"Do I think they'll last? Honestly, yes. Of course I won't write anything as popular as this again. But I have truthfully known that since 1999, when the thing began to become a little bit insane. So I've had a good long time to know that, and I accept it. . . . When all the hype and everything else dies down, they will have to float or sink on their own merits, won't they? So in 50 years time, if people are still reading them, they deserve to be read, and if they're not, then that's OK."--J.K. Rowling in a USA Today interview.

 

Beauty and the Book, the Jefferson, Tex., bookstore and beauty salon that is the home of the Pulpwood Queens, the huge "meeting and discussing" book club, moved into larger quarters three weeks ago. The new location is a restored, renovated former Gulf service center that has about 1,200 square feet of space and six beauty stations instead of the old location's two. "We've got every nook and cranny filled with books and beauty products," owner Kathy L. Patrick told Shelf Awareness, and the décor is "Moulin Rouge meets a gypsy caravan." (Jefferson, by the way, is in east Texas. "It's a Southern town," Patrick said. "We're on a bayou, and we have alligators!")

In keeping with its larger-than-life Pulpwood Queens approach, the bookstore/beauty salon will hold an outsized grand opening celebration and open house on Saturday, September 8. The keynote speaker will be Debbie Rodriguez, author of The Kabul Beauty School. Marsha Moyer, author of Heartbreak Hotel, and Chuck Gray, author, as Leonarto DaVino, of The DaVino Code: Mysterious Paintings Reveal the Timeline of Wine, will also appear. Musical guests include Richard Bowden and his band, the Moon & the Starz. The open house includes a wine tasting; Dr. Pepper, the Pulpwood Queens' "soft drink of choice," will be available during the day.

An open house co-sponsor is the Jefferson Rotary Club, which will cook hamburgers "and fixings" to sell; proceeds will go to the Club's new literacy initiatives, which consist of the first One Book, One City program for Jefferson, giving all third graders in Marion County schools a dictionary and providing books for the Camel Bookmobile in Kenya. (Patrick is literary chair of the club and incoming president for 2008-2009.)

Beauty and the Book stocks 1,000 titles, with a focus on women's, regional, self-help, inspirational and gift books. The store emphasizes first editions and signed copies, particularly of authors who are appearing at the store. When the shop opened seven years ago, it stocked "everything a general independent would carry," Patrick said. Since then, she has winnowed down the inventory to reflect the market, a process that caused her to comment: "Change is good. Change is the only way to survive. Keep changing and keep refining. Don't try to reinvent the wheel, but keep refining."

Early next year the store's inventory will increase by at least one when Patrick's first book, The Pulpwood Queens' Tiara-Wearing, Book-Sharing Guide to Life (Grand Central, $13.99, 9780446695428/0446695424), is published. "A kind of memoir that is six years in the making," she said, the book will be launched during the Pulpwood Queens' Girlfriend Weekend, which will likely make that extravagant event even more extravagant than usual.

Beauty and the Book is located at 608 North Polk, Jefferson, Tex. 75657; 903-665-7520; beautyandthebook.com.--John Mutter

After communications between NPR and New England Independent Booksellers Association members concerning indies' unhappiness that npr.org's only book purchase option is for Amazon.com (Shelf Awareness, June 27), ABA president Russ Lawrence has responded to a letter from NPR that outlined why it does not have a BookSense.com option. (Reasons included what NPR called a "somewhat confusing" BookSense.com user experience and "a relatively small percentage" of BookSense members selling through the site.) A full copy of Lawrence's letter appears in Bookselling This Week.

Lawrence suggested that anywhere Amazon's link appears, NPR add a statement saying, "You can support your local communities by supporting your locally owned bookstore. You can find many of the books discussed on NPR at your local bookstore, and you can find your local bookstore by clicking here: http://www.bookweb.org/aba/booksense/storeSearch.do."

He added that ABA would be "happy to create a special, co-branded NPR-independent bookstore landing page for your users to see. This will not lead users to a specific product page, but it will give them the choice to shop local or to shop national."

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Congratulations to Rob Stahl, general book manager at the Colgate Bookstore, Hamilton, N.Y., a smart guy with many good ideas who is leaving the store to become a member of the Empire Group, where he will rep various publishing lines to bookstores in New York and Pennsylvania. He is a member of the board of directors of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association and chair of the NACS general book committee and has organized shop talks and the NAIBA Trunk Show as well as Colgate Bookstore's Book and Movie Club and the Hamilton Book Fair.

Stahl may be reached at 315-824-8532 or stahlrob@hotmail.com.

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Banned Books Week is being held this year Sept. 29-Oct. 6, and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, a sponsor, is providing an online handbook for booksellers who want to participate. The handbook describes a variety of possible activities to stage, including displays and readings from banned books. There is also a link to order the American Library Association's Banned Books Week Kit ($40) as well as posters that can be downloaded and reproduced inexpensively.

ABFFE continues to offer a range of Freadom products, including a new version of its T-shirt, buttons and more. To download an order form, click here.

For more information about Banned Books Week, contact ABFFE's Rebecca Zeidel at 212-587-4025, ext. 13, or rebecca@abffe.com.

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Has Harry Potter really been the "silver bullet that can inspire a new generation of children to read for entertainment" or is the impact of the bestselling series overrated? The Philadelphia Bulletin spoke with city librarians, a bookseller and some young fans about this issue, in the context of statistics released by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which said that "in 1998 (the year the first Potter novel was released in the United States) 43 percent of fourth-graders and just 19 percent of eighth-graders reported reading for pleasure nearly every day. In 2005, when the sixth book was published, the numbers were identical."

Harry is still getting votes of confidence  in Philly, however.

"Boys have been reading the series all along. It's very difficult to get boys of that age to read at all," said Irene Wright, head of the children's department at the Free Library of Philadelphia. "They're written in an entertaining, readable style. J.K. Rowling really has a feel for what gets children interested."

"Harry Potter didn't just inspire readers; it inspired authors," said Jeremy Sodano, department manager at the Walnut Street Barnes & Noble. "We're seeing a whole new batch of kids' fantasy series. Youth literature is more vibrant than ever because of Harry Potter."

Carolyn DuBois, head of the children's department at the Abington Free Library, seems to favor the Harry Potter-as-classic approach, "I believe the series will endure. Future generations will be reading Harry Potter. They may not be as popular, but there will always be a continuous interest, like the Lord of the Rings books."

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Cedar Book and Card Shop is closing after more than 40 years in downtown Lebanon, Pa., according to the Lebanon Daily News. The decision to close "happened pretty quick," said Alan Etter, manager of both the store and Lebanon Valley News, a newspaper and magazine wholesaler operating out of the same location.

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University presses should "focus less on the book form and consider a major collaborative effort to assume many of the technological and marketing functions that most presses cannot afford, and [universities should be] more strategic about the relationship of presses to broader institutional goals."

These are the main recommendations of a report by a group of scholarly publishing experts issued yesterday by Ithaka, a nonprofit group, as discussed in a long story in Inside Higher Ed.

A key issue: "Digital scholarship, the report notes, is making publication much more diverse and less formal than it once was, as a scholar has many more options--many of them not relying on the vetting process of a university press--to distribute research findings or ideas."

One proposal from the group, as IHE describes it: "A shared electronic publishing infrastructure across universities could allow them to save costs, create scale, leverage expertise, innovate, unite the resources of the university (e.g. libraries, presses, faculty, student body, IT), extend the brand of American higher education (and each particular university within that brand), create a blended interlinked environment of fee-based to free information, and provide a robust alternative to commercial competitors."

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Effective August 20, Campbell Wharton is joining Harper trade as associate director of publicity. He has worked at Crown for the past four years, most recently as publicity manager of Crown Forum. Before joining Crown, he worked at Random House in Australia.

 

Otto Coca has joined Good Yarns Bookshop, Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., as manager, succeeding Amanda Lydon, who has joined the Tenement Museum in New York City as assistant director of 108, the museum's store and events space.

Coca was formerly manager of the New York Open Center, the retail unit of the holistic adult education and world culture center. Earlier he helped manage A Different Light Bookstore in New York, where he coordinated author appearances and community events. He has also worked at Creative Visions, the New York City book and video store; the former Old Santa Fe Trail Bookshop, Santa Fe, N.M.; the Ark, a holistic/New Age store; and HMV Records. As new media director at Carpenter Group Design, he developed web offerings for financial services clients.

He also writes, and his work has been published in many magazines and New York news weeklies. His fiction has been featured in Best Young Writers 2002.

Coca had a kind of baptism by fire at Good Yarns, starting last week, just in time for Harry Potter Day. The store's reservations and pre-orders for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows wound up being twice that of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and the store has sold almost 300 copies of HP7 already, many at its midnight release party--and all sales were at full price. The store donated $1 per copy sold to the local library, and it attributes some of the sales jump to the recently launched "buy local" campaign.

On Sunday, on Weekend Today: Sara Bongiorni, author of A Year Without 'Made in China': One Family's True Life Adventure in the Global Economy (Wiley, $24.95, 9780470116135/0470116137).

 

Restitution by Lee Vance (Knopf, $23.95, 9780307266323/030726632X, July 10, 2007)

Peter Tyler, whose estranged wife Jenna was brutally murdered, is not just grieving, he's in dire straits. Within days of his wife's death, all but a few people turned against him and the police fingered him for the murder, although they haven't arrested him yet. Several months after the killing, he's lost his job on Wall Street, Jenna's parents have filed a civil suit against him and he spends his mornings practicing shooting her killer, loading his gun with snap caps in the kitchen. He's running out of money, and when he realizes that Jenna's murderer will probably never be caught, he decides to use the gun on himself. Then his doorbell rings. And that's just for starters, because naturally he ends up on the run from the police.

Many of the usual thriller ingredients are here: securities fraud, drug testing (for TB), AIDS (a Russian clinic), art theft (Hitler's art collection, natch), forged icons and a new twist--the Department of Homeland Security. Pete relies on friends, like Tigger, a colleague from his former company, and Katya, the sister of his best friend Andrei, and also the one-night stand he had just before he and Jenna separated. He needs to find his friend, but Andrei has gone missing, ethical Andrei, who seems to be involved in something shady. There are a few rotten cops, a few good ones and lots of paranoia. Lee Vance takes these plot lines and characters and weaves them together with class and panache. He's particularly good at limning characters with a minimum of words, like the personnel director who is "vanishingly thin." Vance even writes classy acknowledgements, no mean feat (and hats off to Knopf for putting them at the end of the book, where they belong). Altogether, a fine debut.

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The Night Ferry by Michael Robotham (Doubleday, $24.95, 9780385517904/0385517904, July 10, 2007)

Ali Kaur Barba, who first made her appearance in last year's Lost, is a Sikh detective with the London Metropolitan Police. She's currently on leave after breaking her back while solving a kidnapping and finding a missing girl. After six operations and nine months of physiotherapy, she's in great shape, but without a spot on the force. One morning she receives a letter from her former best friend, Cate, asking for help. The last time they had spoken was eight years ago, when their friendship broke irretrievably apart. Having nothing better to do and eager to make amends, she decides to meet Cate at a school reunion, but their personal reunion is cut short after Cate whispers that "they want to take my baby," and then is pulled away by her husband. A few minutes later, the couple is hit by a truck as they walk to their car. When the paramedics work on Cate, they discover she is not pregnant but has been wearing a prosthesis. After Cate dies, Ali has a few questions: Was the hit and run planned? Who wanted to take the baby? And--what baby?

Ali has little to go on: a file in Cate's desk with ultrasound pictures, a letter from a fertility clinic, a picture of a young girl named Samira and the torching of Cate's house. She takes her suspicions to her former boss, the now-retired DI Vincent Ruiz, of Robotham's previous books, Suspect and Lost. They in turn ask her police officer boyfriend, Dave, to help. He does, partly because it's the right thing to do and partly because he wants to marry Ali. She's been putting him off, telling him that he wouldn't be just marrying a Sikh girl, but her entire family, thus neatly (in her mind) avoiding her fear of commitment. "I know all families have baggage but mine belongs in one of those battered suitcases, held together with string, that you see circling endlessly on a luggage carousel." In short order, the three are involved with a private adoption center, a fertility specialist (also a Sikh, who her mom thinks is perfect husband material), a harrowing trip to Amsterdam and trafficking in refugees.

Michael Robotham has written a good book, one with heart and humor, a ripping good plot and a startling and satisfying ending. He's created compelling protagonists, particularly Ali Barba, and minor characters drawn with a dry wit (Cate's father "[had] stood twice for the Tories in Bethnal Green and each time managed to turn a safe Labour seat into an even safer one.") I haven't read Suspect and Lost, but as soon as I finished The Night Ferry, I ordered them immediately (from a local independent bookseller, of course) and look forward to Robotham's next novel with anticipation and impatience.--Marilyn Dahl

A bit of an itinerant in the book business, in a 25-year career Kevin Morrissey has worked at a half-dozen bookstores including Gringolet Books, Minneapolis, Minn., the Hungry Mind, St. Paul, Minn., and Canterbury Books, Madison, Wis.; three publishing houses (Oxford University Press, Clark City Press and Minnesota Historical Society Press); one wholesaler (Pacific Pipeline); and now a literary journal, the Virginia Quarterly Review. Here he answers questions we occasionally put to people in the industry:

On your nightstand now:

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan and the obligatory stack of New Yorkers.
 
Favorite book when you were a child:

I have to admit that I was one of those geeks who liked reading the encyclopedia, but I do remember devouring all the Henry and Ribsy books by Beverly Cleary.

Your top five authors:

John McPhee, Ian Frazier, Tobias Wolff, Lawrence Weschler, Michael Ruhlman

Book you've "faked" reading:

The Chicago Manual of Style. I can say I've read most of it (had to for a job at a book typesetting firm), but have yet to complete it.
 
Book you are an "evangelist" for:

Recent: Fiasco by Thomas Ricks
Old fave: Driving and Drinking by David Lee
 
Book you've bought for the cover:

Ooh-la-la (Max in Love) by Maira Kalman

Favorite book about books:

The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
 
Favorite line from a book:

"They threw me off the hay truck about noon." (The opening line from James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice.)
 
Book you most want to read again for the first time:

Stop Time by Frank Conroy

Guilty Pleasures:

All the mysteries by Ross Thomas (kudos to Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's for bringing these back into print)