Solid State Books, Washington, D.C., has opened a second location, at 1809 14th St. N.W., between S and T Streets. Solid State Books owners Jake Cumsky-Whitlock and Scott Abel, former longtime managers at Kramerbooks & Afterwords Café, launched the original store at 600 H Street N.E. in 2018.

In Solid State's recent e-newsletter, the co-owners said they "are incredibly excited to welcome you! We certainly wouldn't call the store finished (what ever is?), but it is pretty full with books, kids and adult alike, and we have plenty of cards and stationery too. Come by and check us out!... This summer was a world of fun, and yet we find ourselves looking forward to the fall. Lots to do, and we can't do it without you, so stop by!"

Barnes & Noble will open a new bookstore early next year in Butler Central at 3728 S.W. Archer Rd., Gainesville, Fla. The Alachua Chronicle reported that the store, which is also featuring a B&N Café, will serve Gainesville, Alachua County, and surrounding communities. Grand opening celebrations will be announced soon.

A previous B&N bookstore in Gainesville closed in December 2013 when the chain's lease wasn't renewed after 20 years there. 

Donations of rare books, artworks, manuscripts, photographs, and ephemera are being sought for an auction aimed at raising funds for Ukrainian booksellers and publishers affected by the Russia-Ukraine war, the Guardian reported, adding that the proceeds will go to Helping Ukrainian Books and Booksellers (HUBB), "a group formed shortly after the war began, when thousands of publishing professionals suddenly found themselves out of work. Authors are also being invited to donate signed first-edition copies of their books." 

Active for more than a year, HUBB was founded by Mitchell Kaplan, owner of the Books & Books stores in southern Florida, Jane Unrue of Scholars at Risk, along with authors Carolyn Forche, Christopher Merrill, and Askold Melnyczuk. The group connected with Oleksandr Afonin, president of the Ukrainian Publishers and Booksellers Association (UBPA), to offer assistance, Fine Books & Collections noted. 

Libraries, editorial offices and publishing houses were hit, and sections of the industry were "severely impacted" by the war, "in part because much of the production of Ukrainian books happens in the east in and around Kharkiv, a city that was at that time under siege and being bombed daily," Melnyczuk told the Guardian.

The auction is seeking donations "far and wide," said Arthur Fournier, a rare bookseller helping organize the sale. "That should include collectors, booksellers, antiquarians, authors."

Proceeds will be distributed in Ukraine by the Ukrainian Publishers and Booksellers Association. Thus far, HUBB has raised more than $30,000, which has been allocated to booksellers, publishers and libraries in Ukraine. The Guardian noted that a large portion has come from donations made by customers at Brookline Booksmith, Boston, Mass., which was visited by the late Ukrainian novelist Victoria Amelina when she lived in the city for a year. Amelina died in July from injuries sustained in a Russian missile attack on a restaurant in eastern Ukraine.

The auction will take place online in mid-November. The call for submissions is open until October 10. Those interested in contributing to the sale are asked to send images of up to 10 items to hubb@catalog-sale.com.

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Queen Camilla (left) and Brigitte Macron (right), with their husbands.

Queen Camilla of the U.K. and Brigitte Macron, wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, have launched the Entente Littéraire Prize, or Prix de l'Entente Littéraire, a new award for young adult fiction, the Bookseller reported. The prize will allow "U.K. and French citizens to share joint literary experiences, reinforcing cultural ties while celebrating the joys of reading," Buckingham Palace said in a statement.

"The prize is an excellent initiative," said Nicolas Roche, managing director of the French International Book Office (Bureau International de l'Edition Française), which promotes French publishing abroad. "This is the first time that books have been a focus at the highest level of state."

Roche hopes the prize will help redress the translation imbalance between the two countries, given that 18% of all new fiction titles published in France are translations, compared to only 3% to 6% in the U.K. Full details on the annual prize have yet to be revealed.

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Bookshop wedding: Scottish bookseller the Old Bank Bookshop, Wigtown, shared pics on Facebook featuring a recent moment of bookish marital bliss: "When your customers elope to #wigtown during Wigtown Book Festival and choose #bookshops to have their photos taken! (professional photos to follow) Huge, huge congratulations to Patrick and Cosmo--thanking you for choosing us to be part of your very special day. We wish you every happiness." --Robert Gray

Robert Klane, a comic novelist, screenwriter, and filmmaker "with a taste for gleeful vulgarity who wrote the screenplay for Weekend at Bernie's, the 1989 cult film about two young insurance company employees who create the illusion that their murdered boss is still alive," died August 29, the New York Times reported. He was 81.

Klane's writing career began with the publication of two novels: The Horse Is Dead: A Tasteless Novel (1968) and Where's Poppa? (1970), the latter of which was adapted into the screenplay for a comedy film about a single lawyer (George Segal) who dreams of scaring to death or institutionalizing his aged, maddening mother (Ruth Gordon).

Weekend at Bernie's director Ted Kotcheff wrote in his memoir Director's Cut: My Life in Film (2017) that Klane had been inspired to write the movie by his time as an advertising copywriter in the 1960s, when the top executives at one of the agencies where he worked invited employees to their beach houses on Long Island. "But he always wondered what would happen if the underlings got a house all to themselves--inmates taking over the asylum," Kotcheff noted.

After working for two agencies as a copywriter, Klane joined production house Filmex in 1967 where he directed commercials. In his spare time he wrote The Horse Is Dead, about a camp counselor who hates his campers. The Times noted that the book "was labeled 'filth and smut simply for the sake of smut' by a self-appointed decent literature committee that wanted it removed from a library in Bel Air, Md., in 1968. But commissioners in Harford County, Md., refused to ban it. On the other hand, Jack Benny sent Mr. Klane a fan letter telling him that it was the funniest book he had ever read."

Two years later, Klane published Where's Poppa?. Carl Reiner directed the film adaptation from a script by the author. Over the next three decades, Klane continued writing for TV and film, including six episodes of M*A*S*H and the 1985 movie National Lampoon's European Vacation. His directing work included Thank God It's Friday (1978) and The Odd Couple: Together Again (1993). 

Activist and artist Nikkolas Smith dropped by Once Upon a Time Bookstore in Montrose, Calif., to sign his picture book The Artivist (Kokila) and pick up a copy of the American Booksellers Association Best Books for Young Readers catalog that features his art.

Pageturners Bookstore, Indianola, Iowa, introduced customers to the shop's bookseller dog-in-training by offering a "sneak peak at Mercury. Mercury is just a puppy, but he will be the future Pageturners Bookstore dog! We will announce when he is ready to meet everyone."

Ingram's Two Rivers Distribution will distribute teNeues Publishing in North America, effective January 2024.

Working with major international photographers, teNeues, with headquarters in Düsseldorf, Germany, and offices in Munich and New York, publishes high-quality and exclusive photography, travel, nature, architecture, design, lifestyle, culture, and art books. In addition, the publishing house creates and publishes titles with and about major companies and brands. The multilingual illustrated books of teNeues are available worldwide.

Christian Borio has joined Simon & Schuster's distribution client sales team as associate national account manager for Readerlink.

Slime Doesn't Pay by R.L. Stine (Blackstone Publishing).

Today:
Today Show: Kerry Washington, author of Thicker than Water: A Memoir (Little, Brown Spark, $30, 9780316497398).

Fresh Air: Ben Goldfarb, author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet (W.W. Norton, $30, 9781324005896).

Here & Now: Ian Johnson, author of Sparks: China's Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future (Oxford University Press, $27.95, 9780197575505).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Michael Easter, author of Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough (Rodale Books, $28, 9780593236628).

Also on GMA: Omar Epps, co-author of Nubia: The Awakening (Delacorte Press, $19.99, 9780593428641).

Today Show: Neha Sangwan, author of Powered by Me: From Burned Out to Fully Charged at Work and in Life (McGraw Hill, $28, 9781265443382).

Also on Today: Fran Littlewood, author of Amazing Grace Adams: A Novel (Holt, $27.99, 9781250857019).

A trailer has been released for The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, a movie adaptation of Herman Wouk's 1953 play that was based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, IndieWire reported. Written and directed by the late William Friedkin as his final film, it premieres October 6 for Paramount+ with Showtime subscribers, and will debut October 8 on Showtime. The cast includes Jake Lacy, Kiefer Sutherland, and Jason Clarke. 

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial is produced by Annabelle Dunne and Matt Parker; Michael Salven and Mike Upton executive produce. Guillermo del Toro served as an assistant director on the film, with producer Dunne "explaining during the Venice Film Festival (via Deadline) that Friedkin contractually needed a back-up director due to his age in order for the film to be insured," IndieWire noted.

Dunne added that del Toro came to the set every day: "Graciously [del Toro] said not only yes but despite just having put out Pinocchio, he went to set every day to sit next to Billy. He said he was our mascot. It was a joy for all of us, including the actors, to have his presence there. He made it abundantly clear it was Billy's movie."

The Writers' Trust of Canada unveiled finalists for this year's C$75,000 (about US$55,685) Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, which honors works published in Canada that demonstrate "a distinctive voice, as well as a persuasive and compelling command of tone, narrative, style and technique." Each finalist receives C$5,000 (about US$3,710). The winner will be named November 21. This year's shortlisted titles are:

My Road from Damascus: A Memoir by Jamal Saeed, translated by Catherine Cobham
Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe
Unbroken: My Fight for Survival, Hope, and Justice for Indigenous Women and Girls by Angela Sterritt
Ordinary Wonder Tales: Essays by Emily Urquhart
Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast by John Vaillant

Early in Comedy Book, journalist Jesse David Fox quotes from a 1941 article by legendary New Yorker writers E.B. White and Katharine S. White, who caution against the effort to explain how humor works. The Whites might come to a different conclusion after reading Fox's smart and comprehensive survey of the world of modern comedy.

Fox, a senior editor at Vulture and its comedy critic, also hosts the podcast Good One: A Podcast About Jokes. It's clear he's spent a substantial portion of his adult life in comedy clubs, while consuming thousands of hours of comedy on television and digital platforms. Fox focuses in Comedy Book on the early 1990s to the present, and presents the idea of "play theory," which means that comedy is "not simply about jokes, but is part of the broader human condition born out of the evolutionary need for play." In this framework, comedy is "less of a discrete moment and more of a state of being."

Organized thematically, Comedy Book ranges widely over the comedy landscape, engaging with subjects that include timing and how soon is too soon to be joking about tragic events (Saturday Night Live's response to 9/11); comedy and politics (Jon Stewart and The Daily Show); the role of truth and authenticity in comic performance (the career of Louis C.K., whose popularity plummeted in 2017 after allegations of sexual misconduct); and even whether something has to be funny to qualify as comedy. (Adam Sandler fans, take note.)

Though he writes about some of the era's greatest comic talents--Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle--and groundbreaking comic shows that include SNL and The Simpsons, Fox doesn't dwell exclusively in this lofty territory. Anyone unfamiliar with the explosion of comedy on the Internet or the innovative ways comedians from marginalized groups advance their careers will be better informed about those subjects after Fox's discussion. His book includes copious footnotes, with references to his journalism and podcast episodes and to other sources that illuminate his themes.

Fox concludes with a deeply personal story to illustrate how comedy rescued him from an episode of profound grief and, later, the pandemic. For him, comedy is much more than a source of entertainment: it's an essential way to connect to other human beings and, ultimately, build community. It's an art form that "can be taken seriously," he argues. "It must." Above all, his thoughtful book is proof positive that comedy truly can be a lot funnier if you really understand the joke. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

Shelf Talker: In Comedy Book, Jesse David Fox serves as a knowledgeable and informative guide to the world of contemporary comedy, and its diverse practitioners and forms.

The bestselling self-published books last week as compiled by IndieReader.com:

1. Things We Left Behind by Lucy Score
2. Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
3. Twisted Love by Ana Huang
4. Twisted Games by Ana Huang
5. A Thousand Boy Kisses by Tillie Cole
6. Hunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
7. King of Pride by Ana Huang
8. Hooked by Emily McIntire
9. The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods
10. Cruel Paradise by Nicole Fox

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]