Bristol Books & Bindery, which offers new and used titles as well as bookbinding services, opened earlier this month at 129 Mill Street in Bristol, Pa. The Bucks County Courier Times reported that if owner Elaine Powers's "story was a novel, the pandemic would be a key character. In 2020, deep in the Covid pandemic, she, her husband and their two children went for a car ride. Mill Street had recently turned around a decades-long downslide with 'Raising the Bar,' a community-led movement to revive the street, bring boutique shops, restaurants, eclectic bars and give Bristol the ambience of popular street enclaves in Brooklyn that attract younger people."

When the Powers family noticed a for sale sign on the building that now houses her bookshop, they decided to buy it. "It's a risk my family took," she recalled. "Around that time, everybody was in panic. And it was like, well, if the world's ending, it's now or never.... You walk out my front door, and there's the river. It was a no-brainer."

A bookstore was not her first idea for the space, but when she introduced herself to one of the owners of Calm Waters, a nearby coffee shop, he said, "We need more places on the street to keep people here. Not in-and-out stores, where people come and then leave us. Places that have people stay and walk the street, see what we have here." 

"Oh, like a bookstore," she replied, describing it as a light bulb moment, though she did not know the bookstore business and friends told her an indie bookshop was a losing proposition. "Everyone says, 'You're not gonna make any money.' And I get it, from a business point of view." 

Future plans were on hold until, on a trip to the Poconos, she discovered Main Avenue Books and Bindery in Hawley and another light bulb moment occurred. "If I can incorporate similar facets of the same business model, without losing focus on books, it should be good," she recalled. 

Powers subsequently studied under master bookbinder Ramon Townsend and found she had a knack for the craft. She now teaches classes with Townsend and will offer bookbinding lessons at her shop, along with writing workshops, author appearances, and other events. And she continues to learn "what people in the market want to read."

After the store's recent opening, Powers posted on Instagram: "I want to thank everyone for coming--through all the bad weather, no less!! I cannot believe the support I've received from Bristol. I've known it is an amazing town, which is why I've chosen this location, but I didn't know just how amazing. I can't wait to really get going. It's going to be great!!!"

Books by the Sea, Centerville, Mass., closed on April 8. On Facebook earlier, owner Tom Phillips posted: "After 19 years in several locations, we'll be permanently closing.... EVERYTHING is for sale--shelving, tables, posters, decorative items, office items, and of course books.... Come on by and say goodbye--and give Emily one more belly rub!"

The bookstore moved to Centerville from Osterville Village in 2017. At the time, Phillips had said the new location would "give readers a more convenient way to drop in, get advice and recommendations from our well-read and trained staff, learn about new books from both beloved and emerging authors, and find just the right book for their needs." In 2020, Books by the Sea was the victim of a textbook buying scam that put the business under a severe financial strain and threatened its survival. 

"I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that you have to win the hearts and minds," said Rachel Martin, global director of sustainability at Elsevier, during a panel Wednesday afternoon at the London Book Fair about sustainability in publishing.

Martin, along with Jude Drake, head of sustainability at Bloomsbury, Fabrice Bakhouche; deputy CEO of Hachette Livre; and Amanda Ridout, founder and CEO of Boldwood Books and chair of the Independent Publisher Guild's Sustainability Action Group, convened to discuss what publishing has accomplished so far and what it still needs to do. Ashley Gordon, publishing market development manager at HP, moderated the discussion.

So often, Martin continued, discussions about climate change and sustainability tend to be very technical and come off as "doom and gloom," but in her view it is "really a heart matter." Elsevier, which has reduced its direct emissions by 70% since 2017, has done so through the use of "really good data" about the company’s own direct emissions and through creating a sustainability mindset that has everyone in the organization "pointing in the same direction." That commitment to sustainability is created through "carrots, not sticks."

Left to right: Jude Drake, Fabrice Bakhouche, Rachel Martin, Amanda Ridout

For example, if organizations want to create a responsible travel program that may limit air travel and prioritize train travel, "give them business class," she said. "Make it good." And in a similar vein, if people are bemoaning the end of unlimited travel, emphasize that "unlimited travel was unsustainable," and invite employees to help imagine "something that is even better."

Bakhouche reported that Hachette Livre performed its first carbon assessment, which was focused on its French operations, in 2009. By 2020, the company had achieved a 20% reduction in emissions, and at the end of 2021 the company made another carbon assessment, this one "more global." It encompassed Hachette’s operations in the U.S., U.K., Spain, and Mexico, and the company committed to reduce emissions by a further 30% by 2030.

That, Bakhouche said, is a "very, very ambitious" goal, one that will impact Hachette's entire business model and how "we produce, design and ship books." He pointed to three main areas where there is the most work to be done, including overproduction and returns, partnerships with printers and suppliers, and transportation, specifically air freight. He remarked: "It will be a very big shift."

At Bloomsbury, Drake reported, the sustainability journey started in earnest about four years ago. The company has already achieved a 30% reduction in emissions, and last September completed the CDP Climate Change Questionnaire, receiving a B score. Bloomsbury also has a program for its employees called Live Greener, which aims to inspire people, create a sustainability mindset, and "demystify things." The company also provides information about employee pensions and how they are invested, with Drake noting that pensions have gone from being 30% invested in sustainable businesses to 60%.

Ridout reported that the IPG is preparing something called the zero carbon toolkit, an online resource that will provide publishers with practical solutions for making their businesses more sustainable. Noting that many member publishers are looking at their own emissions and their own suppliers independently, the IPG's task force wondered what it could do best as an industry body. The answer was "supply chain," and the task force sought to get "real-time data" across every level of the industry.

This led to the Book Journeys project, which details the environmental impact of six different scenarios of a book going from printing to a customer's hands. What came out of the first Book Journeys project, Ridout said, is "localizing printing." Print-on-demand is a large part of that, with Ridout pointing out that POD "doesn't answer" the question for the children's sector yet. Another Book Journeys project is in the works that will focus on end of life, and she added that the "elephant" in the publishing world is returns. There is a "real lack of data on it," and everybody is "nervous about it."

There are two things "we feel really strongly" that anyone can do, Ridout continued. The first is collaborating, which she remarked should not be as radical a suggestion as it is, and the second is questioning. For the former, the industry "genuinely needs to come together" to combat climate change, and she urged publishers to share their sustainability data and "don't be protectionist." For the latter, everyone should question why things are done a certain way and whether there are ways to make it more sustainable. Authors, she added, have more power in this regard than they might think.

Asked about the most difficult challenges in the way of publishers' sustainability goals, the panelists gave varied answers. Bakhouche returned to overproduction, calling it "probably the main challenge," and said publishers will have to print in a smart way and be as "accurate as we can" with print runs.

Ridout acknowledged that overproduction is a big challenge, but it at least is one that is "within our own hands to solve." She remarked that the discussion hadn't "talked about consumers at all," and she said the industry needs to "get our house in order" before showing a "united front to consumers." They will have to be educated as to why they "may have to pay more for books" in the name of sustainability. Drake agreed that consumer perception--"what’s expected of a book"--poses a significant challenge.

Martin pointed to finance as the single biggest challenge. At the moment publishers are in a "sweet spot," where most sustainability efforts thus far have actually reduced costs. That hasn't created any real problems yet, as "finance is happy," but Martin wondered what will happen when publishers reach the point where better sustainability means sacrificing revenue. As it stands, "sustainability is not valued" in most business models, and she wasn't sure what will happen when the industry reaches that tipping point. --Alex Mutter

Kathryn Jewitt, founding member of children's publisher Townhouse, died March 22. She was 55. The Bookseller reported that Jewitt "held a degree in English Literature from Durham and a postgraduate Printing and Publishing Diploma from the London College of Printing, and rose to become a skilled and influential editorial director, working for a number of the U.K.'s most successful children's book packagers and mass-market publishers."

Townhouse praised her as "the heart and soul of Townhouse and we will miss her desperately. One word we have heard so many times from her colleagues is kind. She was the kindest soul you could ever meet."

Steve Richards, managing director of Dynamo, where Jewitt was managing editor for six years, commented: "Kath was a creative powerhouse with limitless energy, passion, understanding and ability, no matter the challenge. She was also a hugely positive influence on every person she worked with, whether staff or collaborator, and even on those days when others around her were struggling under the pressure, or generally feeling down, she had the ability to lift them up with her positive energy and compassion."

Etta Saunders, publisher at Parragon, who worked alongside Jewitt when she was editorial director from 2016 to 2018, recalled how she "achieved the almost impossible.... She managed the large editorial team, working with them on a vast list of titles covering many formats, from series fiction through to pre-school novelty titles, all at breakneck speed to mass-market deadlines, without compromising on creative standards (which were raised considerably under her direction) and she still remained very loved by the whole team. She was thoroughly respected by all for her calm demeanor and warm and witty personality."

Author Moira Butterfield, friend and collaborator for many years, added: "Overarching her entire career was her passion for children's reading--and that led her to do the best she could for every publication she worked on. Such breadth of work and experience, coupled with the kindest and most empathetic of natures, will be sorely missed by all of those in the book world who came into contact with her."

Zibby's Bookshop, Santa Monica, Calif., hosted stand-up comedy greats (l.) Mark Schiff (Why Not?: Lessons on Comedy, Courage, and Chutzpah) and Wayne Federman (The History of Stand-Up: From Mark Twain to Dave Chappelle), who discussed their careers and books.

In a segment on the Tonight Show this week, Michelle Obama (and Jimmy Fallon) pleasantly surprised people browsing her book display at McNally Jackson Books in Manhattan.

"If you've been in our store, you've probably seen the Lego version of Old Firehouse that sits right behind our cash registers," Old Firehouse Books, Fort Collins, Colo., posted on Facebook. "We took it down and showed it to some visiting elementary school students and thought it would be a great time to show it off online as well! Artist Meg Dunn hand measured our building to make an EXACT replica, with specially ordered parts and everything! We love having it in our store. Keep an eye out for it when you visit!"

The Night Tent by Landis Blair (Margaret Ferguson Books/Holiday House).

Today:
Today Show: Elizabeth Knight, co-author of Repair Revolution: How Fixers Are Transforming Our Throwaway Culture (New World Library, $18.95, 9781608686605).

The Twilight Saga "is getting the television treatment," according to the Hollywood Reporter, which noted that a series version of Stephenie Meyer's bestselling book series is in early development via Lionsgate Television. The Twilight film franchise collectively grossed more than $3.4 billion worldwide.  

Sinead Daly (Tell Me Lies, The Walking Dead: World Beyond, Raised by Wolves) is attached to write the script, and "is working with Lionsgate TV to determine what the specific take on Twilight will be and if it will be a remake of Meyer's books or a different offshoot," THR wrote, adding that while the project "is in its infancy and does not yet have a network/platform," sources said that Meyer "is expected to be involved in the television adaptation. "

Wyck Godfrey and former Lionsgate Motion Picture Group co-president Erik Feig, who during his tenure at Summit Entertainment bought the rights to the Twilight book series, are both attached to exec produce the TV series. Godfrey's Temple Hill company produced all five of the movies that Feig's Summit distributed. 

The Griffin Trust has released a shortlist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, which aims "to raise the profile of poets and poetry in Canada, and internationally, for works written in, or translated into, English." The winner, who will be named June 7, receives C$130,000 (about US$96,680), while the other finalists will each be awarded C$10,000 (about US$7,435). The shortlisted Griffin titles are:

The Threshold by Iman Mersal (Egypt/Canada), translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell (U.S.)
The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón (U.S.)
Exculpatory Lilies by Susan Musgrave (Canada)
Best Barbarian by Roger Reeves (U.S.)
Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong (Vietnam/U.S.) 

The Griffin Poetry Prize Readings, to be held in Toronto on June 7, will include a selection of readings by the five shortlisted poets, this year's Lifetime Recognition Award recipient, and the Canadian First Book Prize winner, who will be announced May 17.

photo: Sejal Soham

Julia Argy is a writer from Massachusetts. Her debut novel, The One (Putnam, April 18), is about the very fantasy of falling in love. She graduated from Harvard University with a degree in statistics and from the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program with an MFA in fiction.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

The One will change the way you look at your favorite reality dating show: addictive and engrossing, but so much deeper below the surface.

On your nightstand now:

Linea Nigra, written by Jazmina Barrera and translated by Christina MacSweeney, and I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (a reread) are on my literal nightstand. On my virtual nightstand, aka desperately and indefinitely waiting for the audiobook to come through on my library app, is the latest Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent.

Favorite book when you were a child:

I loved Mandy by Julie Andrews for its incredible girl-learns-how-to-garden-alone plot and the nascent dream of home ownership.

Your top five authors:

Susan Choi, Miriam Toews, Patricia Lockwood, Elif Batuman, and Helen Oyeyemi.

Book you've faked reading:

I took a class while I was studying abroad in Ireland where we were supposed to read one Shakespeare comedy a week. I read not a single one of them and, instead of attending lectures, I went rock climbing. I still feel guilty about it. I'm sorry, Shakespeare!

Book you're an evangelist for:

I'm out there proselytizing for Indelicacy by Amina Cain. It is a very short, precise novel about labor and art. I'm obsessed with it and usually able to convert whatever poor subjects are on the receiving end of my spiel. It's a perfect book.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, translated by Sarah Moses. The beautiful woman/cow mishmash and bright colors appealed to me.

Book you hid from your parents:

I surreptitiously read Someone Like You by Sarah Dessen when I was in middle school. It's about a teen pregnancy, so I thought it was scandalizing, but I doubt my parents would have cared. I recently went to an open house in my neighborhood and saw it used as a staging prop on the master bedroom nightstand and felt vindicated for my teenage self.

Book that changed your life:

Antarctica by Claire Keegan. I read this during the winter break of my senior year of college, right as I was applying to take a creative writing class during my last semester, despite years of statistics requirements. The story I submitted to get in was basically a Keegan knockoff and, had I not taken that class, I doubt I would have ever become a writer.

Favorite line from a book:

Not from a book per se, but from Joan Didion's "Art of Fiction" Paris Review interview. In response to an interviewer asking Joan about why she thinks writing is a hostile act, she responded: "It's hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It's hostile to try to wrench around someone else's mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream."

Five books you'll never part with:

The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough. I bought this in high school, hoping it would last me a month-long trip away from home. I must have read it once a week while I was away, even though it was 675 pages.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin. Everyone talks about how good this trilogy is and they are right.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. I have my mom's copy from when she was in college. It is one of my favorite classics, because I love drama and moody weather.

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. I bought this in Athens when I ran out of books to read at my Greek grandmother's house. It's set on Corfu and is about a kid who loves animals. It's insanely charming.

Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat. I read this in college during a course from a Divinity School professor with amazing taste in fiction. It has all my annotations in it from class, and it totally blew me away.

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

I listened to Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive the first time around, so I missed all the visual elements of the text, but I still loved it so much. I wish I could read it in physical form for the first time.

Those who don't closely follow the world of business and investing may be, at best, only dimly aware of the phenomenon known as private equity. By the time readers have finished Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Gretchen Morgenson and banking and financial consultant Joshua Rosner's thorough, unsparing These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs--and Wrecks--America, their eyes will be opened wide to the machinations of this small group of "modern-age robber barons" whose relentless practice of a "rapacious form of capitalism" allows them to amass unimaginable wealth at enormous cost to American businesses, workers, and taxpayers.

In their disturbing story, Morgenson and Rosner (Reckless Endangerment) devote considerable attention to the activities of Leon Black and his investment firm Apollo Global Management. Apollo rose out of the ashes of Drexel Burnham Lambert, a Wall Street company that became notorious in the 1980s for peddling so-called junk bonds to finance corporate buyouts, and that collapsed amid charges of criminal fraud. Executive Life Insurance Company had been a Drexel client, and in a painstaking account, the authors describe how Black took advantage of that connection to engineer, with the aid of California's insurance commissioner, a takeover of the troubled insurer. The result? Massive profits to Black (whose net worth was estimated at $7 billion in 2018) and Apollo, and disastrous losses of some $3 billion to Executive Life's policyholders.

These Are the Plunderers presents many more of these troubling case studies, like that of the well-known luggage manufacturer Samsonite, acquired first by the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) and later Apollo, resulting in "the degradation of the venerable company, the extraction of cash, the layoffs, the losses, the brush with bankruptcy, the cratered stock." Another victim was Noranda Aluminum, a smelting business located in a small Missouri community. Apollo's acquisition produced a financial windfall for Black and his cohorts and eventual bankruptcy for the company, along with higher consumer electric bills and drastic cuts in the local school district budget when tax revenues from the closed plant disappeared.

Morgenson and Rosner don't focus exclusively on these discrete stories. They reveal, for example, that KKR and its private equity rival the Blackstone Group control one-third of the emergency rooms in American hospitals, and that private equity firms own 11% of the country's nursing homes, where cost-cutting and inflated billing too often have become the norm. And as they explain, the ability of Black and his private equity colleagues to rely on a loophole in the U.S. tax code that allows their earnings to be taxed at a rate lower than normal wage earners only serves to enrich them further.

Men like Leon Black don't build or create anything. As Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner so lucidly explain, these "modern privateers" simply act as dealers reshuffling marked cards in the deck of American capitalism. In the high stakes game they're playing, it's a deck that's stacked against the rest of us. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

Shelf Talker: In this exposé, Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner reveal how private equity firms reap massive profits at the expense of most other actors in the American economy.

The International Booker Prize shortlist was released this week. I'm currently reading one of the finalists: Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel (Liveright/Norton), the first nomination for a book translated from Bulgarian. That's what prizes sometimes do; they shine a light in a corner where the reader hasn't looked yet. 

Gospodinov's novel is brilliant. Here's a taste: "Reading magazines and newspapers from forty or fifty years ago. What was worrisome then is no longer worrisome now. News has become history. Breaking news has long since broken. The paper is slightly yellowed, a faint scent of damp wafts from the magazine's glossy pages. But what is going on with the ads? The ones we passed over with annoyance back then have now taken on a new value. Suddenly the ads have become the true news about that time. The entrance into it. A memory of everyday life, which goes bad quickest of all and acquires a layer of mold. Of course, the items being advertised are long gone. Which therefore increases their value." 

Given my belated leap into Time Shelter upon learning it had been shortlisted, I wasn't surprised to discover the International Booker Prize "continues to be a major factor in the increased profile of fiction translated into English," according to data compiled by Nielsen on behalf of the Booker Prize Foundation and released this week. It's a words and numbers game. 

The report noted that in the nine months since winning last year's International Booker Prize, Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, sold about 25,000 copies in the U.K., compared to fewer than 500 before being nominated. Among the top 15 bestselling translated authors in the U.K. last year, four have been nominated for the International Booker Prize: Olga Tokarczuk, Andrey Kurkov, Mieko Kawakami, and Elena Ferrante.

The Booker Prize Foundation reported that in 2022, 24.9% of translated fiction (TF) in the U.K. was purchased by 25-34-year-olds (up from 21% in 2021). When combined with the second highest purchase group (13-24-year-olds), book buyers under the age of 35 account for 48.2% of all TF purchases. 

My age group, however, does not distinguish itself. The proportion of older readers buying TF is declining. In 2019, readers 60-84 (the oldest group surveyed) accounted for 20.9% of all TF buyers, but fell to 13.2% in 2022. 

In terms of gender, the largest purchase group for TF is females 13-24 (15.5% of all purchases), followed by females 25-34 (13.7%), males 45-59 (13.6%), and males 25-34 (11.2%). 

The study, which does not include sales of graphic novels, found that 53.4% of TF buyers are also more likely to say they prefer a challenging read than overall fiction buyers (37.2%); and 30.1% like to be the first to read new books, compared to 21.4% of fiction readers generally. 

In 2022, more than 1.9 million copies of translated fiction were sold in the U.K., up 22% over 2021 and accounting for 3.3% of overall fiction sales. The top 10 original languages for translations were Japanese, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, and Chinese.

Those are some of the numbers, but it always comes back to the words, moving from one language to another.  

"I love working directly with my translators, getting their questions and answering them," said Gospodinov. "I'm always suspicious of translators who have no questions about the text. I know I've left a lot of traps in my writing; references, quotes, allusions. As an author for whom language itself is paramount, I suspect my books are not at all easy to translate. I think Angela Rodel did truly impressive work with her translation, because she often had to translate not only the text itself, but the context of all the stories inside the novel."

Rodel observed: "Georgi and I have been working together for quite a few years--I translated his previous novel as well as many short stories, essays, plays, even a space opera libretto (!). Our close collaboration has always been delightful and intellectually inspiring; despite his rather intimidating erudition, Georgi is also unusually empathetic and generous with his time and knowledge. Georgi cut his writerly teeth as a poet, so he is very interested in the craft of translation and loves to get into the weeds of rhythm and sound. Thankfully he is always up for a lunch or a coffee so we can really drill down into the passages I'm struggling with." 

When Gospodinov was asked "The Question" (Why do you feel it's important for us to celebrate translated fiction?), he responded: "Let me put it simply. When we have ears and eyes (and a translation) for the story of the Other, when we hear and read it, they become a person like us. Storytelling generates empathy. It saves the world. Especially a world like the one we live in today. We write to postpone the end of the world. And the end of the world is a very personal thing. It happens in different languages. Translation gives us the sense that we are working towards this postponement together. It gives us the sense that in my Bulgarian story of sadness and anxiety, in someone else's Peruvian story, for example, and in your English story, we are hurting in a very similar, human way. There is no other way to tame that pain and respond to it than to tell it. And the more languages we tell it in, the better."