Christine Onorati

"My main goal is to brainstorm new and creative ways for bookselling to exist in this somewhat crazy retail environment. Our relationships with publishers and the ways in which they can help direct book buyers to indies and not automatically to online sellers is a big focus, as is fostering the next generation of young booksellers and making sure bookselling is a viable career path for those who want to take over existing stores or start their own. I also believe, as booksellers today, we need to be ahead of the trends and try to stay competitive with the ever-changing technology of the retail and book worlds."

Longtime bookseller Andy Laties and his wife, Rebecca Migdal, a puppeteer, author and illustrator, are opening Book & Puppet Company, a children's book and toy store, in Easton, Pa., LehighValleyLive reported. The store will open on August 12 and have its grand opening on September 2.

Laties was owner of the Children's Bookstore in Chicago from 1985-1996; founding manager of the Eric Carle Museum Bookshop in Amherst, Mass.; manager of the Bank Street Book Store, New York City; and author of Rebel Bookseller: Why Indie Bookstores Represent Everything You Want to Fight for from Free Speech to Buying Local to Building Communities, whose second edition was published in 2011 by Seven Stories Press.

Andy Laties

Besides books, the new store will stock craft kits, toys, games, calendars, stickers and postcards, and will offer free workshops, arts and crafts kit parties, puppet shows, storytimes and other events and programming.

"We can actually do what we love: serving families, working with kids, making children happy, creating an environment where children can be creative and can be themselves," Migdal said.

Laties and Migdal have been visiting Easton for 15 years and recently moved to Easton, according to LehighValleyLive.

Book & Puppet Company is located at 466 Northampton St., Easton Pa. 18042; 484-541-4379.

Dog-Eared Books, Campbellsville, Ky., a used bookstore that has sold some new books, is closing at the end of July.

The store was founded two years ago by T.J. Rayhill, then a 19-year-old student at Campbellsville University. In a Facebook post, he wrote in part: "We are closing because it is time for me to move on in life. At 21 I need the flexibility to move, to explore, to go on vacation, to be spontaneous. I am so sorry. Campbellsville needs a bookstore. I hope some day someone decides to try this endeavor again."

He added, "These past two years have been amazing. I've learned so much about myself, my family, my partner. And it wouldn't have been possible without them. Through the good and the bad they've been there, always with a smile on their face."

The store will host a "going away" party on July 29.

On Thursday, the second e-newsletter edition of the American Booksellers Association's Kids' Next List was delivered to more than a third of a million of the country's best book readers. The second part of the summer newsletter (the first part was sent June 8) went to customers of 106 independent bookstores, with a combined total of 348,000 subscribers.

The e-newsletter, powered by Shelf Awareness, features summer Kids' Next List titles, with bookseller quotes and "buy now" buttons that lead directly to the purchase page for the title on the sending store's website. The newsletter, which is branded with each store's logo, also includes an interview (from Bookselling This Week) with the author whose book was chosen by booksellers as the number-one Kids' Next List pick, in this case Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley (Knopf Books for Young Readers).

For a sample of the newsletter, see this one from Laurel Book Store, Oakland, Calif.

Author Clancy Sigal, who "had enough rambunctious experiences to fill a novel--or, in his case, several of them," and "drew on his escapades in critically acclaimed memoirs and autobiographical novels, developing a cult following, especially in Britain," died July 16, the New York Times reported. He was 90. Sigal's adventurous life included a 30-year self-imposed exile in Britain as an antiwar radical during which he was "the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing's lover and flirted with suicide as a sometime patient of R.D. Laing, the iconoclastic psychiatrist."

Despite his popularity in England, Sigal "never quite equaled the fame and commercial success achieved in the United States by other stars in his literary constellation--none of whom burned more blisteringly," the Times noted. His books include Going Away: A Report, a Memoir (1961); Weekend in Dinlock (1960); Zone of the Interior (1976); A Woman of Uncertain Character: The Amorous and Radical Adventures of My Mother Jennie (Who Always Wanted to Be a Respectable Jewish Mom) by Her Bastard Son (2006); and Black Sunset: Hollywood Sex, Lies, Glamour, Betrayal and Raging Egos (2016). His account of his London exploits is scheduled to be published by early next year.

During his four-year affair with Lessing in the late 1950s, both writers "proceeded to crib from it for their novels," the Times wrote, adding: "Sigal, who insouciantly appeared in public wearing a Friar Tuck-like monk's robe made for him by Ms. Lessing, was cast as Saul Green in her novel The Golden Notebook; Mr. Sigal kissed and told in The Secret Defector (1992), in which the character Rose O'Malley was Ms. Lessing's virtual doppelgänger."

Neighborhood Reads, which opened last month in Washington, Mo., celebrated its first Find Waldo Local, with the help of a couple of Candlewick Press sales reps. Pictured: Emily Johnson of Abraham Associates, Waldo, John Mesjak of Abraham Associates, and Dawn Kitchell, owner of Neighborhood Reads.

Congratulations to the American Writers Museum, Chicago, number 1 on Fodor's Travel's "Sneak a Peek Inside the World's 10 Best New Museums." The listing, in its entirety:

"Opened in May in downtown Chicago, the American Writers Museum's goal is to bring to life day-to-day musings of famous late writers (including Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck) via themed exhibits, permanent collections, author talks, and high-tech interactive events. Book buffs won't want to miss replica homes and historical sites from books like [Gone with the Wind], Cannery Row, and The House of the Seven Gables. 'The Mind of the Writer' exhibit breaks down the approach to creating a novel or full-length non-fiction book."

In a q&a with Gifts and Decorative Accessories magazine, actress, entrepreneur and publisher (SJP for Hogarth) Sarah Jessica Parker discussed her SJP by Sarah Jessica Parker product line (which includes two bricks-and-mortar stores), as well as "a few things about fashion accessories, the female consumer and the importance of a great in-store experience."

She offered high praise for Three Lives & Company in New York City: "There's also a bookstore called Three Lives bookstore that's been in our community for 20-some, 30-some years, and it's famous for being incredibly cared for and a beloved bookstore. So, that's my other go-to-gift, a good book."

Martin Schmutterer is leaving Common Good Books, St. Paul, Minn., after 11 years--the past six as manager--and can be reached at schmutterer@gmail.com.

The Subtle Body Coloring Book: Learn Energetic Anatomy--from the Chakras to the Meridians and More by Cyndi Dale, illustrated by Richard Wehrman (Sounds True).

Today:
CBS This Morning: Linda Fairstein, author of Deadfall (An Alexandra Cooper Novel) (Dutton, $28, 9781101984048).

Fresh Air: Cary Fowler, author of Seeds on Ice: Svalbard and the Global Seed Vault (Prospecta Press, $45, 9781632260574).

The Talk: Amy Silverstein, author of My Glory Was I Had Such Friends: A Memoir (Harper Wave, $26.99, 9780062457462).

Tomorrow:
CBS This Morning: Wesley Snipes, co-author of Talon of God (Harper Voyager, $27.99, 9780062668165).

Late Show with Stephen Colbert: Max Brooks, author of Minecraft: The Island (Del Rey, $17.99, 9780399181771).

Conan repeat: Alec Baldwin, author of Nevertheless: A Memoir (Harper, $28.99, 9780062409706).

Last Call with Carson Daly repeat: Charlamagne Tha God, author of Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It (Touchstone, $25.99, 9781501145308).

A first look at Steven Spielberg's highly anticipated Ready Player One, based on the novel by Ernest Cline, was unveiled Saturday at Comic-Con in San Diego. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the "footage sees star Tye Sheridan as Wade Watts, teenager and gamer on a high-stakes treasure hunt in the all-encompassing video game, Oasis, designed by the nostalgic eccentric James Halliday, played by Spielberg-favorite Mark Rylance.... It was futuristic, big and ambitious--truly worthy of the book."

The movie, which will hit theaters March 30, 2018, was written by Cline, Eric Eason and Zak Penn. The cast also includes Olivia Cooke, T.J. Miller and Ben Mendelsohn. Spielberg appeared at Comic-Con with Cline, who said, "I grew up watching this man's movies and studying them."

Spielberg said of the book: "It was the most amazing flash-forward and flashback at the same time about a decade I was very involved in, the '80s, and a flash-forward to a future that is awaiting all of us, whether we like it or not.... I read the book and said, 'They're going to need a younger director.' "

The winners of the 2017 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, presented during Comic Con in San Diego, can be seen here. A special congratulations to Singapore's Sonny Liew, who won three Eisner awards, all for The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (Pantheon). Among Eisner award book winners:

Best Reality-Based Work: March (Book Three) by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell (Top Shelf)

Best U.S. Edition of International Material: Moebius Library: The World of Edena by Jean "Moebius" Giraud et al. (Dark Horse)

Best U.S. Edition of International Material--Asia: The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny Liew (Pantheon)

Best Writer/Artist: Sonny Liew, The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (Pantheon)

Best Publication Design: The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, designed by Sonny Liew (Pantheon)

Best Comics-Related Book: Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White by Michael Tisserand (Harper)

Best Academic/Scholarly Work: Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation by Carolyn Cocca (Bloomsbury)

Will Eisner Spirit of Comics Retailer Award: Comicazi, Somerville, Mass.

The son of nomadic expatriate Americans on the fringes of high society, John Singer Sargent settled in England in the late 19th century where he remarkably cranked out more than 900 portraits and thousands of landscapes--to a largely indifferent artistic critical reception. The rich, however, afforded him significant patronage. Four of these portraits completed in the 1890s feature American women of great wealth and pedigree. For eight years historian Donna M. Lucey (Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age) researched the letters, journals and archives of these formidable women and their families (as she notes in an introduction, "a bit like Gilded Age porn") to flesh out the stories behind their often eccentric and accomplished lives. Sargent's Women has little to say about the prolific artist but a good deal to say about life among affluent women with brains and talents beyond the Victorian strictures of their time.

As Lucey discovers in her research, the lives of these moneyed women were not all mansions, servants and exotic travel. Sargent's enigmatic portrait of Elsie Palmer shows a face "steely and cold... all hard edges. Humorless... otherworldly"--what Virginia Woolf described as "marmorial and mute." Yet this daughter of a Colorado mining tycoon lived into her 80s, caring in due course for a sickly mother, an overbearing and eventually quadriplegic father, a consumptive sister and a suicidal husband.

Sargent painted the beautiful young Boston heiress Sally Fairchild with a translucent veil alluringly hiding her face, but it was her less attractive sister Lucia who went on to some fame as an artist and miniaturist. The Fairchild family, nevertheless, had its curses. They lost their fortune in the Panic of 1893. Three out of five of Sally's brothers committed suicide. Lucia, who wrote of her life that it was meant to "eat, drink, paint, and be merry," died of pneumonia at age 52.

Elizabeth Chanler was raised in the Hudson River estate and Upper West Side mansion funded by her family's vast Astor fortune, "an unbeatable combination of blue blood and greenbacks." She and her siblings grew up daredevils in a world more "Lord of the Flies than Peter Pan's Neverland." Sargent's portrait of her traveled seasonally between the two palaces "like a migrating bird." The Astor genes, however, brought not only wealth, but also a risk of descent into madness--a fate avoided by Chanler.

Sargent's Women concludes with perhaps the most famous of these heiresses, Isabella Stewart Gardner--who was the subject of two Sargent portraits and was his longest and most significant benefactor. She had the money and taste to amass a significant art collection, which now sits in her eponymous museum among Boston's Fens. With thousands of paintings, drawings, sculptures, textiles, ceramics, books, glass, furniture and assorted historical bric-a-brac, her collection was one of a kind. Rather than focusing on Sargent, Lucey wisely concentrates her attention on these women who epitomized their class and times. Sargent only painted them. --Bruce Jacobs founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Shelf Talker: Lucey's carefully researched and illustrated history of four women immortalized in Sargent portraits creates a vivid picture of the Gilded Age.