The End: a bookstore will host a grand opening celebration next week in Allentown, Pa., the Valley Ledger reported.

A sister store to Let's Play Books in Emmaus, Pa., The End is located at 3055 W. Tilghman St. in Allentown's West End. It is a general-interest store focusing mainly on adult and young adult books, though there is a small and carefully curated children's section. Along with books, it sells puzzles, stationery, gifts, and toys, and has enough room to seat 60 guests for events.

Store owner Kristen Hess held a soft opening for The End on Independent Bookstore Day. The grand opening is scheduled for next Tuesday, July 11, and will feature a ribbon-cutting with special guests, a children's storytime in the morning, and a day full of specials, raffles, and giveaways.

Hess opened Let's Play Books in 2013 as a children's bookstore. In 2016, it moved to its current, larger location and added a wide selection of adult books. Earlier this year Hess launched a fundraiser to help open The End.

Stacks Book Club is opening this weekend in Oro Valley, Ariz., Tucson Foodie reported.

Co-owners Crispin and Elizabeth Jeffrey-Franco will open their doors to customers for the first time tomorrow, Saturday, July 8. Located at 1880 E. Tangerine Rd., the store carries around 2,000 new titles across a variety of genres and also features a cafe selling tea, coffee, beer, and wine. Grab-and-go food items like bagels and pastries are also available.

"We are ecstatic," Crispin Jeffrey-Franco told KGUN9. "We've been thinking about this idea almost four years now. The construction process has been coming up on a year so we are really excited to have the doors open and get to see people enjoying this space and getting to do what we really set out to do here."

Stacks began as a pop-up store that made appearances at local restaurants, tap rooms, and farmers markets. Last year the owners found a suitable bricks-and-mortar space in Oro Valley and decided to make their dreams of owning a full-fledged bookstore and cafe a reality.

Sedley Ambercrombie

Sedley Ambercrombie of Pig City Books, Lexington, N.C., and Sally Sue Lavigne of the Storybook Shoppe in Bluffton, S.C., have received Wanda Jewell Scholarships to attend the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance annual conference at New Voices New Rooms in Arlington, Va., next month. Each will receive $400 for travel expenses and a full event pass for the show.

Ambercrombie said, "Opening the bookstore has been a labor of love, but two years into the game, I am still a volunteer. Every penny goes back into the bookstore. I have three part-time employees and we have grown our business at a scalable rate.... Things are going well, and I would like to learn as much as I can to help our business grow and serve our community for years to come."

Sally Sue Lavigne

Lavigne noted that "by attending New Voices New Rooms I would like to connect with booksellers to discuss positive ways to fight back against all the attempts to ban books. Learn strategies from other booksellers to guide conversations in a more positive direction.... I believe that the strongest voices in a room are often the booksellers. I wish to learn from and commune in the fellowship of my peers."

The Wanda Jewell Scholarship was created in honor the much-beloved former SIBA executive director, who retired in 2020. The scholarship, which is funded by authors, provides financial support for bookseller professional development through education and networking at in-person SIBA-sponsored events. Funding for the 2023 WJS comes from the four author co-hosts of "Friends & Fiction": Mary Kay Andrews, Kristy Woodson Harvey, Kristin Harmel, and Patti Callahan Henry.

Spencer Ruchti and Justin Walls are launching the Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation, which will be the only literary prize for translation led entirely by a committee of independent booksellers. The winning translator will receive a prize of $1,000, an amount the group hopes to expand in the future.

The inaugural prize's five committee members are Thu Doan of East Bay Booksellers, Oakland, Calif.; Riley Rennhack of Deep Vellum Books, Dallas, Tex.; Javier Ramirez of Exile in Bookville, Chicago, Ill.; Gary Lovely of Prologue Bookshop, Columbus, Ohio; and Ruchti, who is author events manager of Third Place Books, Seattle, Wash., and co-editor of Du Mois Monthly, who will serve as the committee chair.

The Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation will be awarded annually by a committee of five independent booksellers. During the initial prize cycle, each committee member will be responsible for nominating two full-length translations published in the U.S. during 2023. Publishers, agents, authors, or translators may not submit titles for eligibility. Instead, committee members rely, organizers said, on organic discovery, discussion, and recommendations to determine their selections.

The 10 finalists for the first Cercador Prize will be announced no later than October 15, with one winner to be announced no later than November 15.

"The Cercador Prize is about bolstering visibility for translated literature," said Walls, who is co-editor of Du Mois Monthly, a translation-focused pick-of-the-month reading series launched in 2019, and previously served on the 2020 Best Translated Book Award fiction jury. "It's also about drawing an explicit connection between the work of independent booksellers and literary translators whose contributions to our reading culture are often similarly obscured. Beyond seeking out the best books currently being published in English-language translation, the Cercador intends to serve as an act of collective curation across disciplines."

Penguin Random House is launching Inklore, a global pop-comics imprint dedicated to publishing the best in manga, manhua, manhwa, webcomics adaptations, and light novels. The imprint will focus on "the most popular, fan-driven tropes in visual storytelling, with a focus on digital-to-print licensed publishing in the romance, fantasy, science fiction, horror, and slice-of-life genres."

Inklore will be led in the U.S. by Keith Clayton, v-p & deputy publisher, Random House Worlds. Rebecca "Tay" Taylor is the editorial director. In the U.K., the program will be led by Ben Brusey, publishing director at Century, with Kate McHale, senior commissioning editor at Del Rey UK, leading editorial. The two teams are acquiring books for both domestic and global publication distribution. They will also work closely with colleagues in Penguin Random House North Asia, with the goal of bringing the voices of international creators and storytellers to a global audience.

The new imprint's first project, to be published in early 2024, is My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lv999, a gamer rom-com manga series by Mashiro, originally published in Japanese by ComicSmart.

Other titles in the works are:

Under the Oak Tree, a fantasy romance novel by KIM Suji, originally published in Korean by RIDI Corporation. The novel has been adapted into a webcomic, adapted and illustrated by Seomal, namu, and P. The webcomic is currently being published both in Korean and English by RIDI and Manta (Summer 2024).

The Heavens, an adult fantasy space opera original graphic novel series written by Lev Grossman (The Magicians) and Lilah Sturges (Girl Haven) (2027).

Northern Lights, a YA fantasy graphic novel series by Malin Falch, originally published in Norwegian by Egmont (2024).

Cherry Blossoms After Winter, a childhood-friends-to-lovers BL manhwa by Bamwoo, originally published in Korean (early 2024).

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The Razorbill Books imprint is being merged into Putnam Books for Young Readers. As explained by Jennifer Klonsky, president and publisher of Putnam Books for Young Readers/Razorbill Books/Dial Books for Young Readers, and Casey McIntyre, v-p and publisher, Razorbill Books, the Razorbill imprint was founded as "a cutting edge teen fiction list" but has over the years "evolved into a broad general interest children's list that aligns perfectly with the mission of Putnam, and so it makes sense to merge these two lists and their terrific editorial teams under the Putnam shingle to create a truly powerhouse imprint bringing to market books for all readers."

As a result, Razorbill creators, including Danielle Valentine, Jessica Goodman, Ginny Myers Sain, J. Elle, Diana Urban, and Sabaa Tahir, will all move to the Putnam list, with the last Razorbill standalone list publishing in Spring 2024.

Among personnel changes, McIntyre has been named v-p, editor-at-large, Putnam Books for Young Readers, and reports to Klonsky, who said, "Casey and I have worked together since 2018 and she has been a trusted and dedicated partner; we are so lucky to have her very cool eye bringing talented creators to the Putnam list. Casey's new role and the Razorbill team's move to Putnam is effective immediately."

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Amber Lotus Publishing, which publishes calendars that showcase wisdom text and inspirational quotes paired with work by artists and photographers, is becoming an imprint of Andrews McMeel Publishing, the largest calendar publisher.

The first line of calendars will debut in the 2025 calendar season. They will include the works of Thich Nhat Hanh, Eckart Tolle, Pema Chödrön, and Ram Dass, as well as artists Katie Daisy, Geninne D Zlatkis, Endre Penovác, Meera Lee Patel, and photographers Kevin Horan and Tony Stromberg.

Andrews McMeel president and publisher Kirsty Melville said, "The Amber Lotus team, under the leadership of Leslie Gignilliat-Day and Lawson Day, have created a special and unique portfolio of work that illuminates the sacred in everyday life. Their work complements the Andrews McMeel calendar line wonderfully, and we're honored that they have chosen us to continue their mission of sharing the extraordinary work of so many talented teachers and artists."

Leslie Gignilliat-Day said, "When Lawson and I purchased Amber Lotus more than 20 years ago, we were drawn to the authentic mission of the company. We have considered ourselves stewards of this company and its creative process. We're grateful Kirsty shares this vision and are confident in her ability to usher in a new chapter and shepherd our unique voice in the calendar market. Andrews McMeel also shares our environmentally friendly forward stance. We are delighted that our wall calendars will have zero plastic starting from 2025. Andrews McMeel is committed to eliminating single-use shrink wrap to reduce plastic pollution."

Congratulations to the Sly Fox bookstore, Virden, Ill., which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this month. Launched in 1998 by George Fox Rishel, the store operated on a part-time basis until Rishel retired from the State of Illinois in 2002. Since then, he has remained the store's sole employee.
 
The Sly Fox store is located 20 miles south of Springfield on Illinois Route 4, which is also an original alignment of Historic Route 66. Rishel's great aunt opened a hat shop in the same location in 1922, which later became a women's clothing store that closed in 1991.
 
Originally, The Sly Fox focused on children's books and mysteries, but over the years it has become a general bookstore with a wide variety of books and an inventory of more than 9,000 titles in 900 square feet of selling space. The Sly Fox was an early affiliate of Bookshop.org, and this year launched its own Indie Commerce online store. Rishel, 79, also writes a monthly Book Buzz column for a local free magazine, The Buzz, that distributes 8,000 copies across 11 counties and to 400 locations in southwest Illinois.
 
"The book trade has changed in many ways over the past 25 years," said Rishel.  "But I feel I'm still on the upward slope of the learning curve."

Anderson's Bookshop, Naperville, Ill., shared a photo of the shop's latest front window displays, noting: "We had just finished the 'Fetch a good book for the Dog Days of Summer' windows when this photogenic puppy walked by."

"A new month is here, and with it, a brand new Alain-designed sidewalk sign!!" Betty's Books, Webster Groves, Mo., noted in sharing a photo of the shop's latest chalkboard art. "We're challenging YOU to take on our I Read Comics Summer Challenge--If you're victorious, you get a vinyl sticker designed by Alain and a chance to win a $50 gift card!... Happy reading!" 

Effective August 1, Meaghan O'Brien will become events director at Brookline Booksmith, Brookline, Mass. She has been assistant events director for the past four months and has an extensive events background.

Events director Alex Schaffner, who has done events for six years, will become community engagement coordinator at Brookline Booksmith.

Wednesdays at One by Sandra A. Miller (Zibby Books).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Aomawa Shields, author of Life on Other Planets: A Memoir of Finding My Place in the Universe (Viking, $28, 9780593299180).

Paramount and Apple have released a new trailer for Killers of the Flower Moon, adapted from David Grann's 2017 book, Variety reported. Directed by Martin Scorsese, the Apple Original film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and Lily Gladstone has set its wide theatrical release for October 20, and will subsequently stream on Apple TV+.

The cast also includes Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion, William Belleau, Louis Cancelmi, Tatanka Means, Michael Abbot Jr., Pat Healy, Scott Shepard, Jason Isbell, and Sturgill Simpson.

Killers of the Flower Moon was produced alongside Imperative Entertainment, Sikelia Productions and Appian Way. Scorsese is producer along with Dan Friedkin, Bradley Thomas and Daniel Lupi. Executive producers include Leonardo DiCaprio, Rick Yorn, Adam Sommer, Marianne Bower, Lisa Frechette, John Atwood, Shea Kammer, and Niels Juul.

The New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association is giving this year's Legacy Award to N.K. Jemisin. In its citation, NAIBA said, "N.K. Jemisin is the first author in history to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugo Awards, all for her Broken Earth trilogy (The Fifth Season, The Stone Sky, and The Obelisk Gate). Her work has also won the Nebula, Locus, and Goodreads Choice Awards. She has been a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, and an instructor for the Clarion and Clarion West writing workshops. In her spare time, she is a gamer and gardener, and she is also single-handedly responsible for saving the world from King Ozzymandias, her dangerously intelligent ginger cat, and his phenomenally destructive sidekick, Magpie. Her latest novels are the Great Cities Duology: The City We Became and The World We Make."

NAIBA has also announced winners of its annual Book of the Year Awards:

Fiction: The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan (S&S/Marysue Rucci Books)
Nonfiction: Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional by Isaac Fitzgerald (Bloomsbury)
YA Literature: Bitter by Akwaeke Emezi (Knopf Books for Young Readers)
Middle Grade: Those Kids from Fawn Creek by Erin Entrada Kelly (Greenwillow Books)
Picture Book: The Year We Learned to Fly by Jacqueline Woodson, illustrated by Rafael López (Nancy Paulsen Books)

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George Saunders is the winner of the 2023 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, which honors "an American literary writer whose body of work is distinguished not only for its mastery of the art but also for its originality of thought and imagination. The award seeks to commend strong, unique, enduring voices that--throughout consistently accomplished careers--have told us something essential about the American experience." Saunders will be presented with the honor at the National Book Festival on August 12 before a conversation about his body of work.

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden said, "George Saunders has an uncanny ability to reveal the complexities of life and death in his writing; in doing so, he points to the truth of our shared human condition."

Saunders is the author of 12 books, including Swim in a Pond in the Rain; Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize; Congratulations, by the Way; Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the inaugural Folio Award; The Braindead Megaphone; and the story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation. He is also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and Guggenheim Fellowship. Saunders is a professor of creative writing at Syracuse University.

photo: Anna Longworth

Alejandra Oliva is an essayist, embroiderer, and translator. Her writing has been included in Best American Travel Writing 2020, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and was honored with an Aspen Summer Words Emerging Writers Fellowship. She is the author of Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration (Astra House), for which she received the 2022 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. She was the Yale Whitney Humanities Center Franke Visiting Fellow in Spring 2022. She lives in Chicago with her husband and her dog.

Handsell readers your book in approximately 25 words or less:

A chronicle on the human-ness of immigration through the lens of a translator, weaving together my heritage, meditations on language, and experience translating at the border.

On your nightstand now:

I'm finally reading R.F. Kuang's Babel, which in a lot of ways feels like a perfect companion piece to my book. It's like a fictional examination of the ways that translation, empire, and language can work both in concert and against each other--and the particular complicities of being a translator. It's also just total catnip for my translation-theory-nerd brain. I'm also working my way through Derecka Purnell's Becoming Abolitionists, which is such a lovely invitation into imagining a better, more supportive future.

Favorite book when you were a child:

I grew up as a book-loving, deeply romantic outdoor child in small-town Massachusetts, so Louisa May Alcott's Little Women always had a particular hold on me. Rereading it today, it's so strong on the religious moralizing (something I also grew up with), but I love Greta Gerwig's adaptation.

Your top five authors:

Annie Dillard and Anne Carson are where theory meets beauty for me. Every time I pick up a Valeria Luiselli book, I'm blown away by her inventiveness. Marilynne Robinson's nonfiction manages to make me a little Calvinist every time I read it, and her fiction is full of beauty and complicated goodness. Hanif Abdurraqib writes feelings like absolutely nobody else.

Book you've faked reading:

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. I'll get to it someday, but I did pretend to read significant portions of it for a class in college.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Steven W. Thrasher's The Viral Underclass. I had already been thinking about the ways that all these different struggles for liberation and justice were interrelated, but Thrasher's writing really made clear and vivid to me the way that all these things are part of really just one fight for a better world. Part two of this answer is Gideon the Ninth/the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir. If you have ever stood next to me at a party three beers in, I have talked to you about lesbian necromancers in space + Eucharistic theology = so many feelings and even more theories.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Sofi Thanhauser's Worn: A People's History of Clothing has one of the best covers I've ever seen: a woman's face, woven together with scraps of paper or fabric. It's so evocative and quiet and fitting with the theme.

Book you hid from your parents:

Unfortunately, the answer to this is: so many Nicholas Sparks books. (So. Many.) Nothing against Nicholas Sparks, but his work constituted an over-large portion of my reading for an over-long period of time--and there are much more fun romance novels out there.

Book that changed your life:

Kate Briggs's This Little Art. This was maybe the first piece of translation theory I read and, as such, maybe one of the first pieces of writing that in some way addressed what it was like to balance between two languages, to love literature, to do translation. It made translation feel like the kinds of relationships I already had with books and reading and both English and Spanish, and it helped me realize that it was worth reading about, thinking deeply about, getting involved in. By that same token, Valeria Luiselli's Tell Me How It Ends took immigration from an abstract issue happening somewhere else and brought it home to me as something I could get involved in, something that needed people with skills like mine.

Favorite line from a book:

Wisława Szymborska's book Map contains the (untitled) poem that my now-husband read to me on one of our very early dates and that we then read at our wedding and inscribed part of in our wedding bands. The whole poem is about the miraculous nature of being alive, but my favorite lines are the ones that close the poem:

"And it so happened that I'm here with you./ And I really see nothing/ usual in that."

Five essays you'll never part with (and the books they appear in):

Annie Dillard's "An Expedition to the Pole" from Teaching a Stone to Talk. It's the closest thing I've read to what God/church/faith feels like to me.

Anne Carson's "Variations on the Right to Remain Silent" from her chapbook-book Float. Translation, Joan of Arc, Hölderlin, Francis Bacon, and the silences that spring up between languages. Perfection.

Thomas Merton's "Letter to an Innocent Bystander" from Raids on the Unspeakable. Like a lot of Merton, it seems almost conversational and friendly at first, and then it turns into an excoriation on the inactive, the passive resisters, the bystanders--and a call to urgency and action. It, alongside the next essay, "The Time of the End Is the Time of No Room," forms a solid argument for becoming an active participant in history.

Helen Macdonald's "The Numinous Ordinary" from Vesper Flights. About finding God, or something like it, in an ordinary cassette tape and being very lonely when you're young.

Lina Mounzer's "War in Translation: Giving Voice to the Women of Syria," which appears in Aster(ix)'s "Kitchen Table Translation" issue. A perfect rendering of what it feels and looks like when your history and your selfhood and your translation are entangled.

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

Probably Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet, although that also has a lot to do with the time of life I was in while reading it. I first encountered that book about three months after meeting my husband and, reading it now, it's full of the absolute corniest annotations possible, as well as some that are the seeds of ideas I ended up exploring in Rivermouth a few years later. Reading that book for the first time felt like all these possibilities opening up in front of me.

The immigrant experience is exponentially complicated by a far more commonplace predicament: having to care for children. This is one unavoidable takeaway from Wednesday's Child, Yiyun Li's exquisite collection of stories of multipronged grief and dislocation.

The book's 11 stories largely revolve around Asian-born or Asian American women dealing with anxiety and loss in their or their parents' adoptive country, the United States. In "Hello, Goodbye," a Bay Area woman who is the daughter of Chinese immigrants fears that she's doing a terrible job raising her own daughters; "What blind courage," she wonders, "had led her into motherhood?" In "Let Mothers Doubt," a Mongolian American woman visits Paris following the fatal overdose of the younger brother she all but raised while their immigrant parents were running a Chinese restaurant in California's Central Valley. In "When We Were Happy We Had Other Names," a woman who grew up in Beijing and is living in the Midwest with her American husband copes with their teenage son's suicide by creating a spreadsheet to track everyone she has known who has died.

Most of these stories aren't about an event that unfolds on the page; they're about the aftermath of something that's already happened. The day's headlines--Covid, California's wildfires, the 2016 presidential election--infiltrate the collection, creating a contextualizing background hum behind the loudly beating heart at each story's center. Li's protagonists can't easily articulate what weighs on them--because it's not articulable, because it's unspeakable, because it's too painful. Still, the women who helm these stories find ways to gain fresh purchase on their lives. For the mother who has lost her son in "When We Were Happy We Had Other Names," the spreadsheet is an unlikely lifeline: "If she could remember a story or two about each of the dead, they would not be reduced to the generally and generically dead." In the book's title story, a writer from North Carolina whose teenage daughter died by suicide several years earlier travels abroad and has the opportunity to help usher in a new life when a pregnant woman on her train goes into labor.

Wednesday's Child highlights the vulnerability of children, but Li (Where Reasons End; Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life; Kinder than Solitude) allows for quiet acts of audacious resilience by women who have likely been fortified by their previous trials. After all, someone whose heritage lies in another country already has experience with starting over. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Shelf Talker: In this exquisite collection of 11 stories, the immigrant experience is exponentially complicated by a far more commonplace predicament: having to care for children.

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Super Book Buyer! Although I think of myself as a words guy, sometimes a devilish little numbers guy voice starts whispering in my ear and I'm lured by the temptations of Percentagelandia. Such was the case recently when I encountered statistics culled from BookNet Canada's Canadian Book Consumer Study 2022, which unveiled a new superhero: Super Book Buyer.

While it may not augur the next DC Comics franchise, the study noted that 13% of all Canadians surveyed were classified as "super" book buyers, purchasing four books or more in a given month last year. Overall, 18% of respondents were book buyers, meaning they bought a new book in a given month in 2022, while almost a quarter bought two books and nearly 10% bought three books.

Among the Super Book Buyers (SBBs), 63% bought four or more print books, 54% bought four or more e-books, and 31% bought four or more audiobooks in a given month last year. They were more likely than all book buyers to purchase fiction titles (70% of all SBB purchases, compared to 61% of all purchases in 2022). This was especially true for print and e-book SBBs, at 70% and 74% of purchases respectively. 

SBBs were more likely than all book buyers to visit a bookstore, either online or in-person, in 2022, with 69% of SBBs visiting a bookstore in person at least once, compared to 64% of all book buyers. More than 80% of SBBs visited a bookstore online one or more times last year, compared to 73% of all book buyers. They also bought more books online than all book buyers, with 63% buying online and 37% in person, compared to 58% of all book buyers who bought online and 42% who bought in person. 

When visiting a bookstore in person, SBBs were slightly more likely to buy a gift (28% of SBBs vs. 23% of all buyers); browse displays and shelves for books to buy (33% vs. 31%); or buy/order specific book(s)/material(s) (17% vs. 15%).

Notably, SBBs were less likely to visit a bookstore to browse new releases (22% vs. 28%) than all book buyers. When visiting a bookstore online, SBBs were slightly more likely to check/compare prices (32% vs. 27%); buy or order specific book(s)/material(s) (25% vs. 20%); or browse books to pass the time (28% vs. 26%).

BookNet Canada reported that SBBs were slightly more likely than all book buyers to shop at stores that were easy to navigate (22% vs. 18%); had a loyalty card/account/subscription (15% vs. 13%); or offered cheap/free delivery (20% vs. 19%).

Overall, SBBs were more likely than all book buyers to agree with the statements: "I pre-order books/buy books pre-sale" (65% vs. 52%); and "I add books to my online cart to get free shipping" (73% vs. 65%). Understandably (at least from personal experience), they were less likely to agree with the statement "I finish reading a book before I buy or borrow a new one to start" (56% vs. 64%).

SBBs were more likely than all book buyers to buy a book because the library didn't have it (14% vs. 11%); it was a low price/on special offer (17% vs. 15%); or it was requested, or being given, as a gift (12% vs. 10%).

Even though SBBs spend more money on books overall, they were slightly less likely to pay full price for their books than all book buyers (51% compared to 55%). They were also notably more likely to participate in a book-related rewards or loyalty program--78% of super book buyers, compared to 66% of all book buyers in 2022.

These, as they say, are the numbers. But as intrigued as I am poring over them, I always come back to words, and this time the transition brought me from thinking about books as statistically significant product units to books as one title, one person, which is where readers, including SBBs, live.

Not long after devouring the BooknetCanada stats, I found a Guardian q&a with Richard Ford, author most recently of Be Mine. Something he said helped narrow my focus. I suspect that many, if not most, of us have one book from childhood that remains imprinted in our memories, or even, if we're lucky, still sits in a place of honor on our bookshelves. 

Ford said his favorite book growing up was The World Book Encyclopedia: "My parents bought this for me when I was eight and doing dismally in school, one red-leatherette volume for each gold-embossed letter of the alphabet. Polio, the Boer war, Abraham Lincoln, basketball: entries were short, informative and often happily had photographs."

This sparked my memory of a particularly evocative sentence in Frank McCourt's bestselling memoir Angela's Ashes, where he recounts a singular boyhood moment that SBBs of all nations can relate to: "There are bars of Pears soap and a thick book called Pears' Encyclopedia, which keeps me up day and night because it tells you everything about everything and that's all I want to know."

Every Super Book Buyer has an origin story, even in Percentagelandia, and every book counts.