than 280 bookstores in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and is the largest bookstore chain in German-speaking Europe, according to Buchreport. The buyer is the Herder publishing family, whose partners now include the Kreke publishing family (which has owned a minority interest), digital publisher Leif Göritz and Thalia CEO Michael Busch.

Thalia has estimated revenues of €960 million (about $1.06 billion). It developed the Tolino e-book device to compete with Amazon, which is the largest book retailer in German-speaking Europe.

After buying its stake in Thalia in 2012 from Douglas Holding, Advent International restructured the bookstore chain. Advent International managing partner Ranjan Sen said that "after successful realignment, Thalia is again on economically sound feet and is growing on its own power."

Herder Verlag was founded in 1801 and is led by Manuel Herder, the sixth generation in his family to head the company, which specializes in religion, philosophy, ethics and modern life titles. For Herder, the purchase of Thalia represents a major return to bookselling. (It does own the Frankfurt bookstore Carolus.) Twenty years ago, the Herders sold Herder Bookstores to the Kreke family, whose bookstores became part of Thalia.

New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg, "who won a Pulitzer Prize for covering Cambodia's fall to the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and inspired the film The Killing Fields with the story of his Cambodian colleague's survival during the genocide of millions," died July 9, the Times reported. He was 82. His books include The Death and Life of Dith Pran; and Beyond the Killing Fields: War Writings.

"I'm a very lucky man to have had Pran as my reporting partner and even luckier that we came to call each other brother," Mr. Schanberg said after Dith Pran's death in 2008. "His mission with me in Cambodia was to tell the world what suffering his people were going through in a war that was never necessary. It became my mission too. My reporting could not have been done without him."

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Poet and novelist Robert Nye, "who found rich material in the legends of ancient England and Wales, and who invented a rollicking afterlife for one of Shakespeare's most enduring characters in his acclaimed novel Falstaff," died July 2, the New York Times reported. He was 77. Falstaff won the Hawthornden Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize. Nye's other books include The Late Mr. Shakespeare; Mrs. Shakespeare: The Complete Works; and Beowulf: A New Telling.

Last October, sisters Leah and Bea Koch ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to help fund a romance-only bookstore in Los Angeles, Calif., and on March 4, the Ripped Bodice held its grand opening.

So far, the sisters have both been thrilled by the community's response to their store. Customers as well as other retailers have been extremely welcoming, they reported, and despite being part of the country's second-largest city, the Culver City neighborhood, where the store is located, has a very close-knit, small-town feel. The Ripped Bodice, said Leah, is both a community bookstore as well as a genre-specific store, and even neighbors who don't read much romance have welcomed the store.

"There are lots of people in Culver City who are excited to have a bookstore, and they don't really seem to care that they don't read the genre," said Leah. "Some are very willing to try to explore."

"I was really happily surprised by the neighborhood reaction," said Bea. "It feels like the other business owners in the neighborhood are really rooting for us. It's been a very positive experience."

Many people come to the Ripped Bodice to shop for gifts, added Leah, including cards, books, clothing items and jewelry, and if a customer is looking for a book that isn't part of the romance genre, they will special order it. At least once a day someone calls the store looking for a non-romance title. "If you want to support an independent bookstore, we're happy to try to get you anything you want," continued Leah, "but we make it clear on the phone we're a romance-only bookstore."

Although the sisters always wanted to open in Culver City, their current location, at 2,100 square feet of retail space, is bigger than what they had initially envisioned. In October, when Bea and Leah launched their Kickstarter campaign, they were thinking that a store around 1,600 square feet would be ideal. And while Culver City was always their goal, the sisters did due diligence by looking at other L.A. neighborhoods, including Santa Monica, Venice, Downtown, Larchmont and even Pasadena, but ended up reassured that Culver City was the right choice. In Culver City, there was one other space that they liked, but Leah and Bea did not see eye-to-eye with the landlord. Instead, the sisters found a larger-than-expected location that was still affordable and is owned by a landlord with whom they immediately connected.

"This was our first foray into commercial real estate, and we just got so lucky," said Leah. "They seem genuinely as invested in our business as we are."

"Our landlord is truly one of the nicest, most generous, caring people," added Bea.

Over the past few months, Bea and Leah have been expanding within the store. The initial inventory, Leah explained, was put together with help from a Baker & Taylor list, the sisters' own personal tastes, recommendations from the online romance community and lists of "must-haves" from romance authors. They tried to include as many of the myriad sub-genres of romance as possible, including historical romance, paranormal, erotica, new adult and more. Based on customer feedback and sales, the inventory has since grown. The store did not have a poetry section at opening, and the classics section has been significantly expanded.

The store's sidelines offerings have grown, too. Bea and Leah work with Etsy Wholesale, adding new vendors every month, and more recently they've begun experimenting with custom Ripped Bodice gear. Ripped Bodice bookmarks and clothing have proven popular, and they've just started a line of Ripped Bodice jewelry.

The biggest change to come over the next few weeks, though, will be the addition of used romance books to the store's inventory. The sisters are renovating a smaller, as-yet-unused second floor room and will stock it with some 5,000 used titles purchased from Books on Broadway in Costa Mesa, Calif. Last month, Books on Broadway was on the verge of closing, but was able to survive by downsizing and moving to a smaller location. Leah and Bea bought that romance stock and drove it in four truckloads up to Culver City. The renovations are coming along, although Leah recently sported a black eye that came from a falling bookshelf. Said Leah, laughing: "That's what it takes to be a small business owner."

Since the Ripped Bodice's opening, the store has also been hosting an increasing number of events. One of the benefits to having a larger-than-envisioned store, said Bea, is that now they can fit more customers into book signings or other events. The Ripped Bodice has three regular monthly events: a stand-up comedy night, a fiction reading series and a community book club. The store so far has been averaging two to four author signings per month, most of which are tied in some way to larger things going on in the romance community. Two July events, for example, are being held immediately before and after the Romance Writers of America annual conference, which begins later this week in San Diego.

At the moment, Leah and Bea are the only staff at the Ripped Bodice. Although both sisters take an active role in all facets of running the store, they've found that each gravitates toward specific tasks. Bea, for example, enjoys researching new titles and recommending books to customers, while Leah likes to design and decorate the store's monthly displays. For the time being they don't plan to bring on anyone else. It would be a huge cost, Bea said, and the sisters enjoy interacting directly with their customers. "I think our love of romance is really baked into the store, and I certainly wouldn't want to lose that interaction," she commented.

Bea and Leah would love to add some kind of cafe component to the store in the next several years. But for now, they said, the plan is to keep growing where they are. --Alex Mutter

Gordon Chaplin signed copies of his new novel, Paraiso (Arcade Publishing), at the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, joined by some famous friends. Left to right: Mike Durell, bookseller at the Mysterious Bookshop; Tanya Farrell (Wunderkind PR); Chaplin, actors Vincent D'Onofrio (star of Law & Order and numerous films) and Kathleen Chalfant (currently in Showtime's The Affair); Elena Stokes (Wunderkind PR).

Congratulations to the Booksmith, San Francisco, Calif., which is celebrating its 40th birthday this Saturday, July 16, from 4-7 p.m., with a party featuring custom shirts, storytelling, cake, toasts and surprises.

Invitees include "friends, neighbors, customers, writers, book club members, Bookswappers, Shipwreckers, celebrities, Aileen, Olympians of Literature, employees past, present, and future, and everyone else who makes our store great."

Guests are invited to contribute a story about the Haight Ashbury or about Booksmith in any of its iterations as well as memorabilia such as old Booksmith bookmarks, totes, newsletters and author trading cards. Local writer and editor Anisse Gross will help participants capture their stories.

In addition, Design Like Whoa will be on hand to print T-shirts and totes of the store's favorite designs. With special birthday pricing, shirts will be available for $9 and totes for $5 and can be printed with a Booksmith design or a design the buyer brings in.

As the store put it: "Owners Christin Evans and Praveen Madan, former owner Gary Frank, and all the Booksmith staff are excited to share this moment with our unique, vibrant community. As the Haight Ashbury's premiere independent bookstore since 1976, we're more ambitious than ever to launch fearlessly into the future of bookselling. We're experimenting with new business models, leading the #Fightfor15 charge, and building on our four-decade legacy of fostering communities around books, writers, and readers."

Moon Palace Books, Minneapolis, Minn., hosted a moving party over the weekend that included a "book bucket-brigade," with staff and volunteers passing books out the door of the 33rd St. space, around the corner, and into the new Minnehaha Ave. location. The store's Facebook page featured video clips of the human book chain in action.   

Scapegoat: A Flight Crew's Journey from Heroes to Villains to Redemption by Emilio Corsetti III (Odyssey Publishing).

Today:
Today Show: Chris Colfer, author of The Land of Stories: An Author's Odyssey (Little, Brown, $19.99, 9780316383295).

Diane Rehm: Andy Stern, co-author of Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream (PublicAffairs, $26.99, 9781610396257).

The Real repeat: Josh Altman, author of It's Your Move: My Million Dollar Method for Taking Risks with Confidence and Succeeding at Work and Life (HarperOne, $25.99, 9780062369253).

Ellen repeat: Giada De Laurentiis, author of Happy Cooking: Make Every Meal Count ... Without Stressing Out (Clarkson Potter, $35, 9780804187923).

Tomorrow:
CBS This Morning: Larry Olmsted, author of Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don't Know What You're Eating and What You Can Do about It (Algonquin, $27.95, 9781616204211).

Today Show: Daniel Silva, author of The Black Widow (Harper, $27.99, 9780062320223).

Also on the Today Show: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., author of Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn't Commit (Skyhorse, $25.99, 9781510701779).

Horatio Clare won the £1,000 (about $1,295) Branford Boase Award, which is "given annually to the author and editor of the outstanding debut novel for children," for Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot. The book is illustrated by Jane Matthews and published by independent Firefly Press. Flood and his editor, Penny Thomas, were also presented with handcrafted silver-inlaid boxes.

Chair of the judges Julia Eccleshare said, "Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot is beautifully written and highly original, proof indeed that children's books is a very exciting place in which to write. Clare describes both the natural world and the misery of depression with extraordinary accuracy, and acknowledges a child's power to imagine a better world."

Winning editor Thomas said she "was bowled over by Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot from the minute I read it and so delighted to sign Horatio for Firefly. The book is funny, big-hearted and original and derives its brilliance from a superb use of language, an empathy for people and nature and a refusal to patronize the reader. It also has one of the best visionary endings I've ever read."

The disordered state of zero-tolerance urban policing is the subject of Down, Out, and Under Arrest, the first book by University of Chicago sociologist Forrest Stuart. Stuart is mixed race (black and Mexican) and grew up in impoverished San Bernardino. He spent five years doing a field study in Skid Row, a neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles known as the homeless capital of the United States. Its residents are mostly black, unemployed, undereducated, disabled and addicted, and it has more police officers per capita than any other LAPD division. To understand this community, Stuart befriended residents and shared their daily routines, accompanied police officers on patrols, and participated in the Community Watch program of LACAN (Los Angeles Community Action Network), a strong opponent of the Safer Cities Initiative.

In the 1990s, Los Angeles helped build three "mega-shelters" in Skid Row. These refuges emphasized rehabilitation over providing temporary food and shelter, and collaborated with the police to get people into their facilities. "By fusing punitive enforcement with rehabilitative programs, the Safer Cities Initiative converted street-level police contact into an official form of social services intake." This altered how police officers viewed their work, which "led to a perverse development: the officers most committed to rehabilitation and reintegration... often acted the most punitively toward residents.... By curtailing the amount of free food available in the neighborhood... or arresting homeless people for sitting on the curb, Central Division officers felt they were doing their best to solve poverty and its associated problems."

Stuart found that this approach burdens the poor with steep fines and jail time for minor infractions, and that "residents found new, subversive ways to deflect, manipulate, and obstruct law enforcement and its paternalistic demands"--ways that offer temporary relief, but no long-term improvements. At the same time, LACAN, a progressive, grassroots community organization consisting primarily of impoverished Skid Row residents, is working to end Safer Cities. Their Community Watch group patrols Skid Row and records police interactions to increase accountability, curb police influence and build a viable community.

Stuart recommends that the U.S. restore the social safety net, and undo policies that treat the poor as undeserving, incompetent and immoral. Therapeutic policing should be replaced by programs that provide basic housing and voluntary access to services, and reduce the harms of self-destructive behaviors rather than trying to eliminate them--approaches that have been proven to succeed. This is a serious academic book, but it is also an intimate, multifaceted portrait of the police, residents and activists in their own voices. It adds new insights and much-needed complexity to the current debates on policing in the poorest urban areas of the U.S. --Sara Catterall

Shelf Talker: This is a vivid and insightful five-year study of Los Angeles's Skid Row that contradicts much of the conventional wisdom about policing and the urban poor.