Wild Aster Books will open in March at 460 Chamblee Dunwoody Way in Chamblee, Ga. What Now Atlanta reported that the new bookshop will feature books for both children and adults, with a stage for story times, performances, puppet shows, and more.

"We carved out a space in our store just for that," said Grace Smith, who owns the shop with her husband, Tyler Smith. "We have seating that a lot of bookstores usually don't have. We're inviting people to come hang out and have it to be a third spot."

Film industry professionals originally from Ohio, the Smiths decided in recent years to embark on a new venture after having two children and as their work slowed down due to strikes in the entertainment industry. Their passion for reading and books led to a natural decision. "We love bookstores," Grace Smith noted. "Anywhere we go, that's the place we would try to find. We love reading, we work in movies. It's all stories, and storytelling is a part of our life's work."

"Our reading has picked up," Tyler Smith added. "We were both in between shows a year or two ago. We charted out to see as many bookstores as we possibly could. We've seen pretty much all of them."

After scouting many possible locations for the bookstore, the Smiths found "a traditional and charming building amid a sea of modern apartments and new builds. Grace's background in set decoration comes in handy for designing the space, which will have a warm, comfortable and old-fashioned aesthetic," What Now Atlanta wrote.

"I wanted it to look like the attic from Little Women where it's very whimsical and Victorian, 1800s, cozy. That's what we're going for there," she said. "We want to get people reading."

Barnes & Noble will open its new location in Huntington Station, N.Y., on February 26, Huntington Now reported.

Located at 301 Walt Whitman Rd., the new store spans about 14,000 square feet and replaces a B&N location that closed in nearby East Northport at the end of 2023. The ribbon cutting and grand opening on February 26 will include an appearance by romance author Tessa Bailey.

---

B&N will also soon be opening a new store at 1025 F St. NW, Washington, D.C., marking a return to downtown after the company closed its 12th St. NW location in 2015. Washingtonian reported that the bookstore chain has signed a lease for a 16,000-square-foot space in the historic Woodward & Lothrop department building, near the Metro Center station.

Effective February 24, Marysue Rucci will become publisher of Scribner, Simon & Schuster's oldest imprint. At the same time, current publisher Nan Graham will stay at Scribner but transition to an editorial role. Graham had announced last October that she would be stepping back as publisher.

Marysue Rucci

Rucci joined Simon & Schuster some three decades ago, beginning as an editorial assistant at Scribner. In that role she discovered Kathy Reichs's first novel, Déjà Dead, and she has gone on to work with a plethora of acclaimed and bestselling authors and to publish fiction and nonfiction.

"It is an extraordinary privilege and the opportunity of a lifetime to lead the storied Scribner imprint, and to take the helm from the incomparable Nan Graham," said Rucci. "As publisher, I will continue to publish lasting works of literary merit and to champion authors at all stages of their careers. I also look forward to working innovatively and strategically with the exceptional staff to expand Scribner’s footprint in the industry."

Jonathan Karp, S&S CEO, said: "Whether the book is fiction or nonfiction, literary or commercial (or both), Marysue brings passion and conviction to her work. Again and again, she has demonstrated that she possesses a discerning eye and an openness to new ideas and literary voices--and a propensity for choosing books that readers love."

"I have the greatest admiration for Marysue, for her books, her vision, and her singular dedication and advocacy," said Graham. "I am thrilled for the Scribner team and honored to be succeeded by her as publisher of this magnificent imprint."

William E. Leuchtenburg, a historian "whose books cemented the place of Franklin D. Roosevelt among the greatest American presidents," died January 28, the New York Times reported. He was 102. His first book, published in 1953, was on the politics of flood control, while his final work, From George Washington to John Quincy Adams, was published last year. 

Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (1963), generally regarded as his masterpiece, was awarded the Bancroft Prize by Columbia University and the Francis Parkman Prize by the Society of American Historians. 

Leuchtenburg's other major books include The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-1932 (1958) and The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (1995). He published In the Shadow of FDR in 1983, and updated it several times, taking it up to the administration of President Barack Obama.

He taught for three decades at Columbia University and for two more at the University of North Carolina before he was given emeritus status there. He served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the Society of American Historians, and the American Historical Association.

For more than 40 years, Leuchtenburg was a close adviser and friend to filmmaker Ken Burns, appearing in three of his documentaries: Prohibition (2011), The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014), and Benjamin Franklin (2022), as well as consulting on many others.

After learning of Leuchtenburg's death, Burns told the Times: "I had to get up and go be by myself for a while. Everything just crashed to a halt." Burns called him "one of the great historians, if not the dean of American historians in the United States, for his work on the presidency."

Burns added: "I'm going to cry talking about it, but it's just this gigantic and unfillable hole. He taught us well, though. He's imparted not just facts, but attitudes and relationships and methodologies that we'll save. We'll be poorer for not having Bill to come and look at a rough cut of something that he shouldn't know anything about but then inevitably knows a ton. We'll muddle through."

The Associated Press noted that in recent years, Leuchtenburg continued to work every morning and, at age 101, completed Patriot Presidents, the first of a planned multi-volume history that he acknowledged in the book's preface "may be too ambitious."

Bookmiser New & Used Books, Marietta, Ga., used its sidewalk chalkboard to share some wisdom from author Matt Haig: "Aren't bookstores strange, sitting there with quiet menace as if they were just a shop and not an entry point to 30,000 different universes?"

At the Random House & Crown Publishing Groups:

Cynthia Lasky has been promoted to executive v-p, group sales director, overseeing all sales for the Random House and Crown Publishing Groups. She began her career at Bantam Doubleday Dell in 1988 as a national accounts sales assistant. Over the years, she has held many leadership roles, including v-p, sales marketing director, Bantam, and most recently, senior v-p, group sales director, Random House, Crown, and PRH Christian.

In related moves:

Maren Monitello, v-p, imprint sales director, Crown Publishing Group, will oversee all imprints for the Crown publishing divisions as well as Audio.

Janelle Leonard, imprint sales and business development director, will oversee Random House and One World, and continue with Harmony Rodale Convergent, and Zeitgeist. She will also keep working across divisions on sales development.

Kim Monahan, the new imprint sales director, Random House Worlds and Ballantine Bantam Dell, will continue overseeing PRH Christian Publishing Group and Out of Print.

Continuing to report to Lasky: Lori Addicott, v-p & director, Christian market sales, and Zeyna Tabbaa, associate manager, imprint sales.

Page & Flame bookstore, Landrum, S.C., shared a photo on Instagram of "a desk with a view."

AMC Networks has released the official trailer for the third season of its noir drama series, Dark Winds, based on the Leaphorn & Chee book series by Tony Hillerman. The TV series returns with all-new episodes exclusively on AMC and AMC+ on March 9, with new episodes airing weekly on Sundays.

The cast includes Zahn McClarnon (The Son, Westworld, Fargo), Kiowa Gordon (The Red Road, Roswell, New Mexico), Jessica Matten (Rez Ball, Tribal, Burden of Truth), and Deanna Allison (Accused, Edge of America). Joining them as guest stars this season are Jenna Elfman, Bruce Greenwood, Raoul Max Trujillo, Tonantzin Carmelo, Alex Meraz, Terry Serpico, Derek Hinkey, Phil Burke, and Christopher Heyerdahl. Returning for season 3 are guest stars A Martinez and Jeri Ryan. 
 
Dark Winds is created by Graham Roland, with John Wirth serving as showrunner. The series is executive produced by Roland, Wirth, McClarnon, Robert Redford, George R.R. Martin, Chris Eyre, Tina Elmo, Jim Chory, Vince Gerardis, and Anne Hillerman.

Jason Reynolds (photo: Adedayo "Dayo" Kosoko)

Bestselling author Jason Reynolds is a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, a Newbery Award Honoree, a Printz Award Honoree, a two-time National Book Award finalist, a 2024 MacArthur Fellow, a UK Carnegie Medal winner, a two-time Walter Dean Myers Award winner, an NAACP Image Award Winner, an Odyssey Award wnner and two-time honoree, and the recipient of multiple Coretta Scott King honors, a Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Author Award, and the Margaret A. Edwards Award. He was also the 2020-2022 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature.

Reynolds won his first Coretta Scott King Author Award at the 2025 Youth Media Awards earlier this week for his YA novel, Twenty-Four Seconds from Now... (Caitlyn Dlouhy/Atheneum), one of Shelf Awareness's 2024 Best Books for children and teens.

I usually do research beforehand to make sure I know how many awards people have gotten, but I had a hard time counting how many CSKs you've received.

Yeah, I don't know if I know.

I think this is your first win, though?

I do know that. This is certainly the first win. That I do know for sure.

That's exciting.

It is. I have to say, you know, I am a little bit surprised. Not that this is my first win, but that it's this book that's getting the win.

Tell me about that.

First, I should say, the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Author Award is the first award I ever got. I owe a great deal to this award and how it positioned my career. I don't know if I would've been able to get enough light at that time to forge whatever it is that myself and editor and agent and community have been able to forge. So, there's that. But the name "Coretta Scott King"... The gravitas that comes with that always seems mission focused.

And that mission, at least in the way that I've always thought about it, has to do with breaking down boundaries. It's about pushing Black people, brown people, anybody who is fighting for freedom and justice, forward, while also highlighting our history, and thinking about the way history plays itself out in our present.... But this book pushes back against Black conservativism. And when I say Black conservatism, I'm not speaking politically. I'm just speaking about how there are certain things that we keep in-house. There can sometimes be a rigidity when it comes to the maturation of our children, sex being the main thing.

It feels like a win in a different way to me. I know that there had to be deliberation about this book because it presses the line. But I also know that choosing this book means a group of people decided this does matter. Not just Black love--a Black love story--but also a Black child exploring their sexuality. It matters enough for someone to lift this book up and say, "We should push this."

I think what you just said highlights how perfect this book is for the award--you're talking about pushing boundaries and Twenty-Four Seconds from Now... is a lovely, romantic, and honest book focusing on Black love and consent.

I appreciate that. And, I mean, why not, right? We always talk about how we just want Black kids to be to be seen as human. But the moment that a Black teenager expresses a particular sort of desire, we get really freaked out. It's easier for us to talk about anger; it's easier for us to talk about school; it's easier for us to discuss mental health. But when it comes down to your child wanting to have sex, it's a whole other thing. Then you have religious ramifications, you have all this cultural stuff--all these things come into play which thwart the beauty. The fear always gets in the way of the fact that this is very normal and natural and beautiful. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't have responsible conversations--but part of the responsible conversation is making sure our children know that their pleasure is a part of their humanity. It's a part of them expressing themselves. When it's chosen, and it's considered, and it's intentional, it's a revolutionary act.

That makes me think immediately, of course, of how sex-positive everybody in this book is. Did you start writing with the intention of every adult being sex-positive?

I just wanted every adult to be like my parents were. So, the sex talk that the mom has with him at the diner is the exact sex talk--verbatim--that my mother gave me at 15-years-old.

Including the finger in the ear line?

Including the finger in the ear line.

["Put your finger in your ear.... Now, wiggle it around," she said. I wiggled it around.... "Now, tell me, what feels better when you do that, your finger or your ear?" Ma asked. I thought for a moment... "My ear feels better." "Exactly. Women are meant to feel pleasure too. Understand?"]

That's exactly what she said to me at 15 years old at a Ruby Tuesday. And my father, who is no longer with us, was a man who said tenderness is important. We use literature not just to bear witness to the lives that we live, but also to project the lives that might live if we model them.

Your dedication to this book is, "For my friends. And our firsts. And Judy." So, this is your Forever, is that correct?

Yes.

Is that something you wanted to do for a while, or did that come up recently?

A couple years. People have asked me if I would write a love story and I always said no. I didn't want to get it wrong, and I think it's easy to get wrong. And it's also almost too easy to get right and slip into cliché. Then I was asked to be in Judy's documentary, and who says no to Judy Blume?

I reread the books that I loved and then I read the stuff that I hadn't read yet. One of those books happened to be Forever which would never be published today. No publisher would take a risk on that kind of book today for kids--this book will never happen again.

The only thing that's not sanitized in children's literature is violence. It doesn't matter if it's fantasy, contemporary--violence is always okay. We'll write violence. But we tiptoe around sex. And I understand it. The truth of the matter is, as a grown person--and for me, specifically, as a heterosexual cis-gender, grown man--it is slippery to write adolescent sex. That's the reason why I don't actually write them having sex.

Yeah, there isn't any sex in the book.

But when I read Judy, I thought, "I can have this conversation." I can write a love story where they're trying to figure themselves out--where they're trying to figure out what these feelings are and how they go on this journey together. But I don't have to take us on that journey.

In Forever, nothing bad happens. Which was the best part for me. Nobody's pregnant, nobody has an STD, nobody's even all that heartbroken. And that's closer to the truth. That's closer to so many of our high school experiences: It's okay, I am lusty and bothered and horny and now I have this partner who I can explore all these things with. And then I'm going to go to college and I may never see them again and it's okay. That's life. Nothing bad happened.

One last question: what do you wish we would ask you about this book?

I don't know how to phrase it as a question, but I will tell you that this book is about what all my books tend to be about: it's exploring, deconstructing, and hopefully exploding the oversimplified ways we think about masculinity. I think masculinity is inherently toxic in this country, and in most countries, to be honest with you. So, the story for me is really about what happens if we strip a young man of all the things that are supposed to be equated with his "masculinity," with the social construct of masculinity.

We get to ask what it is to be a teenage boy who is scared and tender and loving. His mom has the best advice for him; his father is as tender as he is; his sister is empowered and autonomous. His examples are coming from flipped versions of the stereotypes. That's at the crux of it. It's him getting to know himself. It's all just to ask how we can have an honest conversation about how this version of masculinity that has been pressed upon all of us doesn't actually serve any of us.

What happens if a boy just gets to be himself?  
--Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness

photo: Mei Cheng Wang

Tree Abraham, who was born in Ottawa and lives in Brooklyn, is a writer, art director, and book designer. Her writings experiment with collaged essay and mixed media visuals. She is the author of the creative nonfiction books Cyclettes and elseship (Soft Skull, January 28). elseship combines personal entries with illustrations, photos, and mind maps, all organized within eight ancient Greek categories of love to deconstruct the heteronormative canon to explore bittersweet, lonely, uncharted territories of the heart.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

elseship is a lyrical bricolage from my first experience falling in love (unrequited)--a companion for anyone yearning to queer relationships or grieve heartbreak.

On your nightstand now:

I am notorious for keeping a high stack of books on my nightstand that signal an urgent call to be read. I do my best to prioritize these over the other fresh piles in my apartment. This month: Spiral and Other Stories by Aidan Koch; The Quickening: Antarctica, Motherhood, and Cultivating Hope in a Warming World by Elizabeth Rush; Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas by Clarice Lispector; It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken; and Parallel Botany by Leo Lionni.

Favorite book when you were a child:

I was obsessed with decoding the secrets woven through Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, all 13 books in the collection plus Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography. I am sure Daniel Handler influenced my writing style with his fixation on definitions and the hidden stories told in fictional ephemera. From a young age I already took note of the production of the hardcovers--the morose illustrations, the endpapers, deckle edges, and special finishes--which was a sign of a future career in book design.

Your top five authors:

Sheila Heti, Annie Dillard, Anne Carson, Leanne Shapton, and Rachel Cusk. I admire everything each has ever written.

Book you've faked reading:

I shamefully never get through the pop science books on my shelf from authors like Michael Pollan, Oliver Sacks, and Malcolm Gladwell. For me that content is more realistically consumed via podcast or documentary.

Book you're an evangelist for:

For the longest time, I constantly referenced Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams. Her differentiation between sentimentality and empathy has had a permanent impact on my worldview. But in the last year, I have consumed a prolific amount of climate change content, and I would say Paul Kingsnorth's Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays, which includes an essential proposition on how society must evolve its relationship to the natural world in order to survive. I have an almost religious adherence to the text.

Book you've bought for the cover:

The hardcover for Javier Mauro Cárdenas's Aphasia, designed by the genius Thomas Colligan. I prefer paperbacks, but I had to buy this edition. As a book designer, I have a strong personal preference for very flat covers with a lot of negative space and high-concept graphics. This is one of my all-time favorites and the jumbled little illustrated tiles in blue against white encapsulates the disorienting run-on prose.

Book that changed your life:

I read Maggie Nelson's Bluets, quickly followed by The Argonauts. The way she writes and thinks--I didn't know a book was allowed to be like that. I felt something of myself in her autotheory and began elseship that month. It was my first time writing anything literary, and I credit Nelson with inciting my authorship. In many ways, those two books seem like elseship's parents.

Favorite line from a book:

This is an impossible task, but a quote that echoed in me while writing elseship is from my favorite Virginia Woolf book The Waves: "What dissolution of the soul you demanded in order to get through one day, what lies, bowings, scrapings, fluency and servility! How you chained me to one spot, one hour, one chair, and sat yourselves down opposite! How you snatched from me the white spaces that lie between hour and hour and rolled them into dirty pellets and tossed them into the waste-paper basket with your greasy paws. Yet those were my life."

Five books you'll never part with:

1. Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle--I want every book to be this book.
2. Dictionary of Word Origins by Joseph T. Shipley--for the love of word etymologies.
3. About a Mountain by John D'Agata--I devoured this book. The best snapshot of the absurdity of modern life.
4. Weather by Jenny Offill--I read its fragments to remind myself of what I want my sentences to do.
5. The Next Whole Earth Catalog--a quirky compendium of ideas and visuals that provides endless inspiration.

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

I just finished designing the cover for Anelise Chen's forthcoming memoir Clam Down. I became a fan of Chen's after reading her first book, So Many Olympic Exertions, and was eagerly awaiting her next. It was pure coincidence that I was asked to design the cover just as she was blurbing my book. As with all books I design, I skimmed the Word doc manuscript to brainstorm concepts but will wait for the physical copy to properly read it.

Describe the system you have for filing books on your shelves:

I try my best to section off my books by category (poetry, nature, memoir, writing guides, philosophy, journalism, art books...). I keep all books by an author together and group slightly by size and hue. Anything with a bright colored spine gets hidden at the bottom of the bookcase, which isn't too hard because most books I read seem to have desaturated neutrals. I have hopes to stamp an ex libris into all of them one day.

I Leave It Up to You by Jinwoo Chong (Flux) is a funny, bittersweet, heartwarming story about family, love, and making every minute count.

Readers first meet Jack Jr. in what he is slow to realize is a hospital room. He wakes up intubated and gagging. He's confused about his whereabouts and circumstances, and he asks for his husband. His nurse is thrown into a full panic: Jack Jr. has been in a coma for 23 months and was not expected to regain consciousness.

No one will answer when he asks for his husband. Jack Jr. has missed his 30th birthday and the first 18 months or so of the Covid-19 pandemic. A few weeks into this remarkable recovery, he returns home, not to his Manhattan apartment, but to his father's home in New Jersey. He goes back to the family business, a struggling Korean-Japanese sushi restaurant, which was once meant to be his life's work and which he has not seen in 12 years. Jack Jr. has lost everything, and he finds himself in an unfamiliar, masked world. For much of the narrative, the old wounds he was avoiding--that he will now have to face--remain shrouded from the reader.

Jack Jr.'s kind and loving Appa (father) is a passionate sushi chef and workaholic; his Umma (mother) is private, reserved, and fiercely loyal; his especially estranged brother, James, is a recovering alcoholic with a dear wife and a new baby to join the teenaged nephew that Jack Jr. barely knows. Wise, gawky, 16-year-old Juno is perhaps the member of his family that Jack Jr. best connects with. And then there is Emil, formerly Jack Jr.'s nurse, and now potentially poised to become something more. Through these endearing characters, Jack Jr. considers that perhaps "there was more to loving something than smiling at it."

In Jack Jr.'s first-person voice, these mysterious, painful new challenges are wrenching, but his love for his wacky family, and theirs for him, are unmistakable throughout. Alongside the flavors of carefully prepared nigiri, dak juk, soy, ponzu, and plenty of pork belly, humor and off-kilter love shine brightly in this tale of realizing what's really important and making the most of one's own time. The title of I Leave It Up to You refers to a translation of omakase, the Japanese dining tradition of asking for the chef's choice, and also nods to the novel's sweet attention to the care of self and others. While recovering from his physical injuries, Jack Jr. must also navigate old fractures with a family he hasn't seen in years, let go of a relationship with no closure, and remain open to a surprisingly promising future. The story winds up delightfully warm and soothing, for all the bumps along the way. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia

Shelf Talker: A young man wakes up from a coma and returns to the family, and the family sushi restaurant, that he'd left behind, with comical, heart-wrenching, hopeful results.

At Skylight Books

Thoughts and prayers go out to all booksellers who have been dealing with that dreaded winter bookstore tradition, taking inventory. During my 15 years as a bookseller, "doing inventory" was easily the thing I most despised. Eventually we farmed out the actual counting to a professional inventory company, but the evil discrepancy checks were a forever curse. 

As it happens, January is kind of an ideal month for "taking stock" as well as stocktaking, since business for most bookstores tends to get unsettlingly quiet (excepting the occasional Onyx Storm midnight release party front blowing through). 

Some shops close for a day--and often a long night--of scanning, scanning, scanning. Skylight Books, Los Angeles, Calif. posted: "As promised, here is the official warning that we will be closed tomorrow due to inventory. We will miss y’all, so please come back on Saturday. Love y’all." 

At Old Town Books

Others miraculously (from my perspective, at least) manage to find a way to count stock while remaining open, like Fables Books, Goshen, Ind.: "Inventory day! If you stopped by today, you might have noticed us counting, scanning, and moving things around. Don't panic; we're just doing our annual inventory. We thank you for your patience and understanding of the disarray. We promise the store will be back to its beautiful self soon."

Sometimes it goes unexpectedly well. Bookish in King of Prussia, Pa., posted on January 15 that it would be closed until January 16 for inventory, but on January 15 the shop had "Good News! Bookish is re-opening early! Our all star team finished inventory early so stop on by! We can't wait to see you!"

In the days that follow all that scanning, booksellers must find moments to steal away from their other responsibilities for discrepancy checks, aka "How could 3 copies of Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old just vanish?" 

First Chapter Books

I caught my first scent of 2025 inventory season on the winter air December 28, when First Chapter Bookshop, Seneca, S.C., posted on social media: "We will be closed next week (12/31-1/4) to celebrate the New Year with family and to complete a full inventory count* (and possibly rest a tiny bit between all the to do list tasks). We will reopen Tues, Jan 7 for regular business hours!... * still send all the good vibes and energy because your gal continues to be nervous about this daunting task each year."

On New Year's Day, literally the annual moment when humans are "taking stock" of themselves, Liberty Bay Books, Poulsbo, Wash., noted: "We continue the tradition of tackling inventory on the first day of the new year. Thousands of books to count. And more to restock. See you on the flip side."

Then the momentum really kicked in:

Main Street Books, Davidson, N.C.: "Winter break ends today, so it must be time for... inventory! We will be closed on Monday, Jan 6th and Tuesday, Jan 7th as we work on our yearly inventory counts.... Now, wish us good luck and speedy scanning."

Little City Books, Hoboken, N.J.: "The all-day inventory crew (just missing Kate, who took this photo). For a week or two, we actually know what’s in the store!"

Read It Again

Read It Again, Suwanee, Ga.: "We're working hard to inventory the kids section! If it doesn't snow, we should be open regular hours tomorrow."

Deadtime Stories, Lansing, Mich., went all in on the season with "a complete inventory reset." Knowing that it "would be a herculean task, we certainly didn't expect it to take quite this long. We finished re-entering all of the books into the system last night at about midnight, so now all that's left is everything on the Screamatorium side of the shop. (Yes, everything.) We were hoping to get it all done today so that we could reopen a day early (we miss you!), but we just didn't quite get there. We need one more day to wrap everything up, so we will just be open our regular hours this week. (It doesn't help my time management that this guy has been taking full advantage of Mom's 12+ hour days this past week.).... Can't wait to see you all again soon!"

I would not recommend doing a book inventory the way time traveler Rod Taylor does it in The Time Machine (beginning at about the three-minute mark). I think those books should have been returned to the publisher before the apocalypse. 

In his novel, H.G. Wells described the scene like this: "The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified."

Yeah, make sure to keep those returns up to date. And Happy Inventory Month!