Barnes & Noble has confirmed that it made an offer to buy Tattered Cover, Denver, Colo., an offer that was accepted Monday by the owners, Bended Page, and must still be approved by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, which could happen in the next month or two.

B&N CEO James Daunt said in a statement, "Tattered Cover is a storied bookseller that has long been central to the literary life of Denver. Its loss to the community would have been a calamity and Barnes & Noble will provide the support necessary for it to thrive again."

B&N added that "under the acquisition agreement Tattered Cover will retain its name, distinct identity and its staff. Barnes & Noble remains committed to serving local communities with excellent bookstores and promoting literacy. They are looking forward to preserving what has made Tattered Cover so special within the bookselling landscape for over the last 50 years."

Tattered Cover CEO Brad Dempsey, the bankruptcy lawyer hired last year to help turn the company around, told Denverite that his goal was to "preserve and protect Tattered Cover's legacy for the future," which the sale to B&N fulfills. B&N's bid was the only one that included keeping all stores open, which would have led to store closures and employee layoffs.

"The company's never really been profitable over the last, I would say, almost decade or more, and the ability of our booksellers to do what they do has been really restrained by the lack of financial support, the technology problems that have been here," he added. "This is going to allow us to fix those problems and allow our booksellers to really invest in these locations that [longtime owner] Joyce Meskis picked and allow us to do the best bookselling that we can do and continue our brand as one of the best booksellers in the nation."

He said that Tattered Cover staff and customers "still have the spirit of Joyce Meskis, the spirit of Tattered Cover, the spirit of Cherry Creek. We just have to adapt to the current era and be able to use what we have here to really let take the best of the past, but merge it into the future to put it on a sustainable platform."

One of the competing bids for Tattered Cover came from former CEO Kwame Spearman, who headed the company for two turbulent years. In a statement, he said, "While it is important that the business will continue to operate, it is disheartening to see Colorado lose its independently owned and managed bookstore. Despite this setback, I remain confident in our local economy and firmly believe that independent bookstores can still thrive in Colorado."

Cottage Book Shop, Glen Arbor, Mich., has a new owner. The Glen Arbor Sun reported that Jenny Puvogel acquired the "cozy bookshop in a nearly 100-year-old log cabin" from Sue Boucher, effective April 1, after working there for five years. Boucher bought the store 10 years ago from Barbara Siepker, who had purchased it from founder Mollie Weeks in 1995 and then moved it across Lake Street to its current location. 

Asked what had inspired her to buy Cottage Bookshop, Puvogel said, "The short answer is people. First of all I love all of the people that I work with. Kim, Anne, Sue, Amy, Bonnie and Sue are all such thoughtful, caring, smart, community-oriented people that I am happy to call my friends. Buying the book shop so that we could all continue to do what we love (help people find the right books) seemed like the perfect thing to do for the foreseeable future.

"Also, the people who come into the shop. I look forward to continue to provide a place where everyone is welcome and everyone can find something that they are interested in or that speaks to them  We love to hear people say, 'This is our favorite bookstore,' or 'We come here first thing on arrival in town to get our books for the week, and the last thing before we leave to stock up for our trip back home.' "

Puvogel said owning a bookshop in a 100-plus-year-old log cabin appealed to her, "but more than that, Sue and Barb have always curated a collection of books that has something for everyone. We hope to continue the traditions."

In a store e-newsletter item announcing the change earlier this spring, the staff noted that Boucher "will stay on and be the book buyer and as a mentor to Jenny," adding: "We are thankful for you, our wonderful customers who make this journey an absolute delight. We love sharing books and stories with you and look forward to seeing everyone soon."

Tara Weikum

Tara Weikum has been promoted to v-p, publisher, of a new, to-be-named imprint within HarperCollins Children's Books. Launching in winter 2025, the imprint will publish fiction that "sits at the corner of commercial and literary for middle grade and teen readers," according to the company. Weikum will report to Erica Sussman, v-p, publisher at HarperCollins Children's Books.
 
During Weikum's career at HarperCollins, she has published a number of bestselling and award-winning titles, including the Shatter Me series by Tahereh Mafi; The One and Only series by Katherine Applegate; Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhhà Lai; and the I Am Number Four series by Pittacus Lore. Notable forthcoming titles on her list include Songlight by Moira Buffini and The Wilde Trials by Mackenzie Reed. 
 
With the change, Sarah Homer has been promoted to editor and will continue to report to Weikum. The new imprint's team also includes executive editors Kristin Rens and Amy Cloud, as well as editorial assistant Christian Vega.

At Children's Institute 2024 last week in New Orleans, La., four booksellers convened to discuss the intersection of advocacy, activism, and bookselling. The panel featured Rebecca Crosswhite, co-owner of Rediscovered Books in Boise, Idaho, John Cavalier, co-owner of Cavalier House Books in Denham Springs, La., and Vera Warren Williams, founder and director of Community Book Center in New Orleans, La. Brein Lopez, general manager of Children's Book World in Los Angeles, Calif., moderated the talk. 

Williams, who founded her store in 1983, said that narratives centering Black people and experiences have "always been under assault," and currently there is a concentrated effort going on to "rewrite us out of history." In New Orleans specifically, it has not reached the point of official book bans, and Williams said that if it does, the bookstore will challenge them. A major problem, however, is that many schools in the area don't have libraries. Rather, they have media rooms, and Community Book Center works with various nonprofits to help make sure that schoolchildren still have access to the services and functions that libraries provide.

Left to right: Rebecca Crosswhite, John Cavalier, Vera Warren Williams, Brein Lopez

Williams said that the store partners with many nonprofit organizations to help support different facets of the community. Through a partnership with Everything We Touch We Grow, Community Book Center helps make diverse children's books available to young mothers in places like neonatal clinics, and the store works with a drug rehabilitation center to provide books to people with substance abuse issues so that they have gifts to give their families. Williams and her team do similar things to support incarcerated people and their families, and they make books available at places like homeless shelters and battered women's shelters. In turn, Williams emphasized that she and her team are able to do what they do because of community members "stepping up" and giving the bookstore support.

Giving some context for the area of Louisiana in which Denham Springs resides, Cavalier mentioned the state's "infamous" 1991 gubernatorial election in which David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, ran as a Republican and received some 30% of the vote. Livingston Parish, where Cavalier House Books is located, was Duke's "second biggest stronghold" in that election; calling it a conservative community, Cavalier said, is an "understatement." The bookstore makes sure it is an "open, safe space" for all in the community and not just the "loud majority" in Denham Springs.

Cavalier takes an active role in school board and library board meetings to help shape the conversation, and he said one of the projects he's most proud of in-store is "Coffee with the Candidates." The event provides anyone running for public office in Livingston Parish a chance to speak at the store for 30 minutes. The local newspaper attends, and while some bad ideas certainly are aired, it provides a forum for challenging and redirecting those ideas. The event, he added, is "very replicable."

And when an audience member brought up a persistent problem at their store with people coming in and covering up titles that feature diverse characters or pride flags on their covers, Cavalier suggested making those displays even bigger and moving them to the front of the store.

Crosswhite noted that in Idaho, there are currently "lots of things to be mad about right now," and the team at Rediscovered Books decided they had to "pick a lane." They chose book banning, and for the past few years they've been working with local libraries, raising public awareness, and trying to stop the government from "taking our books away."

One of the first things the team noticed, Crosswhite recalled, was how "sneaky" the book-banning efforts were. There was lots of "juggling schedules" and things going on without public awareness or input, but Crosswhite and the team managed to show up at every meeting where bills were put in front of committees and packed hearings with concerned community members. It was a "really heartwarming thing," she said, and when the bill went to Governor Brad Little's desk the first time, he didn't sign it.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of it. Legislators "pushed it through" on the last day of the session, and this time it was signed into law. The law, which goes into effect next month, will allow anyone, whether they are Idaho residents or not, to challenge a book in the state, and librarians will have to move it to an 18+ section of their library or pay a $250 fine. This is forcing some libraries that are too small to maintain separate 18+ sections to become 18+ entirely, Crosswhite pointed out. Going forward, Crosswhite and her team will continue working with community members, local libraries, the ACLU, and the ALA to challenge this law.

Lopez called himself a big advocate for the idea that curation itself is advocacy. Promoting and prominently displaying banned and challenged titles is extremely important in and of itself, Lopez said, considering the reasons why these books are being targeted. He also suggested booksellers provide a space for young people to express their thoughts about these and other issues. To that end, his store has done poetry slams for children ages 7 to 14 that have been very successful, with as many as 35 kids attending.

Children's Book World works with many organizations around Los Angeles to provide children with books. Partners include Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Edelman Children's Court, and every neonatal clinic the store can find. The store also has a nonprofit wing, and its mission is to get books into the hands of students at Title 1 schools. Every book the store sells, he noted, goes to doing that work. --Alex Mutter

Thomas McCormack, longtime head of St. Martin's Press, died on Saturday, June 15, at age 92.

As St. Martin's wrote, "McCormack was a legend in the industry. He inspired a generation of publishing leaders through his generosity of spirit and knowledge, business savvy, and deep passion for the work we do as publishers. Quite simply, he was one of a kind and his impact will be felt for years to come."

McCormack began his book publishing career at Doubleday in 1959, as an editor for Anchor Books. Later, he held executive roles at Harper and Perennial Books, New American Library (where he headed Signet Classics), before becoming CEO of St. Martin's Press in 1970. During his tenure as CEO, St. Martin's grew from $2.5 million in annual billing to more than $250 million. As editorial director, he edited such landmark titles as James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small, Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs, and M.M. Kaye's The Far Pavilions, among other books. McCormack also published his own book The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist, as well as two plays, American Roulette and Endpapers (the latter of which had an Off-Broadway run).

George Witte, senior v-p & editor in chief of the St. Martin's Publishing Group remembered, "Tom was a meticulous, perceptive editor and a canny businessman, who built St. Martin's from a small operation to one of the fastest-growing, most commercial publishers in the business. But more than anything, he was a teacher, and the time he gave to young editors was extraordinary. An unusual number of the assistants at St. Martin's have gone onto significant executive and editorial careers--a lasting legacy of Tom's mentoring."

Bob Miller, president & publisher of Flatiron Books, shared: "We all know the stories: talking in abbreviations, sharing the tuna fish sandwich at editorial meetings, reading the name of every submission out loud so nothing would be missed. But what I'm left with is Tom's relentless urge to teach. Whether you were an editorial assistant, a publicist, or an art director, Tom wanted you to know how a profit and loss statement worked, how a book was printed, how a book was shipped (and returned), and why every novel should have a character to root for. He wanted us all to think like publishers, to see the whole picture. Tom will forever be holding court on the 18th floor of the Flatiron Building, old-fashioned adding machine at this side, cigar in his hand, rooting for all of us."

Macmillan publisher-at-large Sally Richardson said, "Tom was a true original--with guts, charm, integrity--and not a false bone in his body. In addition to a great fearlessness and a sense of adventure about the book business, he had a genius for discovering talent. Some of the biggest successes in the business today are those discovered, supported, and inspired by Tom. We all owe him a lot. He was a wonderful boss, friend, partner--and a hell of a publisher!"

A memorial service for McCormack will be held at noon this Sunday, June 23, at Riverside Memorial Chapel, 180 W. 76th St., New York, N.Y. 10023.

Author Ann M. Martin, surrounded by staff (and bookstore dog Delta) at her local indie, the Golden Notebook in Woodstock, N.Y., showing off the free sunglasses available as a Scholastic Books promotion for the Baby-sitters Club (available while supplies last).

"All You Need Is Love... and Books, Don't Forget Books!" Anderson's Bookshop, Naperville, Ill., shared a photo of its storefront window display and art celebrating Pride Month. 

Phoenix Books, Rutland, Vt., shared a photo of the shop's sidewalk chalkboard sign, noting: "We are getting ready for the Pride Festival in Rutland Vermont on 6/22!"

Pearce Oysters: A Novel by Joselyn Takacs (Zibby Books).

Tomorrow:
Today Show: Jennie Allen, author of Untangle Your Emotions: Naming What You Feel and Knowing What to Do About It (WaterBrook, $27, 9780593193419).

Also on Today: Essie Chambers, author of Swift River: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, $27.99, 9781668027912).

Live with Kelly and Mark: John Stamos, author of If You Would Have Told Me: A Memoir (Holt, $29.99, 9781250890979).

The View: Dr. Anthony Fauci, author of On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service (Viking, $36, 9780593657478).

CNBC's Squawk Box: Louise Story and Ebony Reed, authors of Fifteen Cents on the Dollar: How Americans Made the Black-White Wealth Gap (Harper, $32, 9780063234727).

Apple TV+ has released a trailer for Lady in the Lake, the upcoming seven-part limited series based on Laura Lippman's 2019 bestselling novel. Starring Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram, the project's cast also includes Y'lan Noel, Brett Gelman, Byron Bowers, Noah Jupe, Josiah Cross, Mikey Madison, and Pruitt Taylor Vince. The Apple Original Drama premieres July 19 with two episodes, followed by new episodes every Friday through August 23.

From Fifth Season, Lady in the Lake is produced by Crazyrose and Bad Wolf America and is created, executive produced, written and directed by Alma Har'el alongside producing partner Christopher Leggett. 

In addition to starring, Portman serves as executive producer alongside producing partner Sophie Mas. Exec producers also include Nathan Ross and the late Jean-Marc Vallée for Crazyrose; Julie Gardner for Bad Wolf America; Layne Eskridge, Amy Kaufman, Boaz Yakin, and Lippman. 

The soundtrack is composed by Marcus Norris, founder and artistic director of the South Side Symphony. The live performances are composed and produced by Bekon, a Grammy-nominated producer known for his work on Kendrick Lamar's albums DAMN. and Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.

A shortlist has been released for the £500 (about $635) Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing. Presented by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers in collaboration with Five Leaves Bookshop and Lighthouse--Edinburgh's Radical Bookshop--the prize "celebrates radical, accessible, politically-left nonfiction which offers new perspectives and insight." The winner will be named during a virtual ceremony in September. This year's shortlisted titles are:

Divided: Racism, Medicine and Why We Need to Decolonise Healthcare by Annabel Sowemimo 
Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman 
Friends of Israel: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity by Hil Aked 
I Feel No Peace: Rohingya Fleeing Over Seas & Rivers by Kaamil Ahmed 
Shattered Nation: Inequality and the Geography of a Failing State by Danny Dorling 
Woman Life Freedom: Voices and Art from the Women's Protests in Iran, edited by Malu Halasa 

Richard Cumyn is a past fiction editor of the Antigonish Review, and he has been published widely in Canada. He has been shortlisted for the ReLit Award, longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and won a Linda Joy Media Arts Award. He lives in Edmonton, Alberta. His 10th book of literary fiction is This Lark of Stolen Time (Great Plains Publications, June 4, 2024), a novel that centers on two Halifax families.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

Two Halifax households both alike in dignity, bound by love and circumstance. You can go home again but only to catch your breath!

On your nightstand now:

After reading Vivian Gornick's insightful memoir, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader, I picked up Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence, almost 50 years after having to read it in high school. We must have been given an abridged version (or I skimmed it) because this time around I am engrossed. A typical writer, I read to plunder (technique more than ideas), and I appreciate the way Lawrence gives Paul Morel's discovery of love the necessary page-space to unfold naturally.

On deck is The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. I love bookstore stories--Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop is a favorite--and, according to my wife, Sharon, who devoured The Sentence and said, "You MUST read this novel," it's also a ghost story. What could be better?

Favorite book when you were a child:

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. I discovered it on my own at age 11 and was so enthralled by the story of Toad, Rat, and Mole that I wrote an imitative story about the origin of the duckbilled platypus.

Your top five authors:

I will read anything by Ian McEwan, that consummate blend of literary stylist and storyteller who keeps you up at night. I will spend the remainder of my days trying to figure out how Alice Munro constructs her stories. I turn to Mavis Gallant to hear her uncompromising voice delineate the sharp edges and the sweep of life. Penelope Fitzgerald for her piquant humor. James Salter writes about masculinity with a sophistication that eschews stereotype and suggests how men might raise their sights above crudeness and mindless violence.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Two by James Salter: Light Years, for its crystalline depiction of natural beauty, and its calm, adult investigation of the dissolution of a marriage; and A Sport and a Pastime, about a young American discovering (wink, wink!) all the pleasures of rural France after the war.

Book you've bought for the cover:

The Roaring Girl by Greg Hollingshead, which won the 1995 Governor General's Award for fiction. The bonus was that, once past the fetching lass seated cross-legged in her abbreviated red dress, I devoured the stories. More plunder for the fledgling writer.

Book you hid from your parents:

It was actually a book my father had hidden from my brothers and me in his dresser drawer: Fanny Hill: Or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland. I became adept at lifting it, reading a chapter, and returning it undetected to its rather obvious cache. For 18th-century porn, it was surprisingly literate and, for a teenage boy desperate to learn about sex, titillatingly accurate and instructive.

Book that changed your life:

I read Barry Hannah's collection Airships at a time in my life when I was ready to commit to being a writer and to experiment with something wilder and more poetic in my prose. Hannah taught me that exuberance, even controlled craziness, was allowed a writer if it was in faithful service to the spirit of the story.

Favorite lines from books:

"A rather rusted sensitivity served to bar her progression into tactlessness," from Janet Frame's delightful novel, In the Memorial Room, is the kind of double-edge wordplay that stops me in my tracks, willingly, just to savor the wit.

"I see you riding down from the mountains to the desert at that hour when thunderstorms and sunsets caparison the sky...." This is in a letter from J. Robert Oppenheimer to Herbert Smith, his former teacher at the Ethical Culture School. He's describing his beloved Los Alamos, N.Mex. We may have seen the Oscar-winning movie, but the book on which it was based, American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, makes Oppenheimer the man so much more understandable in all his troubled complexity. I had to look up the word "caparison," which is an ornamental covering for a horse.

Five books you'll never part with:

I'm not slavishly proprietary about books, which have a way of multiplying and complicating one's living space. But there are a few that I need to know are nearby:

One is an illustrated edition of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, inscribed to my maternal grandfather on his birthday from his father and dated 1896. One day I would like to have it rebound and preserved before I pass it along.

I cherish a signed copy of my dear friend, the late Steven Heighton's story collection, On earth as it is. On the title page he has drawn a map of eastern Canada and traced a dotted line from Nova Scotia, where we had been living, to Ontario, where we had just moved for Sharon's work. Labeled spots are, "1. a broken man on a Halifax pier" and "2. a frozen man on Collingwood Street" in Kingston, the city where Steve lived.

In 1968, I won an Ottawa Humane Society essay contest. The prize was Paul Gallico's gem of a book, The Snow Goose, which culminates in the civilian mobilization to rescue stranded Allied soldiers on the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940. Its musical sentences, too, made me want to write.

My brother Alan Cumyn's timeless YA novel The Secret Life of Owen Skye is dear to me, because it encapsulates the essence of pre-teen boyhood in all its sweet naivety, and because it draws upon some of Alan's, our brother Steve's, and my quasi-heroic childhood escapades.

I will also hold on to my signed first edition of The Birth House by Ami McKay. She and I were paired in one of the first years of the mentorship program run by the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia and endowed by a generous gift from Alistair MacLeod after the success of his stirring novel No Great Mischief. Ami and I would meet weekly, either in her home, which had been the midwife's house in Scots Bay, or in Halifax, to talk about the progress of her novel. I'm proud to have played a small part in the creation of such a beloved book.

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

Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. When poets write novels, the rest of us need only stand aside and watch. Every scene, from the Bedouin healer arriving with his clinking bottles of medicines and salves, to the breath-stopping tension of landmine detection, is unforgettable.

Book publication you are most excited about:

I recognized in Rosalind Brown an original talent immediately upon reading her novel excerpt, "A Narrow Room," in the Fall 2023 Paris Review. Brown takes the simple, familiar premise of a student trying to write an essay about Shakespeare's sonnets, and turns it into something so immediate, sensual, and smart that I blush with embarrassment to think about my mediocre undergraduate attempts to do the same. Rosalind Brown's Practice should be in bookstores soon.

I'm also eager to read Michael Ondaatje's new poetry book, A Year of Last Things. In his poem, "Definition," published recently in the New Yorker, he dream-raids a Sanskrit dictionary for such entries as "A single word to portray light/ from that distant village/ reflected in a cloud,/ or your lover's face lit/ by the moonlight on a stage."

Immortal Dark is a fabulously bloody and intricate reimagining of the vampire myth, wherein an ancient agreement between vampires--or "dranaics"--and humans is all that keeps a massive slaughter of mortals at bay. But the stasis becomes threatened when one bitter, self-destructive 19-year-old embarks on a mission to save her twin, no matter the cost.

Kidan Adane is a murderer. And she'll kill again when she finds the "shadowy vampire" she is convinced kidnapped her twin sister, June. When Kidan's aunt dies, Kidan finds herself heiress to her parents' legacy, which should include the great House Adane, located on the hidden campus of Uxlay University. Uxlay is an ancient Black community that exists because of an uneasy peace, the Three Binds, that was created long ago in Ethiopia between dranaics and humans. Before the powerful binds, "humans were hunted and tortured by vampires," but once the alliance was forged, vampires were invited to live alongside humans as companions.

In a baffling twist, Kidan's parents have willed House Adane not to Kidan, but to dranaic Susenyos Sagad, the very vampire Kidan is seeking. To get to him and break her parents' will so she can inherit, Kidan must live in the estate with Susenyos; at the same time, each races to master the very real power of House Adane. Kidan and Susenyos, with his features "cut like dark glass," behave brutally--despite their growing and violent attraction--as each plots to make the other leave. As secret societies with unknown allegiances contribute to a trail of corpses, Kidan realizes the odds she'll save June without losing her own life are slim. But Kidan has always intended to die for her twin, "wreaking as much chaos as she [can] before facing hell itself."

Tigest Girma's ambitious, vividly imagined debut conjures a complex, often messy world in which humans vie for power and vampires fight for control. Her smart writing, which never shies away from violence, features a cutthroat society where life (both human and immortal) is cheap. Girma's heroes--angry, driven by their own conflicting desires, and unafraid to get bloody--rarely pretend to be virtuous. Readers will likely enjoy the intricacies of the mythmaking, and ultimately be left pondering the price of survival in this rewarding and original read, first in a planned trilogy. --Lynn Becker, reviewer, blogger, and children's book author

Shelf Talker: This debut features a fabulously dark and intricate world of vampires that is rooted in an ancient Ethiopian community and features an uneasy, and bloody, alliance between humans and "dranaics."