If They Didn't Quite Recall All Copies . . .

Here's a surprise sales statistic. Some 100 copies of If I Did It, O.J. Simpson's cancelled title, were sold during the week ended December 3, according to Nielsen Bookscan, Media Bistro's Galley Cat reported.

Only six copies were sold by "standalone retail outlets," Galley Cat said. The rest were sold by companies in Nielsen Bookscan's "discount and other" category, which includes online retailers Amazon.com, B&N.com, Borders.com, BAM.com and Powells.com, mass merchandisers Target, Costco and K-mart and specialty stores like Starbucks (which at the moment is selling only Mitch Albom with lattes).

"That some copies sold instead of going back to HarperCollins' warehouse for pulping is to be expected--and perhaps the real surprise is that so few leaked out," Galley Cat wrote. "So congratulations, you lucky 106--you've got yourself quite a rarity on your hands." 

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On a down day on Wall Street, Barnes & Noble shares rose 4.9% to close at $41.97 yesterday on more than double the usual volume after Credit Suisse raised its rating on B&N to outperform from underperform. Analyst Gary Balter wrote: "Our change in the Barnes & Noble rating reflects the fact that this stock appears to be one of the best positioned leveraged buyout type candidates in our universe at this time, combining consistent cash flow with relatively cheap valuation." He estimated the company could be sold for a 25% premium on its share price. More details at Forbes and Reuters.

At the same time, Balter lowered his rating on Borders to neutral from outperform, saying that a turnaround is taking longer than expected. In particular, he said that the rewards program has started slowly and discount redemptions and customer traffic are not as strong as he had expected. Yesterday Borders dropped 2.1% to $22.74 a share.

Still, Borders also remains a takeover target for private equity funds. "Ironically [a leveraged buyout] of Barnes, should it occur, would make the likelihood of a similar event for Borders much greater," he wrote. "In fact, an LBO of the two of them together may make the most sense for someone exploring one or the other."

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Cool idea of the day. To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the opening of its Security Square Mall store in Baltimore, Md. (Shelf Awareness, November 20, 2005), Karibu Books is holding a party this Saturday with author signings, raffles and giveaways. At a poetry performance from 2-4 p.m., everyone who buys a book receives a free Lit Noire T-shirt. 

Rich Rennicks, bookseller at Malaprop's Bookstore/Café, Asheville, N.C., writes:

Traffic was pretty steady this past weekend. It was noticeable that fewer grandparents were shopping with their grandkids, for one thing, so a different set of titles were moving. Thirteen Moons continues to be our top seller (doubtless helped by the fact that Mr. Frazier stopped by to sign all our stock after his book tour wound down). Thirteen Moons is certainly the must-read book in western North Carolina right now--and unlike some of the national press, local readers are giving it great reviews.

Following Thirteen Moons are Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, Elizabeth Haydon's wonderful YA fantasy The Floating Island, Wendell Berry's latest collection The Way of Ignorance (a Malaprop's bestseller for the last two months or so), all of Orhan Pamuk's books and local author Neal Thompson's colorful history of the Southern moonshiners who gave birth to Nascar, Driving with the Devil. This last will be parked under a lot of local Christmas trees this year.

Sales of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion jumped this past week, and we continue to have a lot of handselling success with Neil Gaiman's American Gods--one of our booksellers, Gina Glenn, has made it her mission in life to ensure everyone reads his books. (American Gods is probably one of our top five bestsellers for the whole of 2006.)

Unfortunately one title that would be a store bestseller if we could get more copies is Martin Millar's The Good Fairies of New York (Soft Skull Press), a hilarious contemporary fantasy about Scottish fairies creating chaos among the fairy tribes of modern-day New York City. A great intro from Neil Gaiman (a favorite author among our customers--see above), support from our in-store SF/Fantasy book club and enthusiastic handselling has caused it to take off. But The Good Fairies of New York is out of stock at the publisher and at all distributors because several other independents are doing well with it. Richard Nash, the publisher of Soft Skull, tells me that he's gone back to press on the book. Some customers who loved it have returned looking for other Millar books. (There aren't any available yet, but hopefully Soft Skull will bring more of his backlist over from the U.K.) We anticipate Millar becoming a steady seller for us.

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People have definitely begun their holiday shopping (gift certificate sales are up, lots of requests for gift-wrapping) but there doesn't seem to be any sense of urgency yet. There are three weeks to go, after all, and Christmas is on a Monday this year.

One thing we're doing this year that's new for us is that our staff voted for our own best books of 2006. We're promoting them on a front-of-store table display, have stocked up on everything and are creating special bookmarks and flyers. The list (drum roll, please) is as follows:

Fiction

• Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier (Random House)
• The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (Little, Brown)
• Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link (Harcourt)
• Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (Vintage)
• On Beauty by Zadie Smith (Penguin)

Nonfiction

• A Temple of Texts by William Gass (Knopf)
• The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer (Penguin)
• The Places in Between by Rory Stewart (Harcourt)

Poetry

• Natures: Poems 1975-2005 by Jeff Davis (New Native Press)
• Knit One, Haiku Too by Maria Fire (Adams Media)
• Man and Camel by Mark Strand (Knopf)

Young Adult Fiction

• The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M.T. Anderson (Candlewick)
• Scrambled Eggs at Midnight by Brad Barkley and Heather Helper (Dutton)
• New Moon by Stephenie Meyer (Little, Brown)
• Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (Little, Brown)

Children's Picture Books

• Chowder by Peter Brown (Little, Brown)
• Wolves by Emily Gravett (S&S)
• Walter the Farting Dog Goes on a Cruise by William Kotzwinkle et al. (Dutton)
• Bats at the Beach by Brian Lies (Houghton Mifflin)

So far, customers have been very interested in the display. Since several of the titles were read by one or another of our in-store book clubs during the year, there's already a groundswell of support for many of them.

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Monday and focuses on political and historical books as well as the book industry. The following are highlights for this coming weekend. For more information, go to Book TV's Web site.

Saturday, December 9

6 p.m. Encore Booknotes. In a segment first aired in 2003, New York University English professor Kenneth Silverman conveys aspects of his book Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F.B. Morse (Da Capo, $20, 0306813947). Silverman portrays the inventor of the telegraph as an easily depressed man who dabbled in inventing and whose first love was painting.

8 p.m. General Assignment. In an event hosted by the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Michael Crichton, whose new thriller is Next (HarperCollins, $27.95, 0060872985), discussed recent leaps in the study of genetics. 

9 p.m. After Words. Peter Singer, who directs a project on 21st century warfare for the Brookings Institution, interviews Larry Kahaner, former Washington correspondent for BusinessWeek magazine and former reporter for Knight-Ridder newspapers, about his new book, AK-47: The Weapon That Changed the Face of War (Wiley, $25.95, 0471726419). In the book, Kahaner traces the versatile, durable rifle's role in wars around the world since its invention in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s. According to the author, no tool has spread so much raw power to so many people in so little time in the history of warfare. (Re-airs Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.)

This morning on the Early Show: Maya Angelou, whose latest offering is Celebrations: Rituals of Peace and Prayer (Random House, $16.95, 1400066107).

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This morning on Imus in the Morning: Carol Higgins Clark and Mary Higgins Clark, whose Christmas present to book readers this year is Santa Cruise: A Holiday Mystery at Sea (Scribner, $22, 1416535527).

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Today on the Martha Stewart Show: husband-and-wife restaurateurs Johanne Killeen and George Germon, authors of Top of Spaghetti . . . : . . . Macaroni, Linguine, Penne, and Pasta of Every Kind (Morrow Cookbooks, $24.95, 0060598735).

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Today on the Ellen DeGeneres Show: no-nonsense Brit Jo Frost, author of Ask Supernanny: What Every Parent Wants to Know (Hyperion, $14.95, 1401308643).

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Aujourd'hui on WAMU's Diane Rehm Show: Jean-Benoit Nadeau, a Montreal  journalist and co-author of The Story of French (St.Martin's, $25.95, 0312341830).

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Today on KCRW's Bookworm: Chris Adrian, author of The Children's Hospital (McSweeney's, $24, 1932416609). As the show describes it: "The author--a pediatrician and theologian--imagines a future in which a children's hospital becomes an ark that survives the flood at the end of the world. Add ministering angels and mysterious healing powers, and a central question arises: is this fiction or wishful thinking?"

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Today on the Dr. Phil Show: Dr. Frank Lawlis, author of The IQ Answer: Maximizing Your Child's Potential (Viking, $24.95, 0670037842).

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Tonight on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Ed Viesturs, high altitude mountaineer and author with David Roberts of No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World's 14 Highest Peaks (Broadway, $23.95, 0767924703).

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Tonight on the Colbert Report: Dr. Francis S. Collins, author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press, $26, 0743286391). 

 

Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala (Harper Perennial, $11.95, 0060798688) has won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize, which is given annually to a writer 35 years old or younger. The prize carries an award of £5,000 (about $9,800). The Guardian, which reported on the prize, called the book "a brutal but surprisingly poetic novel about an African child soldier."

Iweala, 23, was born in Nigeria and raised in the U.S.; Beasts of No Nation grew out of his senior honors dissertation at Harvard. His mother is Nigeria's finance minister.

The book has won the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, the 2005 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for fiction and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.

 
The third book in Lauren Willig's captivating series, following The Secret History of the Pink Carnation and The Masque of the Black Tulip, is just as beguiling as the first two. Opening in present-day London with Eloise Kelly pursuing her research on a trio of colorful spies (the Scarlet Pimpernel, the Purple Gentian and the Pink Carnation), and her romance, or romance-to-be, with Colin Selwick, the action quickly moves to 1803 England, where Letty Alsworthy has a problem. There had been Alsworthys in Hertfordshire when "the first bemused Norman had galloped through, demanding to know the way to the nearest vineyard," but they weren't a great family, and Letty's sister Mary was having trouble making a good marriage without wealth or title. When she decides to elope with the dashing Lord Geoffrey Pinchingdale-Snipe, Letty steps in to stop this rash act and winds up being forced to marry the lord herself, of course much to their mutual dismay. With a name like Pinchingdale-Snipe, one wouldn't imagine Lord Geoffrey to be dashing, but he definitely is, and also a spy for the League of the Purple Gentian, an arm of the British government. Letty is drawn into intrigue as a result of the marriage and with her undercover agent-husband and his colleagues, is quickly up to her bodice in Bonaparte's spies, Irish rebels and the British secret service.
 
Theatre evenings with secret notes, baskets of oranges with messages stuck beneath their skins, clandestine meetings in alleys and mistaken identities combine to make a good mystery, but the best thing about Willig's novel is her wit. Letty is smart and amusing, if a tad outspoken: "As for Letty . . . he didn't like to think what she might do with an armful of explosives. She was dangerous enough armed with adjectives." The debonair lord, in turn, almost gives as good as he gets, but his new wife causes him some trying moments: "Lord Pinchingdale's eyebrow had climbed so high that Letty was afraid he might do himself permanent damage." And when you least expect it, Willig slips in sly jokes, like "I'm Dooney and this is Burke. We're here to work on the fuses." After infiltrating a group of Jacobins in 1799, Geoffrey wondered why rebel movements seemed to demand expression in song; he had "that interminable 'Ca ira' song stuck in his head, popping up at odd moments, and when he caught himself humming 'Quand l'aristocrate protestera, le bon citoyen au nez lui rira,' he made himself stop--Wrong country, wrong mission, and it didn't even scan."
 
Letty and Geoffrey's escapades are diverting (more so than Eloise and Colin's), the mystery is well-crafted and the laughs are plentiful. With derring-do, romance, and clever humor, Lauren Willig has created a fine entertainment.--Marilyn Dahl