Becky Anderson

Becky Anderson has become the sole owner of Anderson's Bookshop in Naperville and Downers Grove, Ill., as well as Anderson's Toyshop in Naperville, Ill. Anderson previously co-owned the store with her brothers Tres and Pete Anderson, who are retiring from the role, NCTV17 reported.

The bookshop has been a family business for five generations and dates back to the W.W. Wickel pharmacy, which Anderson's great-great-grandfather opened in Naperville in 1875. Anderson has been a co-owner of the business since her parents retired and was American Booksellers Association board president from 2011 to 2013. She had a seat on Naperville's city council from 2015 to 2019 and in 2018 ran for Congress in Illinois's 6th Congressional District.

Anderson plans to "maintain and expand on the company's commitment to readers, authors, and to the local communities she serves." That includes the store's Jan's Book Angels program and its Books for Troops initiative, as well as its partnerships with schools and nonprofits. In addition to the two bookstores and the toy store, Anderson's also has a school bookfair division.

"I have always believed in treating customers like family," Anderson said. "And if you're honest and treat them with respect, the relationships you build will last a lifetime."

The Boulder Book Store, Boulder, Colo., is partnering with the nonprofit organization Impact on Education to provide Boulder Valley School District students who lost their homes in the recent Marshall Fire a gift card to the store. The store aims to give a gift card worth at least $100 to the 500-plus affected students and is asking the public for donations.

"We know how important it is for a child's sense of security and well-being to have their favorite books nearby," the store wrote on its site, where donations can be made. "Whether it is the Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Harry Potter or the Hunger Games, we want to enable each student to reclaim their beloved books and perhaps discover some new ones."

The full amount of every donation will go toward the gift card, and each student will receive a 33% discount when they use the gift card. Thus, a $100 gift card will buy $150 worth of books.

"We need your help to reach this ambitious goal," the store added. "Thank you for whatever you are able to give."

Robert Sindelar, managing partner at Third Place Books in Ravenna, Lake Forest Park and Seward Park, Wash., said the stores had a "very strong holiday season and year," after being down in 2020. And compared to 2019, Third Place Books was up 12% for December and the year overall.

Sindelar explained that although the store's bestselling title in December was technically Amanda Gorman's Call Us What We Carry, Third Place "pre-sold 90% of those last February." After that, Brené Brown's Atlas of the Heart, Nikole Hannah-Jones's The 1619 Project, Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land, Amor Towles's The Lincoln Highway, Louise Erdrich's The Sentence, David Graber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything and Dave Grohl's The Storyteller were Third Place's bestselling frontlist titles. Dune by Frank Herbert, The Overstory by Richard Powers and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer proved to be popular backlist titles, with Sindelar saying there weren't any real surprises there.

On the supply-chain side, things turned out much better than what the Third Place team had expected. The stores ordered early on many titles and ended up running out of very few overall. The biggest issues all involved gift and nonbook items.

"Many orders our gift buyers placed in the summer simply never arrived," Sindelar said. "Those areas of the store looked pretty decimated with 7-10 days still to go until the holiday."

Sindelar said there weren't any apparent changes in shopping behavior due to rising case numbers and the spread of the Omicron variant, but the team did notice that, overall, shoppers were in a very good mood. "Starting the day after Thanksgiving there was a definite vibe of, 'oh, I wasn't able to do this last year--I missed this.'"

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Brian Lampkin, co-owner of Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, N.C., said the bookstore had its best December ever, despite the fact that Scuppernong continues to limit coffee and bar sales, has not resumed hosting events and adamantly requires customers to wear masks in-store. Lampkin remarked that he can't think of an easy explanation for having such a "rocking holiday season," but perhaps customers appreciate the store's insistence on safety.

Many of the store's bestsellers, Lampkin noted, were probably the same as many other indies--The 1619 Project, The Lincoln Highway and Call Us What We Carry being just a few examples--but there were some "really good books by local authors" that proved to be "wild cards." He pointed to Julia Ridley Smith's The Sum of Truffles, Alexis Oregera's Head Case and Stephanie Grant's Disgust, which was published by Succpernong Editions. A surprise hit was Let's Make Dumplings! by Hugh Amano and Sarah Becan.

Supply-chain issues were "not nearly as bad as feared," and customers were more understanding of holiday delays. Asked whether it felt like a normal holiday season in-store, Lampkin said the mood was still diminished by travel concerns, Omicron cases rising and the looming January 6 anniversary. There seemed to be a "pervasive sadness afoot," but that seems almost normal with the past two years.

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At The Ripped Bodice in Los Angeles, Calif., holiday sales were about even with 2020 and up 25% from pre-pandemic levels, co-owner Leah Koch reported. While overall sales were roughly the same, she noted, there was much more in-store shopping in 2021 than the year before, with about two-thirds of all holiday sales in-store and the rest online.

The store's bestselling book for the holidays was The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood, which "continued to enjoy its TikTok-originated dominance." Tessa Bailey's books Window Shopping and It Happened One Summer were two and three on the list, respectively, and Mad & Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency by store co-owner Bea Koch was number four. 

Koch said supply-chain issues were not as bad as expected, with the store "prepared for it to be much worse." By about the middle of November, they knew which titles would be unavailable later in the season and they were able to communicate that to customers, who had plenty of time to get other things. The store's biggest issue was a few of the more popular Christmas romances being unavailable, such as Jenny Holiday's A Princess for Christmas. She added that a spike in interest in those Christmas titles should not have been hard to predict.--Alex Mutter

Yusef Harris

Yusef Harris, founder of Alkebu-Lan Images, a cornerstone of the North Nashville, Tenn., community for more than 35 years, has died. He was 66. Nashville Scene reported that Harris opened Alkebu-Lan in 1986 while pursuing his doctorate in psychology at Vanderbilt University and teaching part time at Tennessee State University. When the Jefferson St. property was put up for sale, he made a down payment with a loan from Metro Development and Housing Agency. The shop became a cultural mecca, selling books, art, apparel and other goods that reflect and celebrate African culture. 

"It's hard to meet a Black person who grew up in Nashville who hasn't felt Harris' impact," Nashville Scene wrote. He mentored and advised hundreds of Black business owners, his son and business partner Jordan Harris said. In December 2020, the father-son duo purchased a building on Buchanan Street and expanded Alkebu-Lan. "If you are going to be brick-and-mortar, you have to be able to control your land," Yusef Harris had said. 

In a tweet, TSU professor and North Nashville historian Dr. Learotha Williams called Alkebu-Lan North Nashville's "House of Common Sense and Home of Proper Propaganda," referencing the famed Harlem bookshop the African National Memorial Bookstore. 

Nashville Mayor John Cooper tweeted: "I join Nashville in remembering the life of Yusef Harris. Yusef earned his Ph.D. at @VanderbiltU and taught at @TSUedu. He was a pillar in our community. His bookstore, Alkebu-Lan Images on Jefferson St., has been a staple for more than 35 years." 

Ashford Hughes said his friend always lifted up his community: "He knew the importance of [Jefferson Street], our HBCUs, the three that are on this corridor and ABC off West Trinity and the importance of making sure the city paid homage for the way that we spend money and the way that we move to make sure HBCUs were put in a prominent light. He was a part of that movement and that ideology in the city as well."

Many people came to Alkebu-Lan Images on Tuesday to pay tribute. Jordan Harris said he would keep his father's legacy alive, adding: "He was always comfortable in his skin. He was always happy to help and to be around and to be involved in and be out there. And I'm going to miss that. He really saw an opportunity to be a source of the cultural product to the community. He saw that there was a need, there was a lack, and he was at that intersection of being able to provide those resources and those products. He would say it's been a labor of love to stay open all those years there were lean times and high times, so that been flow has been consistent, but lately it's been really on the up."

In a 2015 interview, Yusef Harris told Nashville Scene that "sometimes I feel like I'm getting old, because I'll have people come in and tell me how their parents used to shop here.... I appreciate it, and it makes me feel good. People remember coming in here when they were little. We used to host storytelling here, and the parents would bring their children in, and they told me that it had really made a difference. It's empowering, because a lot of the time we don't recognize the importance of reading. It's not prioritized enough, especially among African-Americans. Getting parents to value reading and storytelling is so important."

Brian Doerter, beloved bookseller at Port Book and News, Port Angeles, Wash., sports a T-shirt for Pacific Pipeline, the one-time book wholesaler in the Pacific Northwest, with a sticky note added by store owner Alan Turner. The note updates the T-shirt's tagline of "serving the book trade since 1974" with "not serving the book trade since 1997." (Incidentally, the T-shirt was given to Doerter by Shelf Awareness publisher Jenn Risko, a Pacific Pipeline alumna, when he was a bookseller at Powell's Books, Portland, Ore.)  (Photo: Cassidy Turner)

Kyle Burk, co-owner of used bookstore Capitol Hill Books in Washington, D.C., made the most of the bookstore being open for appointment only by recording an album in the store. Burk told DCist that since the bookstore was closed, he just "hauled a bunch of gear over there. The books are pretty good at absorbing loud guitar sounds."

Burk's bookstore recording sessions resulted in a five-track album called Death of the Novel, which he released under the name The Failed Poets. He did all of the vocal and instrumental work on the album, and recorded in the poetry and mystery sections of the bookstore. Burk said he feels like he "kind of made these songs for Book Twitter," with many of the songs being about books and bookselling.

The album can be found on Band camp and Burk's website.

Theresa DeLucci has joined Grand Central as associate marketing director. She was formerly at Macmillan, where she was senior associate marketing director for Tor, Forge and Nightfire Books.

Small World Books, Venice, Calif., shared a photo of its latest sidewalk chalkboard message, reimagining a John Muir quotation: "And into the bookshop she goes to lose her mind and find her soul."

Champagne for One by Rebekah Iliff (Collective Book Studio).

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 this weekend 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 website.

Saturday, January 8
10 a.m. Rebecca DeWolf, author of Gendered Citizenship: The Original Conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920–1963 (University of Nebraska Press, $30, 9781496227959). (Re-airs Saturday at 10 p.m.)

2 p.m. Patricia O'Toole, author of The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made (Simon & Schuster, $21, 9780743298100). (Re-airs Sunday at 2 a.m.)

3 p.m. George William Van Cleve, author of We Have Not a Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution (University of Chicago Press, $20, 9780226641522). (Re-airs Sunday at 3 a.m.)

6 p.m. Holly Mayer, author of Congress's Own: A Canadian Regiment, the Continental Army, and American Union (University of Oklahoma Press, $45, 9780806168517). (Re-airs Sunday at 6 a.m.)

Sunday, January 9
10 a.m. Randy Barnett and Evan Bernick, authors of The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit (Belknap Press, $35, 9780674257764). (Re-airs Sunday at 10 p.m.)

2:50 p.m. Joe Weisberg, author of Russia Upside Down: An Exit Strategy for the Second Cold War (‎PublicAffairs, $30, 9781541768628). (Re-airs Sunday at 2:50 a.m.)

4 p.m. Sharri Markson, author of What Really Happened in Wuhan: A Virus Like No Other, Countless Infections, Millions of Deaths (HarperCollins, $28.99, 9781460761083).

5 p.m. Brendan Borrell, author of The First Shots: The Epic Rivalries and Heroic Science Behind the Race to the Coronavirus Vaccine (Mariner, $28, 9780358569848).

5:30 p.m. Emily Ratajkowski, author of My Body (Metropolitan, $26, 9781250817860).

6:30 p.m. Ronald Daniels, co-author of What Universities Owe Democracy (Johns Hopkins University Press, $29.95, 9781421442693).

Tobias Menzies (The Crown) will lead the cast of Manhunt, a straight-to-series limited drama based on James Swanson's Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer. Monica Beletsky (Parenthood, The Leftovers, Fargo) serves as showrunner and executive producer on the series, "which marks her first as a creator and stems from her recently renewed overall deal with Apple," the Hollywood Reporter noted. 

Manhunt will be produced in-house at Apple Studios and Lionsgate, POV Entertainment, Walden Media and 3 Arts Entertainment. Exec producers include Layne Eskridge, Swanson, Michael Rotenberg, Richard Abate, Frank Smith and Naia Cucukov. Carl Franklin (Mindhunter, Devil in a Blue Dress) will direct and exec produce.

Selected new titles appearing next Tuesday, January 11:

A Thousand Steps by T. Jefferson Parker (Forge Books, $27.99, 9781250793539) is a missing person thriller set in 1968 Laguna Beach.

The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality by Mike Sielski (St. Martin's Press, $29.99, 9781250275721) explores the life and career of the late basketball legend.

The Last House on the Street: A Novel by Diane Chamberlain (St. Martin's Press, $27.99, 9781250267962) unites two women a generation apart over a mystery in a North Carolina town.

Find Me: A Novel by Alafair Burke (Harper, $26.99, 9780062853363) is a thriller about a missing amnesiac woman.

I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home by Jami Attenberg (Ecco, $27.99, 9780063039797) is a memoir about the craft of writing.

Fear of Black Consciousness by Lewis R. Gordon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28, 9780374159023) is a philosophical work about race and racism.

Ashes of Gold by J. Elle (Simon & Schuster, $19.99, 9781534470705) is the final book in the Wings of Ebony YA duology.

Strong Mama by Robin Arzón, illus. by Addy Rivera Sonda (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, $17.99, 9780316299947) is the Peloton Head Instructor's picture book debut that celebrates pregnancy and parenthood.  

Paperback:
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by Benjamin M. Friedman (Vintage, $20, 9780593311097).

From last week's Indie bestseller lists, available at IndieBound.org, here are the recommended titles, which are also Indie Next Great Reads:

Hardcover
The Cat Who Saved Books: A Novel by Sosuke Natsukawa, trans. by Louise Heal Kawai (HarperVia, $24.99, 9780063095724). "The Cat Who Saved Books is a love letter to book lovers, championing the emotional impact that stories have in the hearts and lives of readers. Tiger adds a bonus charming and Ghibli-esque aesthetic to this thoughtful, tender novel." --Andrew King, Secret Garden Bookshop, Seattle, Wash.

Murder Under Her Skin: A Pentecost and Parker Mystery by Stephen Spotswood (Doubleday, $27, 9780385547123). "Murder Under Her Skin will light a fire under eager fans of Pentecost and Parker. Filled with snappy dialogue, clever plot, and richly imagined characters--readers will clamor for the next installment. It is cracking good fun!" --Pamela Klinger-Horn, Valley Bookseller, Stillwater, Minn.

Paperback
A Different Distance: A Renga by Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr (Milkweed Editions, $16, 9781571315519). "Friends, poets, and Paris residents Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr wrote a renga (a linked poem) over the course of a year, from March 2020 to March 2021 during the full lockdown. Reading this collection is a lovely, lovely experience." --Jen Wills Geraedts, Beagle and Wolf Books & Bindery, Park Rapids, Minn.

For Ages 4 to 8
Milk and Juice: A Recycling Romance by Meredith Crandall Brown (HarperCollins, $18.99, 9780063021853). "An adorable and funny tale of two plastic containers and their love connection through the process of recycling. Kids and adults will enjoy this very engaging story with a hint of education on the side." --Judith Lafitte, Octavia Books, New Orleans, La.

For Ages 8 to 12
Just Roll with It (A Graphic Novel) by Lee Durfey-Lavoie, illus. by Veronica Agarwal (Random House Graphic, $12.99, 9781984896995). "This book is so cute! I know RPGs are really hot right now, but this book uses RPGs to talk about something more. It shows the realities of OCD, and models how parents and friends can properly interact with someone they think is struggling." --Kellie Otis, Books of Wonder, New York, N.Y.

For Teen Readers
If This Gets Out by Sophie Gonzales and Cale Dietrich (Wednesday Books, $18.99, 9781250805805). "This absolutely blew me away. For boy band fans, for those who've memorized the lyrics to every Camp Rock song, or for anyone who knows how hard, complex, and beautiful it is to come out as queer whether you're famous or not--this is our book." --Miriasha Borsykowsky, Phoenix Books, Burlington, Vt.

[Many thanks to IndieBound and the ABA!]

Catriona Ward (The Last House on Needless Street) places mundane, everyday frustrations alongside profound chills in a novel of family, tough choices, secrets and terror. "It's the chicken pox that makes me sure--my husband is having another affair." At the beginning of Sundial, readers wonder what feels just a little off about the suburban household where Rob and her husband, Irving, bicker and feud and raise their two daughters, Callie and Annie. Irving has a nasty temper; Rob is bitterly frustrated: "These days I don't understand why anyone bothers to watch soap operas or go to movies. Living is enough. It is so intense and painful." Annie is a sweet, docile child; Callie has a discomfiting fascination with murder and death. When the bones of small mammals begin to show up in Callie's room, Rob feels that things have gone far enough, and takes her elder daughter away for a spell--to Sundial, Rob's family home in California's Mojave desert, an abandoned hippie commune and site of terrible unnamed wrongs.

Through flashback-style stories Rob tells Callie, readers learn of Rob's past: she had a twin sister named Jack, and the sisters shared an unusual upbringing, surrounded by half-wild dogs, scientific experiments, wayward graduate students and shadowy, evil acts. Something dark lived or lives in Rob, or Jack, or Callie, or possibly all of them, and it gradually dawns on readers that Rob is mulling the unthinkable choice to save one daughter or the other. Her secrets come out only slowly and in fits and starts, and it's often unclear what is imagined, what is paranormal and what is plain human malice. "It's possible to feel the horror of something and to accept it all at the same time. How else could we cope with being alive?" The novel's perspective shifts between Rob then, Rob now and Callie, so a character may appear innocent in one chapter and dangerous in the next. At least one of these narrators is surely unreliable, but it takes until the final pages to piece together the unsettling enigma of Rob's family history and the possible futures for her girls.

With the special horror of creepy children and the very real torture of abusive adults, Sundial serves up a deeply, deliciously disturbing family mystery, populated by ghost dogs and misguided scientists as well as apparently nonthreatening neighbors. A slow burn leads into a quick ratcheting up as this psychological horror deals its final blows. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Shelf Talker: This unnerving novel of family history and impossible choices is part ghost story, part terrifying reality.