Blue Kettle Books, a mobile bookstore with an all-ages inventory, made its debut at Cairn Brewing in Kenmore, Wash., on Friday evening, the Seattle Times reported.

Owner Monica Lemoine carries an inventory of around 800 titles in her bookshop, which is built inside of a 22-foot-long 2014 Ford StarTrans bus. About 40% of the inventory is children's books, and there is a selection of sidelines sourced from small businesses and craftspeople of color.

Blue Kettle's adult titles are shelved in themed categories such as "Love Lighter Lit," full of romance novels and humor; and "Take a Thrill Ride," for page-turners. Lemoinie told the Times that with shelf space at such a premium, she asked family and friends to send her a list of their "absolute favorite" books when she was assembling her opening inventory.

Through the rest of the summer, Lemoine will set up shop at various family-friendly events and festivals in the Seattle area, such as Northwest Folklife in Kirkland, the Fremont Fair, PrideFest and the Mill Creek Festival. Eventually she would like to find a few businesses that would allow her to park her bookmobile in their parking lots on weekdays, and she isn't opposed to opening a bricks-and-mortar store someday.

Before opening an indie bookstore, Lemoine was a teacher for nearly 20 years. While serving as an English teacher at Highline Community College in Des Moines, Wash., she learned that the majority of her students "could not recall the last time they had picked up a book for pleasure."

That inspired her to start a book club with her students, which proved to be a hit. She came to love the feeling of introducing someone to the joys of reading. Lemoine noted that while she still loves teaching, the book club "sparked in me this realization that I would love to open a bookstore."

Young Bookworms, a bookshop that exclusively sells children's books by self-published authors, has opened at 3604 Hartsel Drive, Suite B, in the Woodmen Plaza shopping center, Colorado Springs, Colo. The Gazette reported that owner Joni McCoy's journey to bookselling began in October 2019, when her mother died after a six-year battle with Alzheimer's. Inspired by the kind of books McCoy read aloud near the end of her mother's life, she started writing children's books and has since self-published more than 30 titles.

"I started out just to fill the void with Mom," she said. "As soon as I wrote one, I was addicted." In 2020, she set up a booth with her books at area farmers markets and events. "Nobody is going to sell your book like you do." 

Her booth was a hit and expanded to include works by other self-published authors, which inspired the idea for a bookshop. "We sold so many books that I realized we needed a storefront," she said. "I knew I needed to create a space that families could come to and enjoy all the books.... I think the world is missing out on so many incredible self-published books. I want to change that."

She also continues to write, with her original target reader still in mind. "Every book I come up with, I try to do something that's going to make my mom giggle," said McCoy, who thinks the bookstore would make her mother smile, too. "She feels so present in this store. I think she would've been here every day."

She told KOAA News: "When I come into the store in the morning, it puts a smile on my face. I have a hard time leaving at night, this is my happy place, and when I walk in, it's art on the wall, it's imagination, and it's thoughts in an author's head come to life."

Michael Rentas has joined Artbook | D.A.P. as v-p, chief financial & operating officer. He was formerly director of business operations & analysis at the Ingram Content Group and earlier was associate director of operations at Hyperion Books. He has more than 20 years of experience in corporate finance, strategic planning, business operations and sales.

Rentas succeeds Yvonne Puffer, who will be retiring after nearly 30 years with the company. President and publisher Sharon Helgason Gallagher said, "Since our earliest years, Yvonne led our financial department with a steady hand. An accomplished artist herself, Yvonne understood both the business and the creative orientations of our independent arts publishing community."

Rentas commented: "I am thrilled to join the D.A.P. family, to continue to grow and expand our offerings, and to help further develop our brands and properties in new and exciting ways. I am very grateful to Sharon Helgason Gallagher and my D.A.P colleagues (new and old) for this chance to do what I love."

Gallagher said that Rentas's "sustained trajectory in the publishing industry and specialized skill set is invaluable. On behalf of all of us at Artbook | D.A.P., I extend him the warmest welcome."

David Marcuse

David Marcuse, former bookseller and book wholesaler, died on April 7. He was 73.

He was perhaps best known for his Common Concerns bookstore in Washington, D.C., which became "a community hive for bohemians and hardcore liberals in the 1980s by offering publications, posters and T-shirts with assertively left-wing political messaging," the Washington Post wrote. "Marcuse was a serial entrepreneur who put his politics and creative marketing talents in service of selling books. He owned several Washington-area bookshops over the decades, but Common Concerns, based in the Dupont Circle neighborhood from 1980 until its shuttering in 1991, drew the widest attention.

"Like a handful of other Washington bookstores run at that time by communist and socialist groups, Common Concerns thrived in opposition to President Ronald Reagan's administration. Mr. Marcuse promoted the shop under the slogans 'More Mao Than Thou' and 'Still Subversive After All These Years,' and stocked shelves with obscure academic journals as well as feminist, trade union and Indigenous periodicals. He also sold Black-history playing cards....

"He was, by all accounts, a boundlessly good-humored man and habitue of the local punk scene who had a thorough knowledge of seemingly every alternative press in North America. He piped in West African rock music, sold tickets to Sweet Honey in the Rock concerts and served up pots of coffee cultivated by farmers said to be on the side of anti-colonial and anti-military struggles in Africa and Central America."

Earlier he had had worked at the Community Bookstore in Washington and run a wholesale book distribution company from a warehouse in Rockville, Md., called RPM that specialized in small and alternative press titles. He also operated Bookworks, in Old Town Alexandria, Va., and became manager of Sidney Kramer Books in Washington.

After he closed Common Concerns because of pressure from a recession and the gentrification of the Dupont Circle area, Marcuse was co-owner with his friend Charles Dukes of Chuck & Dave's Books, Etc., Takoma Park, Md.

(from l.): Maya Wiley, Laura Ravo, Elizabeth Warren.

On Friday, May 6, The Strand Book Store in New York City hosted Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) for a discussion moderated by professor and civil rights activist Maya D. Wiley to mark the paperback release of Warren's Persist (Metropolitan).

The two discussed the Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade. Warren emphasized, "It's the poor women in the United States who will suffer when the right to have a safe and legal abortion is no longer available," and she urged attendees to "get angry" and then go out and vote.

The Strand staff created a booklist centered on women's reproductive rights, with 20% of the proceeds going to Planned Parenthood. "Strand has an obligation to our customers and to our community," said Laura Ravo, COO of the Strand. "We remain steadfast and committed to using our voice to make a positive impact on the world and causes we believe in. The book collections we've curated show the history of the fight for reproductive rights and share the narratives of people who have had abortions. Both are vital in understanding the stakes of the current moment."

Posted on Instagram last week by Café con Libros, Brooklyn, N.Y.: "It's a beautiful week in Brooklyn! Grab a coffee and book and come hangout outside--we're open 9-3 every weekday."

Shina Patel has joined Putnam as marketing manager. She was previously associate marketing manager at Penguin Press.

Armadillo Antics by Bill Martin Jr. and Michael Sampson (Brown Books Publishing), timed for National Armadillo Day yesterday.

Today:
CBS Mornings: Bethenny Frankel, author of Business Is Personal: The Truth About What it Takes to Be Successful While Staying True to Yourself (Hachette Go, $29, 9780306827037).

Fresh Air: Hugh Ryan, author of The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison (Bold Type Books, $30, 9781645036661).

The Talk: Ali Wentworth, author of Ali's Well That Ends Well: Tales of Desperation and a Little Inspiration (Harper, $26.99, 9780062980861).

Tomorrow:
CBS Mornings: Ian Bremmer, author of The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats--and Our Response--Will Change the World (Simon & Schuster, $28, 9781982167509).

Also on CBS Mornings: Tom Daley, author of Coming Up for Air: What I Learned from Sport, Fame and Fatherhood (Hanover Square Press, $17.99, 9781335662569).

Late Night with Seth Meyers: Allegra Hyde, author of Eleutheria (Vintage, $17, 9780593315248).

Tonight Show: Mary Lynn Rajskub, author of FAME-ISH: My Life at the Edge of Stardom (Abrams, $26, 9781419754791).

Neil Gaiman and actor Tom Sturridge talked with Entertainment Weekly about this summer's highly anticipated release of The Sandman, based on the legendary comic series created by Gaiman, Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg. "Of all the questions the creators of Netflix's upcoming Sandman show had to answer, one loomed above the rest: Who will play Morpheus?" EW noted.

"I think I have personally seen 1,500 Morpheus auditions," Gaiman said. "I hesitate to imagine how many [casting director] Lucinda Syson and her team have seen.... Having watched all those other auditions, we were able to go to Netflix and say, 'it's Tom'.... We know it's Tom."

Sturridge said the long process was "entirely necessary, because this is a character who is so utterly beloved--by me more than anyone. That requires you to spend time with a human being to discover if they can live up to the dream you have of who he is. I think The Sandman pervades culture. Even the name Morpheus, King of Dreams, kind of haunted me in my youth."

Gaiman observed that "Morpheus' dialogue is incredibly specific. It was probably the thing I was most obsessive about. Someone would have written a fabulous script, [showrunner] Allan Heinberg would have rewritten a fabulous script, and I would have seen it at every iteration, but there would always be a point at the end where I would still be noodling on the Morpheus dialogue: Making sure the words were right, that the rhythms were right."

Sturridge added: "I remember you said to me that everything he says has to feel like it was etched in stone. He's never improvising. He has experienced and perceived every thought, dream, and moment, and therefore he knows what you're going to say. That was very helpful."

The cast also includes Gwendoline Christie, Boyd Holbrook, Charles Dance, David Thewlis, Jenna Coleman, Stephen Fry, Patton Oswalt, Joely Richardson, Asim Chaudhry, Sanjeev Bhaskar and Kirby Howell-Baptiste. Allan Heinberg is the show runner and an executive producer. Also on the project as exec producers and co-writers with Heinberg are David S. Goyer and Gaiman. The series is produced by Warner Bros. Television.

The winner of the 2022 Plutarch Award, sponsored by Biographers International Organization and honoring the best biography published in the English language in 2021, is Burning Man: The Trials of D.H. Lawrence by Frances Wilson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

The judges commented: "Frances Wilson's account of the wandering life, relationships, loves and hates of the writer David Herbert Lawrence is so freshly written, so critically honest, so intent on reaching into the difficult heart of one of the greatest prose-writers of the twentieth century in English, that it will be a model for such investigative biographical illumination in the future. It is a tour de force in its delineation of genius. In its imaginative structure, its allusions, and its use of Dante's Divine Comedy as a kind of poetic guide, it is a demonstration of the golden art and craft of modern biography. Like Lawrence's own work, it is always passionate, intense, revelatory and compellingly original--a biography any biographer would be proud to have composed."

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Winners of the Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards include best food book Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by Dan Saladino and best debut food book The Female Chef: Stories and Recipes from 31 Women Redefining the British Food Scene by Clare Finney & Liz Seabrook. To see winners and shortlists in all categories, click here.

Meg Mitchell Moore (The Islanders; The Admissions) returns with another juicy, thoughtful, enthralling family drama in her seventh novel, Vacationland. Louisa Fitzgerald McLean has been going to her parents' summer home, Ships View, on the coast of Maine every summer for her entire life. But this summer, things are different: Louisa, now a tenured professor, arrives in Maine with her three kids in tow. Her husband, Steven, has stayed behind in Brooklyn to focus on his podcast start-up. As Louisa struggles to make some progress on a scholarly book she's writing, she is also forced to face an uncomfortable truth: her father, a retired judge, is struggling with Alzheimer's, and her patrician mother is alternating between trying to cope and pretending everything is fine. The family's tenuous peace is further upset by Kristie, a new arrival to town, who's juggling $27,000 in medical debt, her grief at losing her mother and a secret that connects her to the Fitzgeralds. Louisa and Kristie are forced to examine their assumptions about privilege and family--as well as each other--over the course of the summer.

Moore tells her story mostly by alternating Kristie's and Louisa's points of view, with occasional detours to follow Louisa's 12-year-old son, Matty. Moore paints midcoastal Maine, the "vacationland" of the title (also a nickname for the state), in its spruced-up summer glory, but pulls back the curtain to show the lives of those (including Kristie) who work hard to serve the wealthy residents and summer people. Matty's experience of first love, which provides him with his own glimpse into Maine's working class, is sweet and believable; it also gives readers a fresh perspective on the adults' struggles. Louisa's precocious middle child, 10-year-old Abigail, details their summer escapades in increasingly strident letters to her father, while Claire, the youngest at age seven, appears to take everything in calmly, but is affected more than the adults realize. Meanwhile, Kristie is struggling to hold down a job and enjoy the new relationship she's in, while also trying to process her mother's death and determine exactly what she wants--or can expect--from the Fitzgeralds. Though both Kristie and Louisa have their blind spots, they gradually come to appreciate one another and see their own lives in a new light.

Full of breathtaking Maine sunsets and family drama writ large and small, Vacationland is both an escapist summer read and a thoughtful examination of motherhood, privilege and what makes a family. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Shelf Talker: Meg Mitchell Moore's seventh novel combines a juicy family saga with a thoughtful exploration of motherhood and privilege.