Rizzoli International Publications is buying the assets of Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, the publisher of illustrated books in the fields of art, nature and wildlife, military history, Judaica and popular culture whose list includes more than 200 titles. James Muchett, v-p and general manager of Hugh Lauter Levin, is joining Rizzoli to continue and expand its publishing programs. Founder Hugh Levin commented, "My company is now part of a great publishing house with an outstanding tradition and the resources to help these books reach an even broader market. After over 34 years in my own publishing house, I feel it is time to look for new challenges."

Rizzoli is distributed by Random House.

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The suit by a film company that wants the return of at least $45,000 it paid for film rights for the novel Sarah has gone to court. The New York Times implies that the film company would be happy if author "JT Leroy"--who was revealed last year to be not a young man but middle-aged writer Laura Albert--would give it rights to her life story as well so that it could make a "meta-film." For an interesting legal defense and analysis of Albert's deceptions, click here.

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Shaver's Books, Huntsville, Ala., will close at the end of July, the Huntsville Times reported. John Shaver, who has owned the store for some 20 years, will continue to sell books online and at several antique stores in the area.

The paper wrote, "For years, he's tried to make a niche in offering a wide array of local books and old books and by being the guy who will do whatever's necessary to find the book you want." But having to compete with Yahoo and Google on top of the chains, Amazon.com and Costco made the store's situation untenable.

Reading habits have changed, too. "Insomniacs used to read, but now they turn on TV and there's 200 channels, with everything from the pope saying mass in Brazil to Girls Gone Wild to QVC selling cheap diamonds," he said. "I'm reading [Walter] Issacson's Benjamin Franklin, and I was wondering the other day what Mr. Franklin would have accomplished if he hadn't had time to think and time to contemplate and time to reason."

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After nearly two years as manager of Good Yarns bookstore, Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., Amanda Lydon is joining the Tenement Museum in New York City as assistant director of 108, the museum store and events. (The Museum is located at 108 Orchard St.)

She said she will miss Good Yarns: "I'm quite attached to this quirky store; it's charming and I've gotten close with the customers and the staff." But the Tenement Museum is "a good match" and she has been hired, she continued, "to expand their event series, develop relationships with the schools who already come through for tours, do some of the buying and sort of manage the gaps between the visitor center and museum shop."

Lydon has also been active in both the national and area Emerging Leader programs.

June 29 is her last day at Good Yarns. She starts at the Museum July 9. Congratulations!

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Congratulations, too, to Beth Pelle, associate director of the Frederick County Public Libraries, Frederick, Md., who has won the entire hardcover list of Unbridled Books for the library. The prize was for a BEA raffle by the publisher open only to librarians. Pelle said, "The titles we already own in our collection are very popular, so this new addition will make our patrons very happy."

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An item in its entirety from the Chicago Sun-Times:

"A federal judge in Chicago ordered Borders bookstore in Oak Park to reinstate wrongfully fired employee Clarice Prange, and ordered Borders to pay her $333,229 in unpaid overtime and for time and expenses lost due to the company's retaliation against her for filing her lawsuit in April 2005. Prange, an hourly employee, worked 4,170 hours of unpaid overtime from 2001 to 2004 in hopes of winning a promotion and on the promise of compensatory time off, said her attorney, Jac A. Cotiguala. U.S. District Judge Robert W. Gettleman also ordered Borders to pay legal fees, which are estimated at $500,000 to $600,000."

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No free livres. The Bookseller reported that Syndicat de la Librairie Française (SLF), the French booksellers association, "has vowed to sue all internet retailers offering free book delivery in France, after winning a court battle against Alapage. The Paris court of appeal last month ordered the online bookseller to pay the SLF €50,000 [about $68,000] in damages, saying that it had dipped below discounting limits by offering free book delivery and gift vouchers."

Benoit Bougerol, SLF president and owner of La Maison du Livre in Rodez, said the court order indicates "that the fox can no longer enter the chicken coop."

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Unreserved Pottermania in the Windy City. The Chicago Sun-Times reported that the city's libraries will have 1,000 copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows available July 21, but advance reservations will not be allowed. "We believe that the first-come first-served system is the fairest way to go," said spokeswoman Maggie Killackey.

According to radio station WBBM, Chicago Library commissioner Mary Dempsey said the "last time a Harry book came out, young readers lined up outside a number of library branches waiting for the doors to open."

 

Speaking of Harry, J.K. Rowling is coming to the U.S. in October for what Scholastic is billing as the J.K. Rowling Open Book Tour, which will include four events at which she will read from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, answer questions about the series and sign copies of the book. Three of the events will be held for schoolchildren in New York City, Los Angeles and New Orleans. The fourth will be in New York City for winners of a sweepstakes.

Rowling appears at the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles on October 15; at the Convention Center in New Orleans on October 18; and at Carnegie Hall in New York on October 19. In September, Scholastic will select schools in each of the three cities to send students to the events. Each of those schools will be given a Sorting Hat to place in their school where they will conduct random drawings of students and classes to attend the events.

The last event, on the evening of October 19 at Carnegie Hall, is for the 1,000 winners of a sweepstakes contest that is open to people of any age; winners receive a pair of tickets. The sweepstakes launches on July 30; as of that date, scholastic.com/harrypotter will have complete rules and information on how to enter.

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And more about Harry: Borders has launched its Harry Potter video book club on its Web site. Created with theleaky-cauldron.org, the club is moderated by the Leaky- Cauldron's "Pottercast" hosts Melissa Anelli, John Noe and Sue Upton and was filmed with Harry Potter fans who attended the Phoenix Rising Conference in New Orleans, La., in May. Fans of all ages participated in the book club discussion of topics ranging from "Dumbledore's Monumental Mistakes" to "Time Travel and Horcruxes" to "Harry versus Voldemort."

 

Colin Fletcher, author of the longtime bestseller The Complete Walker, died on Tuesday at age 85.

Fletcher, who was born in Wales and educated in England, popularized hiking and backpacking in the U.S. with several books. The most important of them, The Complete Walker, first appeared in 1968 and has sold more than 500,000 copies. The fourth edition, written with Chip Rawlins, is The Complete Walker IV (Knopf, $22.95, 9780375703232/0375703233). Another popular Fletcher title is The Man Who Walked Through Time: The Story of the First Trip Afoot Through the Grand Canyon (Vintage, $14.95, 9780679723066/0679723064).

The following is from The Complete Walker, courtesy of Backpacker magazine, which has a touching eulogy: "The important thing about running your tight little outdoor economy is that it must not run you. You must learn to deal with the practical details so efficiently that they become second nature. Then, after the unavoidable shakedown period, you leave yourself free to get on with the important things--watching cloud shadows race across a mountainside or passing the time of day with a humming bird or discovering that a grasshopper eats grass like spaghetti or sitting on a peak and thinking of nothing at all except perhaps that it's a wonderful thing to sit on a peak and think of nothing at all."

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Ruth Bell Graham, the wife of evangelist Billy Graham, died yesterday at age 87. She was the author or co-author of 14 books, including poetry collection and Footprints of a Pilgrim, which the AP called an "autobiographical scrapbook."
 

Monday evening, the first two segments of Simon Schama's Power of Art air on PBS. Based on his book, The Power of Art (Ecco, $50, 9780061176104/0061176109), the series focuses on eight artists and a work that defined the career of each. The series runs every Monday through July 30. Schama is a professor of art history and of history at Columbia University.

The artists and the works Schama views, in order of appearance:

• Vincent van Gogh and Wheatfield With Crows
• Pablo Picasso and Guernica
• Michelangelo and David With the Head of Goliath
• Gian Lorenzo Bernini and The Ecstasy of St. Theresa
  
• Rembrandt and The Conspiracy of the Batavians Under Claudius Civilis
• Jacques-Louis David and The Death of Marat
• J.M.W. Turner and Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On)
• Mark Rothko and the Seagram murals

This morning the Today Show talks with Tim Russert, author of Wisdom of Our Fathers: Lessons and Letters from Daughters and Sons (Random House, $13.95, 9780812975437/081297543X).

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Today on the Early Show: Sara James and Ginger Mauney, authors of The Best of Friends: Two Women, Two Continents, and One Enduring Friendship (Morrow, $24.95, 9780060779481/0060779489).

Also on the Early Show: Dr. Andrew Weil, whose wellness books include Healthy Aging: A Lifelong Guide to Your Well-Being (Anchor, $14.95, 9780307277541/0307277542).

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Today on NPR's On Point: Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, authors of Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes (Abrams Image, $18.95, 9780810914933/081091493X).

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Tonight ABC's 20/20 features Bo Peabody, author of Lucky or Smart (Random House, $13.95, 9781400062904/140006290X).

Norwegian writer Per Petterson has won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for Out Stealing Horses, which has won several other prizes, been a surprise bestseller in Norway and Germany and was published here in April by Graywolf Press. The award comes with a 100,000-euro prize (worth more than $130,000), is administered by Dublin City Public Libraries and is sponsored by IMPAC, a productivity and management company. Nominations were made by libraries around the world.

"This is a very happy man standing before you, a surprised man,'' Petterson said at a ceremony yesterday in Dublin City Hall, according to Bloomberg. "I was honored just to be on the list. If any of the others had won, that would have been fine with me.''

That shortlist consisted of Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie, Arthur & George by Julian Barnes, A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry and The Short Day Dying by Peter Hobbs.

Petterson was trained as a librarian, worked as a bookseller for 12 years and was a translator and literary critic before becoming a full-time writer. He has published a collection of stories and the novels To Siberia and In the Wake.

Out Stealing Horses was translated by Anne Born. A poet, critic, and historian, Born has translated many works from Scandinavian languages into English, including Petterson's other novels. She receives 25,000 euros of the prize.

Graywolf described Out Stealing Horses ($22, 9781555974701/1555974708) as "the story of Trond, a man who has settled into a rustic cabin in an isolated part of eastern Norway to live the rest of his life with quiet deliberation. A meeting with his only neighbor, however, forces him to reflect on a fateful childhood summer."

Graywolf publisher Fiona McCrae commented: "Everyone who reads this extraordinary novel falls in love with it. The craftsmanship is exquisite, the interweaving portrait of the book's protagonist as an old man and as a teenager in Norway are utterly authentic, and the narrative is highly charged and dramatic, yet strangely calming and intimate. Out Stealing Horses exudes a rare grace that touches readers deeply. We're delighted for Per Petterson, his translator and for Graywolf--how often are we entitled to boast that we have the best book in the world?"

Mark Lindquist is a prosecuting attorney for Washington State's Pierce County, the epicenter for methamphetamine production on the west coast. Much of the county used to be fairly rural, where homes in the forests near Mount Rainier were cute or at least rustic; now, they just look suspicious--people have learned that a house trailer or carport with a blue tarp means trouble. Lindquist specializes in meth prosecutions and knows his way around this sad, violent world. The King of Methlehem is a gritty, often humorous thriller; nonetheless, it makes plain the harsh toll meth takes on people's lives, both addicts and non-addicts.

The novel opens with Detective Wyatt James, "who believes a good old-fashioned dialogue is the surest way to solve anything, though sometimes the specter of coercion is necessary to keep the conversation lively," interviewing a tweeker, a meth addict.  This is rough going, since "it takes eight to ten weeks of cold turkey before tweekers can communicate. Even then, though, a dialogue with a tweeker is roughly akin to one with a snotty ten-year-old." James had thought his assignment to the meth lab team would be a good break from homicides, but instead it's been a "grim tour through doom and decay."

James is looking for the top meth cook in Pierce Country, a man with many aliases, who is currently calling himself Howard Schultz. Schultz is proud of his reputation as the meth king. "To the outside eye, Howard looks depleted and decrepit . . . but inside he feels dynamic and destined for greatness." The great man moves in with a former girlfriend named Brandy and her seductive 12-year-old daughter, Porsche. Schultz delights in taking Porsche with him on various scam outings, like installing a fake ATM in a 7-11 parking lot. They sit in the car, watching people lose their cards in the machine, laughing and ingesting hard lemonade, Mountain Dew and Vicodins. The All-American enterprising family.

Detective James is a committed cop, completely focused on his job, with few friends: "At an open-house party a neighbor told Wyatt that he was the only resident with a normal job and Wyatt explained that detective work is not a normal job, that it consumes and changes people in much the same way he imagined artistic pursuits can, sometimes in good ways, sometimes not. He was surprised to hear himself vocalize this and vowed not to get drunk with civilians again." One of his friends is Mike Lawson, the team chief for the drug trial unit. They trade best movie lines, argue over due process and try to make the world a better place. His girlfriend Suki has two jobs, barista and stripper. He's right: not exactly a civilian.

The King of Methlehem, with its dark humor and wild characters, takes us on a rowdy and pleasurable ride, even with the grim reality of methamphetamine as its engine.--Marilyn Dahl