The New England Independent Booksellers Association has awarded the first of its grants to "developing or established local independent business alliances" in which member stores are involved. The association's strategic plan has called for NEIBA to "assist booksellers' efforts in their own communities to shift consumer culture toward supporting locally-owned businesses."

The involved stores will report on the programs' progress during the next year, including at the September trade show. NEIBA will award another round of such grants in the fall; applications will be available in the summer.

The grants are going to:

• Seacoast Buy Local, Portsmouth, N.H. The grant of $2,500 will be used to develop and implement the group's interactive Buy Local website. Members of Seacoast Buy Local include Gulliver's and RiverRun bookstores.
• Cambridge Local First, Cambridge, Mass. The grant of $2,500 will help fund the printing of a 250-300 member resource directory. Members of the group include Curious George Store, Globe Corner, Harvard Bookstore, Henry Bear's Park and Porter Square Books bookstores.
• Local First Vermont, Burlington, Vt. The $2,500 grant will help support the salary of the group's part-time executive director, which is a requirement of BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies) to move into Stage Three of its detailed network stages. Local First Vermont members include Bear Pond Books, Briggs Carriage Bookstore, the Flying Pig Bookstore, Galaxy Bookshop, Northshire Bookstore, Norwich Bookstore, Seasoned Books & Bakery, Shiretown Books and the Vermont Book Shop.
• Titcomb's Bookshop, East Sandwich, Mass. The $750 grant will be used in conjunction with Sandwich Chamber of Commerce to help fund a study by the University of Massachusetts Center for Research to measure interest in expanding the previous two year's holiday "shop local" program to a year-round campaign.

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Bare fact: The surprise hit movie Knocked Up is pushing up the potential of a September book, Mr. Skin's Skintastic Video Guide: The 501 Greatest Movies for Sex & Nudity on DVD, published by SK Books and distributed by Independent Publishers Group. Mr. Skin and his popular website, mrskin.com, are featured in the movie, which has grossed more than $90 million in the past three weeks.

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Several readers pointed out that yesterday we mixed up the order of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians titles. For the record, The Lightning Thief is the first in the series, The Sea of Monsters is the second and The Titan's Curse is the third. 

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Boston Now profiled Calamus Bookstore and owner John Mitzel, whose mission from the beginning was "to create the kind of bookstore that he didn't have growing up: independent, with books that spoke to his own unique experience."

According to Boston Now, Mitzel "began his career at the Glad Day Bookshop in the Back Bay, the first gay and lesbian bookstore in New England. They lost the lease in 2000, and things looked a bit grim. Developers wanted coffee shops and restaurants, not a bookstore--and certainly not a GLBT one. But, eventually, they found a space for the new store in the leather district, and with their core of loyal patrons from the old store--and some neighborhood converts--they've thrived for seven years."

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"I used to sell stories," Larry Abramoff told the Worcester Telegram, which profiled him--and his wife, Gloria--more than a year after the closure of their bookstore, Tatnuck Bookseller & Sons.

The Abramoffs still live in Worcester, Mass., where they grew up, but Gloria said the transition out of the bookselling life has been difficult: "It was awful. I actually stopped doing my grocery shopping locally because it was a traveling funeral. People would stop me in the produce section. One person said, 'You ruined my Christmas.' They were sad, but a lot of them expressed it as anger."

Although they considered buying another bookstore recently (Gloria even suggested they call it Full Circle Bookstore), Larry said "It doesn't make sense, not today. . . . The finances don't work. It's a service to the community." 

A second location, now called Tatnuck Bookseller, is still in business in the Westboro Shopping Center. Its assets were acquired by Westboro businessman Eugene S. Colangelo, who had originally leased the space to the Abramoffs.

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Don't miss the second annual Pimp My Bookcart contest, sponsored by Unshelved and Highsmith. First-prize is a Smith System Book Truck with Dividers, valued at over $300, as well as a $250 gift certificate to the Unshelved Store. Second place winners and runners-up will receive prizes--and all entrants will win a 15% coupon good for Highsmith, Upstart and Upstart books.

"Our last contest brought out the creative streak in so many librarians, teachers, and students," Unshelved cartoonist Bill Barnes said. "Now with Highsmith's generous help we are able to raise the stakes for contest participants."

Last year's winner--"Pink Cadillac" by Katie George and the teens of the Miller Branch Library of Howard County Library in Ellicot City, Md.--will be on display at the Highsmith booth at the ALA annual conference in Washington D.C., June 23-26.

For more information about , go to unshelved.com/pimpmybookcart/.

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Angel Gate Press, an imprint of Left Field Ink, is now being distributed by National Book Network. Angel Gate, with headquarters in Los Angeles, publishes young adult, graphic novels and children's books, including a series of children's books written by Jane Seymour and her husband, James Keach.

This morning's Book Report, the weekly AM radio book-related show organized by Windows a bookshop, Monroe, La., has the theme "Book Groups and Summer Reads" and features an interview with Diana Loevy, author of The Book Club Companion: A Comprehensive Guide to the Reading Group Experience (Penguin, $14, 9780425210093/042521009X).

The show airs at 8 a.m. Central Time and can be heard live at thebookreport.net; the archived edition will be posted this afternoon.

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Today on NPR's Morning Edition: David Walsh, author of From Lance to Landis: Inside the American Doping Controversy at the Tour de France (Ballantine, $24.95, 9780345499622/034549962X), which goes on sale June 26.

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On today's Diane Rehm Show: readers review Villette by Charlotte Bronte.

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Today the Martha Stewart Show creates confections with Gale Gand, author of Chocolate and Vanilla (Clarkson Potter, $22.50, 9780307238528/0307238520), in a re-aired episode.

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Tonight on the Colbert Report: Will Schwalbe, co-author of Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home (Knopf, $19.95, 9780307263643/0307263649).

 

Today's Wall Street Journal has a riveting front-page story about an August title, Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak (University of Iowa Press, $13.95, 9781587296062/1587296063), that contains 22 poems by 17 prisoners at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The collection is edited by Marc Falkoff, a defense lawyer who represents 17 Yemenis in Guantanamo Bay. (The prison, which the Bush administration set up after September 11 to hold alleged terrorists indefinitely, currently has 380 prisoners, two of whom have been accused of crimes.) Ariel Dorfman wrote an afterword; Flagg Miller has contributed a preface.

The official Defense Department comment doesn't make for blurb material: "While a few detainees at Guantanamo Bay have made efforts to author what they claim to be poetry, given the nature of their writings they have seemingly not done so for the sake of art," a spokesman told the Journal. "They have attempted to use this medium as merely another tool in their battle of ideas against Western democracies."

Some of the poems were written on Styrofoam cups prisoners received with their meals; others were written using toothpaste as ink. The published poems went through a vetting process that included submitting translations to the government for review. Some poems are still classified. Other poems never made it that far: prison guards confiscate and usually destroy poems they find.

The Journal describes the poems as consisting of the "explicitly religious," sentimental and "denouncing the Bush administration."

One released prisoner told the paper that writing the poetry was crucial for him. "You had all of this anger and frustration that would build up, and poetry was a way of getting it out of you. It was a way of staying sane."

A Who's Who of indie bookselling in Southern California had dinner in Los Angeles with Kate Furnivall, whose The Russian Concubine (Berkley, $15, 9780425215586/042521558X) has appeared in the U.K. and Germany and goes on sale here July 15: (from l. to r.) Irma Wolfson, the Reading Room, Las Vegas, Nev.; Doug Dutton, Dutton's Brentwood, Los Angeles; Alison Reid, Diesel: A Bookstore, Malibu; Sherri Gallentine, Vroman's, Pasadena; Kerry Slattery, Skylight Books, Los Angeles; Kate Furnivall; Amy Comito, Penguin sales rep; Terry Gilman, Mysterious Galaxy, San Diego, and SCIBA president; John Evans, Diesel: A Bookstore; Glenn Goldman, Book Soup, Los Angeles; Deb and Mary Goodfader, Small World Books, Venice.

The 2007 SIBA Book Awards, honoring the books members of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance most enjoyed handselling, have gone to:

• Children's: Alabama Moon by Watt Key (FSG)
• Cookbook: I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence by Amy Sedaris (Warner)
• Poetry: Keep and Give Away by Susan Meyers (University of South Carolina Press)
• Fiction: Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier (Random House)
• Nonfiction: Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee by Charles J. Shields (Holt)

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Imperial Life in the Emerald City by former Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran (Knopf), has won the $60,000 Samuel Johnson Prize. According to today's New York Times, Helena Kennedy, chairwoman of the judges, said, "The writing is cool, exact and never overstated and in many places very humorous as the jaw-dropping idiocy of the American action is revealed."

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The Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries has awarded its Annual Literature Awards, which honor both authors and publishers of books that "make a significant contribution to the literature of botany and horticulture." The winners are:

In general interest, Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime by Kenneth Helphand (Trinity University Press, $34.95, 9781595340214/1595340211).

In the technical category: A Tropical Garden Flora: Plants Cultivated in the Hawaiian Islands and Other Tropical Places by George W. Staples and Derral R. Herbst (Bishop Museum Press, $59.95, 9781581780390/1581780397).

Patricia Jonas, director of library services for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Brooklyn, N.Y., commented about Defiant Gardens: "Helphand, a landscape architect and historian, reconstructs vanished wartime gardens (in World War I trenches, ghettos in Nazi-controlled Europe, prisoner-of-war camps, and Japanese American internment camps) through first-person accounts, testimonies, interviews with survivors, published memoirs, and photographs unearthed in little-known archives. [He examines] how life, home, work, hope, and beauty were experienced in the creation of all of these gardens."

The Council called A Tropical Garden Flora "a comprehensive, illustrated reference to more than 2,100 species of tropical and subtropical ferns, gymnosperms, monocots, and dicots, and includes taxonomic, economic, and design information. A successor to Marie C. Neal's In Gardens of Hawaii (1948, rev. 1965), A Tropical Garden Flora reflects the spirit of that work yet also has 'evolved into a much different and expanded publication' that is 'both accessible and affordable,' " according to Charlotte Tancin of the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pa.

Conversations about translation continue this month. Some have come to me by email, opening new doors.

Laura Hansen, owner of Bookin' It in Little Falls, Minn., wrote in response to last week's column about translated mysteries with a recommendation: "I might add Dog Day by Alicia Gimenez-Bartlett (trans. by Nick Caistor), set in Barcelona, as one I enjoyed and recommend."

She shared what we'd call a "cool idea of the day" here at Shelf Awareness: During the past two summers, Bookin' It offered "a spin-off book club from the Reading the World list; the first year reading three novels and the second summer three travel memoirs. We took this summer off, but after reading the article I wish we had done mysteries in translation for this year. Maybe next summer!"

Hansen added that the world reading group "was lovely because we were able to meet away from the store, at my home on the river and a member's cabin at the lake. It attracted about half of our regular contemporary fiction book club regulars. One book I wanted to include in the first year of the world book club was Orhan Pamuk's Snow, but it wasn't out in paperback at the time. I think it is stunning."

Chad Post, one of the founders of Reading the World (and currently developing Open Letter Press at the University of Rochester) informed us he will soon be "launching a site dedicated to international lit called Three Percent. We work very closely with students from the developing literary translation program, giving them internships, helping them to do sample translations for the web, etc. Our focus is on 20th and 21st century international literature from around the world. Cosmopolitan literature, books that stimulate and provoke readers by doing something unusual and interesting. Books that will last. Known authors like Dubravka Ugresic, and new voices that should be known."

Jaime Starling of Stone Bridge Press confessed that our reference to translators' names vanishing from book covers "made me check the covers of our own translated mystery novels (Tokyo Zodiac Murders and crime novel The Inugami Clan), and they actually do feature the translators' names. Then again, most of our translated books do."

Rebecca Passick of Milet Publishing drew our attention to a Milet reference title, Outside In: Children’s Literature in Translation, edited by Deborah Hallford and Edgardo Zaghini.

So much that is good about the book business involves such conversations, and when I think about that word in connection with the Reading the World, I remember a man named Charles Tuttle and a brief conversation I had with him a couple of decades ago.

Tuttle, who died in 1993, was a native of Rutland, Vt., a small city where I lived for many years. He had served as an American soldier in Tokyo after World War II, and fell in love with Japanese arts and culture. In 1948, he established Tuttle Publishing to introduce this world to American readers. In 1971, he was named Publisher of the Year by the Association of American Publishers, and was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure by the Emperor of Japan in 1983.

It's not an exaggeration to say that I began reading the world in the 1970s because of Charles Tuttle. A significant part of my introduction to translated work came from a small bookstore Tuttle Publishing had in its Rutland office. It was there that I purchased my first copies of The Izu Dancer & Other Stories by Yasunari Kawabata, Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima, Seven Japanese Tales by Junichiro Tanizaki and so many others.

I once met Mr. Tuttle quite by chance on a golf course. We played a few holes together before I found the courage to thank him for the new doors he had opened for me. It was a brief conversation about how I learned to read the world. I think he understood.

One of the books I bought from Tuttle Publishing back then was Zen Art for Meditation by Stewart Holmes and Chimyo Horioka (1973). It rests on my desk as I write these words, open to page 90 and a Soseki haiku, translated by "Mrs. Yasuko Horioka":

    Butterfly! These words
    From my brush are not flowers,
    Only their shadows.

Read those shadows, too.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)