"Here I am four years later back in the same bookstore. It's almost like the movie Groundhog Day. It's time to say, 'Cut! We're going to change the ending.' "--Presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D.-Ohio), speaking yesterday in MainStreet BookEnds in Warner, N.H., as quoted by the Manchester Union-Leader.

Ouch. Three high-profile bookstores are closing soon. Two are new branches of established stores, and one is a relatively old but well-known chain store. Fasten your seatbelts for more doom-and-gloom retail stories in the general media. And while the closings of such big-name stores is a sad event, it's also important to note that the remaining stores are healthy and that taking risks is an essential part of healthy retail.

That said, it's still extremely sad to say that in San Francisco, the 20,000-sq.-ft., $3.5 million Cody's Books that opened in the fall of 2005, is closing on April 20, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

President Andy Ross, who last year closed Cody's flagship store in Berkeley and sold Cody's to Yohan, Inc., a Japanese bookseller and distributor, told the paper the store has been losing $70,000 a month., "It's wasn't like it almost didn't work," Ross said. "It just didn't work. To make it work, we would have had a long, long way to go."

With a location down an escalator from street level, the store had trouble attracting customers and standing out from a nearby Borders and other chain stores in the area, the paper said. Also construction on a Barneys store cut business by 40%.

The Cody's on Fourth Street in Berkeley remains open.

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Tomorrow Poisoned Pen, Scottsdale, Ariz., is closing the downtown Phoenix store it opened two years ago, the Arizona Republic reported. "We need to withdraw from an untenable position, and I don't want to jeopardize the very successful business I have in Scottsdale by trying to maintain a business in Phoenix that isn't working out," owner Barbara Peters told the paper.

Poisoned Pen Central never recovered from a two-week shutdown last summer when the renovated warehouse in which it is located was closed by the city for electrical and structural problems, Peters said. The closing was "the equivalent of four-to-six weeks' loss of revenue and damage to the store's reputation," according to the paper, and afterwards sales were half of what they had been before the closing.

Peters said she sought assistance from her landlord and the city. Her landlord told the paper he waived August's rent and allowed Poisoned Pen Central to use gallery space in the building for events for free, but Peters said this was not enough to keep the store in business. Peters had decided to close the store in November but remained open to honor scheduled author appearances.

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The Barnes & Noble branch on Astor Place in the East Village in New York City, which opened in 1994, is closing at the end of the year, today's New York Post reported. Company spokesperson Mary Ellen Keating told the Post that rent is the problem, saying, "We'd like to stay there, but we really can't afford it."

 

In an article headlined "A New Incarnation," the Norwalk Citizen-News reported that Pymander Books has settled comfortably into its new Wall Street location in Norwalk, Conn., after moving from neighboring Westport, where it had been for 34 years. The bookstore, which specializes in "creating bridges between faiths and homeopathic healing," is now part of a small community of complementary businesses. "There have been a lot of changes on Wall Street," Pymander owner Kristen Howard told the newspaper. "We also have two yoga studios, Garden Cinema and the Unity Church, so all of those are places my customers frequent anyway."  

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Next Monday Kent Watson joins the Publishers Association of the West as executive director. PubWest's primary office will be located now in Portland, Ore., where Watson lives.

Watson was formerly sales manager for Timber Press until it was bought by Workman last year. Earlier he was an acquisitions editor for Academic Internet Publishers, a college sales rep for Houghton Mifflin, field sales manager for Ingram Periodicals and the newsstand buyer for Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver, Colo.

Watson replaces Kalen Landow, who joined Chelsea Green Publishing. 

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Celebrating both its 33rd anniversary and being named Bookseller of the Year by Publishers Weekly, Changing Hands Bookstore, Tempe, Ariz., will hold a special customer-appreciation day tomorrow, the Arizona Republic reported. Among the thank you gifts for customers: free chair massages, tarot-card readings, face painting, cookie decorating, balloon animals, live music and treats from Wildflower Bread Company.

Bookselling legend Gayle Shanks, who owns the store with with her husband, Bob Sommer, and Susie Brazil, told the paper that the PW award is "a confirmation that we're doing something right in our community."

Mollie Connelly, 18, whose grandfather brought her to the shop when she was a child and who has been an employee since she was 16, said, "Everyone who works there is a really cool human being. . . . If you're in a place that you're really in love with it brings out certain things in you."

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Bookselling This Week profiled A Shade of Gray Bookstore, a 1,200-sq.-ft. feminist store with an African-American emphasis that Tiffany Dow and Robin Cain, business and life partners, opened last May in Indianapolis, Ind. Besides author events, the store offers writing workshops and a knitting/crocheting night and hosts a lesbian social group.

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On the occasion of the store's 15th anniversary, BTW featured McLean & Eakin, Booksellers, the 5,000-sq.-ft. Petoskey, Mich., bookstore founded and owned by Julie Norcross and managed by Susan Capaldi and Matthew Norcross, Julie Norcross's son.

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A developer's plans to build an 82,575-sq.-ft. shopping center just south of Rutland, Vt., that may include a Barnes & Noble has evoked a range of reactions from local independents, according to the Rutland Herald.

Steve Eddy, owner of Book King in Rutland, said that such a development is "a huge concern. . . . Traditionally independent booksellers don't do very well when a Barnes & Noble or a Borders comes to town." Dennis Pryor of Annie's Book Stop cited adaptability as a key defensive measure: "There are successful bookstores that have a Barnes & Noble or a Borders in their towns and are successful because they have adapted and changed." But Matthew Gibbs of the Briggs Carriage Bookstore, located in the nearby town of Brandon, expressed deep reservations about the news: "If my business got seriously worse than it already is, then I would have to look at the feasibility of staying open."

Developer John Kalish was less than sympathetic. According to the Herald, Kalish's e-mail response was, "Let the consumer be the one to choose where they want to spend their time and money. Last I knew, we were living in a free capitalist society responsive to the demands of the people."

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You won't find Rhonda Byrne's bestselling The Secret on the shelves at Books for Less bookstores in Gwinnett County, Ga. Owner Jack Mason, who describes Books for Less as having "Christian underpinnings," told the Gwinnett Daily Post that his bookstores are generally accommodating to titles reflecting a range of beliefs, but he thinks The Secret's basic message could "do harm." According to the article, customers who special order the book from Books for Less will get their copy accompanied by a warning that it "conflicts with the teachings of the Bible."

 

Today Good Morning America schedules an appearance with Atul Gawande, author of Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance (Metropolitan Books, $24, 9780805082111/0805082115).  

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Today NPR's Talk of the Nation gets charged up with Sherry Boschert, author of Plug-in Hybrids: The Cars That Will Recharge America! (New Society Publishers, $16.95, 9780865715714/0865715718).

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Today on the Martha Stewart Show, just in time for Easter, Sloane Tanen, her chick Coco, and the rest of the coop. Tanen's titles include:

• C Is for Coco: A Little Chick's First Book of Letters (Bloomsbury USA, $6.95, 9781599900711/1599900718)
• Coco Counts: A Little Chick's First Book of Numbers (Bloomsbury USA, $6.95, 9781599900728/0599900726)
• Hatched! The Big Push from Pregnancy to Motherhood (Bloombury USA, $14.95, 9781596912779/1595612774)
  

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Tonight on the Charlie Rose Show: Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King, the authors of Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity (Viking, $24.95, 9780670038459/0670038458). 

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On Sunday on This Week with George Stephanopoulos: Senator John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry, authors of This Moment on Earth: Today's New Environmentalists and Their Vision for the Future (PublicAffairs, $25, 9781586484316/1586484311).

Thanks to Jean L. Ross, acquisitions manager of the Prince William Public Library System, Woodbridge, Va., who sent one of the more amusing display photos we've seen. Put together by the library's selection and cataloguing departments, the display is an entry for Wiley's Dummies display contest for libraries.

 

Monica Drake teaches at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and is a contributing writer for the Oregonian, the Stranger and the Portland Mercury. Her fiction has appeared in the Beloit Fiction Review, Threepenny Review, the Insomniac Reader and others. Clown Girl (Hawthorne Books, $15.95, 9780976631156/0976631156) is her first novel. Here she answers questions we put to people in the industry from time to time.


On nightstand now:

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders, The Turning by Tim Winton, Torch by Cheryl Strayed and a stack of New Yorkers.

Favorite book when you were a child:

The Once and Future King by E.B. White

Top five authors:

George Saunders, Barbara Comyns, Alice Munro, Mark Richard and Flannery O'Connor

Book you've "faked" reading:

Octopussy by Ian Flemming

Book you are an "evangelist" for:

The Torn Skirt by Rebecca Godfrey

Book you've bought for the cover:

The Torn Skirt by Rebecca Godfrey

Book that changed your life:

Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver

Favorite line from a book:

" 'I reckon you think you been redeemed,' he said."--Hazel Motes, in Wise Blood by Flannery O'Conner

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Most inspiring writer's moment:

At the Sewanee Writers' Workshop. It was a day of readings. The readings had been arranged to start with the least accomplished writers and progress to the big names. I'd had one story published, so I was scheduled to read at eight in the morning. I was nervous. I could hardly eat my scrambled eggs. Then an older man came up to my table, hitched up his pants and sat down. He said "Pass the salt?" It was Arthur Miller! I was blown away. I think I was pale. He was so generous with his company. He carried the conversation. He said, "Just write about whatever matters to you. Don't worry about trying to write something important. If it's important to you, it'll be important to other people. That's what I did, when I wrote The Crucible." Ever since then, I think about Arthur Miller and that moment we had together, his words, when I have doubts about my writing.

"Dear Mr. Pulsifer: I know from your destruction of the Emily Dickinson House that you are a literary man. . . . I would like you to do unto the Mark Twain House as you did unto the Emily Dickinson House: I would like you to burn it to the ground . . . "

This unusual piece of correspondence was mailed to the media as part of Algonquin Books' publicity campaign for its lead fall title, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England. Each of the three missives was written in the voice of a disgruntled individual seeking to hire Sam Pulsifer--accidental arsonist and the main character in Brock Clarke’s novel--to torch a particular writer’s house.

The letters were sent in late February and early March and will be followed by a mailing of advance reading copies next week to both media professionals and booksellers. "It's a delightfully ironic story," said publicity director Michael Taeckens, "and we wanted to create a fun and inventive campaign that would match the tone of the novel."

Part humor, part mystery and part send-up of the literary world, An Arsonist’s Guide is slated to be Algonquin's featured title at this year’s BEA. Clarke will be on hand to sign galleys and participate in the panel "Book Trip: Discover What's Involved in the Creation of a Book, from Conception to Shelf." Algonquin has announced a first printing of 50,000 copies of the novel, which goes on sale September 4.

No author abodes were harmed during the writing of An Arsonist's Guide, which Clarke makes clear in a disclaimer at the front of the book. Rather it was the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Mass., that inspired him. "I had it in my mind for many years that I wanted to write something about it," said Clarke, who first visited the literary landmark on a college trip nearly two decades ago.

In the novel, Dickinson's house is accidentally torched by teenager Sam Pulsifer. The manse goes up in flames, taking with it two people who were in the poet's bed after hours. Ten years later, Pulsifer has served his time in prison and is living a law-abiding life. But when someone starts setting fire to writers’ homes in New England, Pulsifer is the likely suspect and sets out to find the perpetrator.

Along with the intriguing storyline and a likeable main character, it was the energy of Clarke’s prose that caught the eye of executive editor Chuck Adams. "Brock has a great voice and a talent to pull the reader in," he commented. Two of some 30 booksellers who received a sneak peek of An Arsonist's Guide agree with Adams' assessment. Mark LaFramboise of Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C., called Pulsifer "a memorable narrator" and the story "raucous, hilarious, absurd, and oddly compelling." Tova Beiser of the Brown University Bookstore in Providence, R.I., deemed it "thought-provoking, insightful and funny."

Clarke is also the author of The Ordinary White Boy, as well as two short story collections, and he teaches creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. Clarke originally hails from the East coast and spends summers in Massachusetts and Connecticut, where he paid a memorable visit to one dwelling he evokes in the book--the Mark Twain House in Hartford. "It's like this Victorian house on steroids," he said of the elaborate Gothic manse where Twain lived for 16 years. "I was thoroughly awed by it," added Clarke, who counts Twain among his literary inspirations. "He's funny and at the same time incredibly dark."

Clarke will undertake a 15-city tour this fall, and among his appearances will be stops at the NEIBA, GLBA, NCIBA and PNBA trade shows. Executives at the Mount, Edith Wharton's home in Lenox, Mass. (one of the houses mentioned in the letter-writing campaign), have expressed interest in the book. "They loved the first letter and have invited Clarke to stop by on his tour," said Taeckens.

Writers' homes are venues that Clarke would like to see as part of the tour. "I'm fascinated by them," he said, "and without them I wouldn't have thought of the book in the first place."--Shannon McKenna

 

The 10 bestselling titles on AbeBooks.com in March:
 
1. Heart-Shaped Box: A Novel by Joe Hill
2. The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh
3. The Black Swan: Memory, Midlife and Migration by Anne Batterson
4. Life's Greatest Lessons: 20 Things That Matter by Hal Urban
5. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
6. China Lake by Meg Gardiner
7. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
8. In My Father's House by Ann Rinaldi
9. The Jesus Creed: Loving God, Loving Others by Scot McKnight
10. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
 
Abebooks noted that The Sorrow of War, a 1993 memoir by a former Viet Cong child soldier, may have benefited from the interest in Ishmael Beah's book, A Long Way Gone, about his time as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. Also Cormac McCarthy's The Road sped onto the top 10 after Oprah's book club pick announcement last Wednesday.