Editors' note: In honor of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, we are starting the weekend early. Enjoy the holiday! We'll see you again on Tuesday.

 

"Last week she dies. And so we suddenly got really, really attractive to the distributors and to the book buyers. We didn't kill her or anything."--Carole Stuart of Barricade Books, quoted in today's New York Times in a story about the newfound popularity of Great Big Beautiful Doll by Eric and D'Eva Redding, a biography of the late Anna Nicole Smith, which Barricade had recently updated and is now shipping to stores.

During a C-Span interview on Monday, President Bush recommended Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths by Bruce Feiler (Harper Perennial, $12.95, 9780060838669/0060838663).

Prompted by a question about what books he had been reading, he responded, "Well, I just finished a book called Abraham by a guy named Feiler. And it's a really interesting book that studies the prophet Abraham from the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim perspective. And the lesson is, is that if you--you can look at Abraham as a unifying factor. In other words, all three of our--all three of those religions started from the same source, which means it's possible to reconcile differences. And I was impressed by his writing. I really enjoyed the amount of study he did on the subject. And I appreciated his lessons that sometimes as each religion appropriated Abraham to suit their own needs, but, ultimately, we could view Abraham as a way to find a common God."

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Time Tested Books, Sacramento, Calif., has moved to new quarters next to its old site that have "large warehouse-style windows and skylights for an open, airy feel--just the opposite of the old, crowded and dark store Midtowners have known and loved for decades," according to the Sacramento News & Review. The new space includes more room for events.

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Beat the Bookstore, the franchised off-campus bookstore company, is opening its 23rd store, in Lawrence, Kan., home of Kansas University, according to the Lawrence Journal-World.

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In March 2008, Barnes & Noble plans to open a new store in the Peninsula Town Center at 1800 W. Mercury Boulevard in Hampton, Va. The store that is currently in the Peninsula Town Center will close this spring, when the mall is torn down and rebuilt as a lifestyle center. 

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Books-A-Million see opportunities to grow, particularly "west of Texas," CEO Sandra Cochran told a business meeting, as reported by the Birmingham News.

She also observed that Books-A-Million is seeing "an increase in demand for Bibles and Japanese anime novels," the paper wrote, while computer and technology guides haven't been as popular. "We're hoping [Microsoft's] Vista catches on because everyone will need a book to learn how to use it," Cochran said.

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Beth M. Pritchard, president and CEO of Dean & Deluca, has resigned from the board of directors of Borders Group. The company said she made the move because of "the demands of her position." She has been with Dean & Deluca since June of last year and became a Borders director in March 2000.

 

Baker & Taylor's offer of $76.25 million for the bankrupt AMS includes the stock of AMS Mexico and AMS U.K., which were not part of the bankruptcy filing, and rights to AMS's Indianapolis, Ind., returns center and the Sacramento, Calif., Ashland, Ore., and Bentonville, Ark., facilities.

The deal does not include PGW, AMS's equity interest in Canada's Raincoast and the stock and facilities of AMS's Australian and Singapore subsidiaries.

RadioFreePGW has a scathing analysis of the offer that flows from this statement: "The question that begs to be answered here is how can a nearly billion dollar company be worth only a maximum of $76 million?"

The site portrays a deal that makes it difficult for another company to offer a competing bid; B&T would have no obligations to AMS employees unless it wanted to hire them; B&T is receiving all accounts receivable except for PGW's--worth about $65 million for which it would pay slightly over $50 million; B&T is taking some inventory of Advantage Publishers Group, AMS's publishing division, at a discount; B&T is not taking AMS's inventory.

 

On the eve of today's auction for PGW, NBN has sweetened the pot. In a letter this week to PGW publishers, NBN president and CEO Jed Lyons said that if it wins, NBN will:

• Retain the PGW name and logo.
• Maintain PGW offices in the Bay Area and Manhattan "for the current PGW employees who accept our offer of employment."
• Aim to retain the PGW client services team run by Eric Kettunen.
• Try to keep the sales force intact with Kim Wylie, Elise Cannon and others continuing in their roles.
• Retain PGW's space in AMS's Indianapolis warehouse "for the foreseeable future, not just on an interim basis," meaning that the books will not be moved again and that the AMS "estate" will save some money because of NBN's new lease for the space.
• Continue using PGW's PKMS and Cat's Pajamas software for five or six months and then change to NBN systems.

As of late yesterday afternoon, NBN had 115 signed contracts, Lyons told Shelf Awareness. He said he is "very confident" that the bankruptcy court judge will choose NBN in part because NBN's offer is not an administrative claim against the AMS estate and thus takes less from the estate--about $7 million less, according to his calculations. He also said the deal of 85 cents on the dollar is better for publishers than Perseus's 70 cents.

 

For his part, Perseus president and CEO David Steinberger said in a letter to PGW publishers that Perseus had commitments from them representing 85%-90% of PGW publisher revenues, many of which "signed up since the competing offer from NBN surfaced last week." He added that many PGW publishers with whom he has spoken "see the decision of picking the right distribution partner going forward to be more important than whether you receive an extra 15 cents on the dollar"--a reference to the difference between Perseus's and NBN's offers.

Steinberger called the PGW brand "one of the great brands in independent publishing" and said PGW will maintain "a significant office" in the Bay Area and be "an independent member of the Perseus Books Group like Consortium, PublicAffairs, Basic Books, Da Capo Press and Running Press." The company has planned to distribute PGW publishers from its Jackson, Tenn., warehouse.

He added that "the majority of the PGW sales, marketing and client services team will be offered the opportunity to continue to represent your books in the marketplace." Perseus plans to build on PGW's international team and "expand its scope."

Bookstore sales in December were $1.987 billion, down 8.8% from $2.179 billion in the same month in 2005, according to preliminary estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. By comparison, total retail sales rose 3.4% to $386,731 billion.

For the full year, bookstore sales fell 2.9% to $16.117 billion from $16.596 billion in 2005. By comparison, total retail sales rose 5.8% to $3.9 trillion.

Note: under Census Bureau definitions, bookstore sales are of new books and do not include "electronic home shopping, mail-order, or direct sale" or used book sales.

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In other sales news, general retail sales began the year flat, according to this morning's New York Times. Although department store and other general merchandise store sales rose 1.3%, auto sales dropped by the same amount.

 

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, February 17

6 p.m. Encore Booknotes. In a segment first aired in 1999, former New York Times Beijing Bureau Chief Patrick Tyler discussed his book A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China, An Investigative History (PublicAffairs, $19.95, 9781586480059/1586480057).

9 p.m. After Words. Doug Bandow, former senior fellow at the Cato Institute, current v-p of policy at Citizen Outreach, a limited-government public policy organization, and author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire, interviews Brian Doherty, a senior editor at Reason magazine whose new book, about the modern American libertarian movement, is Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (PublicAffairs, $35, 9781586483500/9781586483501). (Re-airs Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.)

Sunday, February 18

1:30 p.m. History on Book TV. This segment features two authors of books about Abraham Lincoln: Tom Wheeler, a telecommunications expert and author of Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War (Collins, $24.95, 9780061129780/006112978X), and Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer, author of Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President (S&S, $14, 9780743299640/0743299647), which won the 2005 Lincoln Prize. (Re-airs on Mon. at 7 p.m. and Tues. at 3 a.m.)

Today Good Morning America scares up an appearance by Joe Hill, who talks about his debut novel, the horror tale Heart-Shaped Box (Morrow, $24.95, 9780061147937/0061147931).

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Today on the Diane Rehm Show: teacher and educational consultant Marietta McCarty talks about her book Little Big Minds: Sharing Philosophy with Kids (Tarcher, $14.95, 9781585425150/158542515X).

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Today on KCRW's Bookworm: Alice McDermott, author of After This (FSG, $24, 0374168091). As the show put it: "Alice McDermott is a writer who believes in loading each facet of her work with resonance and significance, while composing an accessible, highly readable narrative. Here, we explore the details that reveal the hidden chain of meaning connecting the book's themes of religious grace, love and war."

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Tomorrow morning the Today Show spices things up with Kylie Kwong, author of Simple Chinese Cooking (Studio, $34.95, 9780670038480/0670038482).

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Tomorrow Good Morning America talks with R. Scott Reiss (a pseudonym) about the page turner Black Monday (S&S, $25, 9780743297646/0743297644).

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Tomorrow on the Early Show: Chris Bohjalian on his new novel, The Double Bind (Shaye Areheart Books, $25, 9781400047468/1400047463).

Also served up on tomorrow's Early Show: Barry Glassner, author of The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong  (Ecco, $25.95, 9780060501211/0060501219).

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Tomorrow on the Martha Stewart Show, Dr. Louann Brizendine demystifies The Female Brain (Broadway, $24.95, 9780767920094/0767920090).

Martha also suits up with fashion designer Joseph Abboud, author of Threads: My Life Behind the Seams in the High-Stakes World of Fashion (Harper Paperbacks, $14.95, 9780060535353/0060535350).

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Tomorrow on NPR Marketplace: money-saving experts Steve Economides and Annette Economides, authors of America's Cheapest Family Gets You Right on the Money: Your Guide to Living Better, Spending Less, and Cashing in on Your Dreams (Three Rivers Press, $12.95, 9780307339454/0307339459).

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On Saturday's Weekend Edition, Scott Simon interviews Roger Angell about the revised edition of Letters of E.B. White (HarperCollins, $35, 9780060757083/0060757086).

 

The incident occurred last weekend. A variation of it happens every time I work at the bookstore. I guess I mentioned that recently (Shelf Awareness, January 26 and January 31). Perhaps I'm obsessed. Or maybe I'm just a bookseller.

That I am still contemplating bookstore search and response strategies also has something to do with an exchange I had recently with Hank Jones of TitleSmart, the online service that provides bookstores with search capabilities for current information on major media book reviews and publicity.

It's all about those pesky questions.

Last Saturday, my customer was a tourist who had heard about a book on her local AM radio station--historical novel, set in the Middle Ages, with the words mistress, dark, and mystery in the title.

As usual, I employed every tool at my disposal and assumed one or two of her keywords were incorrect. Still, I couldn't come up with the answer, though I've already given you a clue that would have helped immensely in this search if my own memory had kicked in.

Eventually, desperately, I led my customer to the hardcover fiction section and we scanned the shelves together. I began with A, she with Z. We hoped we'd get lucky.

We did.

Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin.

There's a hard way and there's an easy way to find a book for a customer. We don't always have time for luck. More often, we really need the proper tools.

My conversation with Hank Jones made me think about search tools and adaptation. Jones, former owner of Putnam Book Center in Carmel, N.Y., has been working on the evolution of a particular search device, TitleSmart, for a long time. Thinking incessantly about search options might be considered his job description.

"I was a bookseller for 14 years," says Jones. "Countless times people would come to me and my staff asking about something recently reviewed or on TV or the radio."

Like most booksellers, he routinely received information updates from sales reps about reviews and publicity, but "we could never make these gobs of info easily accessible to the salespeople behind the counter. Though we certainly had a staff favorites area, I felt it was our job to provide customers with a more comprehensive selection of recommendations, especially when it came to categories like business, armchair cooking, and other categories where we didn't have an 'expert.' "

During the 1990s, Jones unveiled the original TitleSmart, a sales floor kiosk designed for customer interaction: "I thought that by creating a deeper keyword database per title, but one that applied only to recent titles getting major media attention, I would get a more manageable list and a better chance of a correct match."

According to Jones, the original concept "was to provide a reference tool for customers and a marketing tool for publishers. This was before the days of DSL and other high speed connections, so all new material was downloaded by phone lines overnight. It turned out to be a train wreck . . . not only because the technology and hardware was unreliable, but also because it compromised the person-to-person interaction that many small stores prided themselves on."

I worked with one of those kiosks and can vouch for his assessment. Undaunted, Jones continued to adapt TitleSmart as technological options improved. Now the service is an online database used primarily for behind-the-counter bookstore or library searches. "Unlike other industry tools, my program concentrates its book info specifically on what is getting great reviews and major publicity attention," Jones says. "It is not designed to be a comprehensive Books-in-Print--stores already have that--but is meant to supplement a current system."

Next step?

Jones would like TitleSmart "to be able to interface with store inventory systems or books in print . . . TitleSmart already has built-in capacity to link to the major distributors, but I have not yet come to terms with any of them. I also see expansion of the database to regional and second tier specialty magazines, newspapers, and media sites."

Adaptation.

Search.

All, ultimately, working in concert with the at once erratic if persistent human mind.

Witness the clue I missed that would have solved the mistress book quest. In the January 31 edition of Shelf Awareness, Costco book buyer Pennie Clark Ianniciello's pick was in a piece just above my column. I read, but didn't retain, the title.

Paying attention and adaptation are key bookseller tools. Improved retention on my part wouldn't hurt, either.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)

The following were the bestselling titles during January at member bookstores of the Independent Mystery Bookstore Association:

Hardcovers

1. The Blade Itself by Marcus Sakey
2. Dust by Martha Grimes
3. Web of Evil by J.A. Jance
4. Find Me by Carol O'Connell
5. Plum Lovin' by Janet Evanovich
6. False Mirror by Charles Todd
7. The Song Is You by Megan Abbott
8. A Deeper Sleep by Dana Stabenow
8. Wild Indigo by Sandi Ault
10. Shape Shifter by Tony Hillerman

Paperbacks

1. The Cat Who Dropped a Bombshell by Lilian Jackson Braun
2. No Dominion by Charlie Huston
3. Edge of Evil by J.A. Jance
4. Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter by Blaize Clement
5. The Case of the Missing Books by Ian Sansom
6. Death on the Family Tree by Patricia Sprinkle
7. The Fallen by T. Jefferson Parker
8. Bride and Doom by Deborah Donnelly
9. Glossed and Found by India Ink
10. A Long Shadow by Charles Todd

[Many thanks to the IMBA!]

The bestselling titles for the week ended Sunday, February 11, at AbeBooks.com, the online marketplace for new, used, rare and out-of-print books, featured a delightful No. 1 title, The Cat in the Hat, which will be 50 years old on March 2. Here's one reason the book is on the list: on the classic's birthday, the National Education Association is leading a "National Read Aloud" of the book at schools, libraries and book clubs.
 
1. The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss
2. My Little Bible by Stephanie Britt
3. Carlota by Scott O'Dell
4. Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth by Richard Foster
5. Photoshop Elements 3 for Windows & Macintosh by Craig Hoeschen
6. The Purpose-Driven Life by Rick Warren
7. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
8. China Lake by Meg Gardiner
9. Ferrari F1 by Rainer Schlegelmilch
10. A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Tolle Eckheart