Notes: Red Letter Day for Charles Simic; Jane and Jane
Yesterday, the same day Charles Simic was named poet laureate of the United States, as noted here, Simic also won the 2007 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. The $100,000 prize recognizes "outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry." Academy Chancellor James Tate added: "Charles Simic is a poet of immense, humane consideration. He carries our souls around in his back pocket like a map of the lost world."
The Academy of American Poets will feature Simic in a free public reading in New York City's Bryant Park on August 21. He will also participate in the Academy's inaugural Poets Forum in October. For more information, please visit www.poets.org.
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In a Q&A with forbes.com, HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman talked positively about the book business, her career, what it's like being a woman at the head of such a large company and more. Among her comments:
"We are seeing a breadth of titles selling in many different channels of distribution. We are no longer publishing for the independents only, the chains only, the big box merchandisers only, the online sellers only. We are selling across the board. The health is the breadth, diversity and range. That's good for business, and more importantly, it's good for society."
"The whole point is getting the words of the author to the consumer, where the consumer wants it, when the consumer wants it and on whatever vehicle the consumer wants to consume it. Since we understand and embrace this premise, I am very positive about the digital world, e-books, downloadable audio, larger print books, trade paperback editions and overseas expansion, covering both English and other languages."
No word on the possibility of a new Wall Street Journal Books imprint.
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USA Today reported on the wave of "Jane's addiction" that is currently sweeping across the entertainment world, inspiring two movies and several books.
"She's almost eerily contemporary despite the bonnets, the balls and the carriages, because she's so keen and hilarious an observer of human nature," said Laurie Viera Rigler, author of Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict. "To me, it's as if she's a modern-day psychotherapist who time-traveled back to the Regency period and writes a novel about everyone who spent time on her couch."
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Thank God. We feel so much safer now.
A federal district court judge has sided with the CIA on the issue of whether Valerie Plame Wilson may mention in her upcoming memoir from S&S how long she worked for the intelligence agency, a matter of public record since her outing by the White House, the New York Times reported. The CIA, which has vetted her manuscript, apparently has cleared most of the rest of her story.
The judge wrote that "the information at issue was properly classified and has not been officially acknowledged by the CIA."
The CIA made its arguments in a secret filing. S&S's Adam Rothberg told the Times: "Trying to argue a case in which the government was able to submit a supersecret affidavit which we were not able to review was like playing an opponent who has 53 cards in his deck." He added that the decision "runs counter to the First Amendment, sets a dangerous precedent and creates an unreasonable standard by which the government can disappear public information and rewrite history."
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Charging that its May 1 event featuring Food Network star, chef and author Paula Deen was "marred by poor sound, lighting and parking amenities," the Page & Palette bookstore, Fairhope, Ala., has sued the city's convention center and a production company for $1.5 million, the Mobile Press-Register reported.
The store argues that its name and reputation were "once and forever damaged" by the poor presentation and it will suffer the loss of future profits. At the time of the event, some of the 4,000 attendees had complained to the paper, it said, about "a lack of food, poor sound quality and a gridlock of traffic in the parking deck." Tickets were $65 each; a portion of the proceeds went to the Bay Area Food Bank.
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Several bookstores are organizing their own bookstore tours, a la the bookstore tourism program developed by Larry Portzline, who forwarded the following information. Among them:
Book Tales, Encinitas, Calif., which is hosting a "Used Bookstore Crawl" from Carlsbad to San Diego, with stops in Leucadia, Encinitas, Del Mar, Pacific Beach and Clairmont, on Wednesday, September 19. In October, the store will host another tour to the bookstores on Adams Avenue in San Diego, and in November, to bookstores in Orange County. Book Tales owner Patti McFarland lamented the loss of many indies but said that those remaining "work harder to stay in a business that we love!"
Barking Dog Books and Art and the O'Neill Senior Center in Marietta, Ohio, are hosting a "Columbus Bookstore Adventure," which will include a tour of three of Columbus's independent bookstores, lunch and a visit to the James Thurber Museum. Barking Dog co-owner Marianne Monaghan said that she had invited some local officials along to see the potential for tourism and economic development in bookstore road trips.
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Amazon.com is quietly experimenting with selling and delivering fresh produce and other grocery items to customers on Mercer Island, near its Seattle, Wash., headquarters, according to the AP. Offerings do not include books.
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Bookselling This Week celebrates the 30th birthday next May of Prairie Lights Bookstore, Iowa City, Iowa, founded and owned by Jim Harris, which has expanded from a 1,000-sq.-ft. space to an 11,000-sq.-ft. store with café that was a literary salon in the 1930s. Read about the store, its Live from Prairie Lights reading series, its extensive poetry section and more here. Congratulations to Prairie Lights!
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"Harry Potter: The anti-drug?" was the headline for a column by William Brigham in the Scotts Valley, Calif., Press Banner. Brigham wrote, "For the first--and, apparently, last--time, I found myself in the midst of Harry Potter mania at Bookshop Santa Cruz one recent midnight."
Before losing himself momentarily to Pottermania, Brigham had "long wondered if the youth who read the Harry Potter series would be reading anyway, or if these fantastical tales have attracted a lot of new readers. It takes something special to attract and hold the attention of young people today. . . . Reading, a solitary and analog activity, does not fall high on the list of things that generate excitement in most digitally-enhanced preteens and teens."
His conclusion? "The millions of young people who have gobbled up the Harry Potter books have obviously engaged themselves in an activity that fends off boredom--and boredom in preteens and teens can be coupled with other triggers that might lead to drug use."
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Harry Potter has changed the bookselling business forever, according to the AP (via the Arkansas Democrat Gazette). In the story, former Warner Books head Larry Kirshbaum reminisced about the furor created in 1991 by the 500,000-copy first printing for Scarlett, the authorized sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. Sales for Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows exceeded that figure in the first hour of release.
Several factors were cited by the AP for this profound market change: "Production and communication systems were far slower at the time of Scarlett, Amazon.com did not exist, superstores were only getting started and price clubs weren't selling nearly as many books."
But Harry was, well, Harry. "With Potter, you have almost a perfect storm of events," said Steve Ross, new president and publisher of Collins. "You have changes in technology and capacity, the synergy that worked so effectively between the books and the movies, and, most importantly . . . they were books of startling quality."
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Something many children's booksellers have long suspected finally has made the news: China Daily reported that "some busy working couples in Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang, are leaving their children in local bookstores then picking them up on their way home."
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Stardust, directed by Matthew Vaughn and based on the book by Neil Gaiman, opens next Friday, August 10. In the Victorian Era, a young man promises to retrieve a shooting star for his beloved. What he finds instead is a world beyond imagination. A movie tie-in edition features illustrations by Charles Vess (Vertigo, $39.99, 9781401211905/1401211909). There are also less pricey versions in trade paperback (Harper Perennial, $13.95, 9780061142024/0061142026) and mass market (Harper, $6.99, 9780380804559/0380804557) as well as a teen movie tie-in edition (HarperEntertainment, $6.99, 9780061240485/0061240486).
Rush Hour 3, which stars Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker and is directed by Brett Ratner, opens next Friday, August 10. Rush Hour: Lights, Camera, Action!: The Blockbuster Companion to the Jackie Chan-Chris Tucker Trilogy with an introduction by Ratner (Newmarket, $29.95, 9781557047847/1557047847; paperback, $19.95, 9781557047830/1557047839) covers all three Rush Hour movies and includes more than 370 color illustrations.
None too shy, Lucy Lawless (aka Xena) pauses for a photo with David Mack, making his picture book debut with The Shy Creatures at ComiCon in San Diego last week. A star in his own right (at least among this crowd), Mack is also the author of the Kabuki graphic novel series.
Kevin Patterson is the author of the memoir The Water in Between, which was a New York Times
Notable Book. Country of Cold, his short fiction collection, won the
Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, as well as the inaugural City of
Victoria Butler Book Prize. He lives on Salt Spring Island, B.C., Canada. His
debut novel, Consumption, will be published by Nan A.
Talese/Doubleday ($25, 9780385520744/0385520743) this coming Tuesday, August 7. Here he answers questions we
occasionally put to people in the industry: