In Karl Rove's resignation speech, President Bush's top political adviser mentioned he might want to write a book, and publishers, "with some reservations, would like to see what he has in mind," according to USA Today.
"If he's ready to talk about what he's been doing, to lay out how he developed his architectural plans and then implemented them and what his vision is, I think that book would have significant readership," said Steve Ross, president and publisher of Collins U.S.

"He's clearly one of the most controversial, notorious and elusive figures in politics, and I think that people would be interested in looking behind the curtain and seeing what the Wizard of Oz is actually saying," added Jonathan Karp, publisher of the Twelve Imprint at Grand Central Publishing.

USA Today reported that Ashbel Green, senior editor at Knopf, suggested "Rove's advance could reach the mid-six figures, but not higher, if only because Rove lacked the charisma of Clinton."

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Here we go again.

Beaufort Books plans to publish If I Did It, the book by O.J. Simpson that was originally to be published by HarperCollins but was cancelled late last year. After legal battles, ownership of the book has been taken by the family of Ronald Goldman, who was murdered with Nicole Simpson. The Goldman family won a civil judgment against Simpson. See Beaufort's announcement here.

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Even though no book is involved, we want to note the death of that beloved huckleberry, Phil Rizzuto, longtime New York Yankees player and announcer. He died Monday at the age of 89. We loved his wacky honesty and language. Our favorite story about him was a line during a broadcast on a Yankees road trip when he marveled about the round rooms in the hotel where the team was staying. He added, "If my wife, Cora, was on the trip, there would be no cornering Cora tonight."

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Nice trick: Murder by the Book, Houston, Tex., will host the only event in the country for Charlaine Harris's upcoming Harper Connelly mystery, An Ice Cold Grave (Berkley Prime Crime, $23.95, 9780425217290/0425217299). On the title's official on-sale date, Tuesday, September 25, Harris will fly to Houston to appear at one of the store's Mystery Author Luncheons and then return home.

Harris is the author of the Sookie Stackhouse series, which is being made into an HBO show, created by Alan Ball (Six Feet Under) and starring Oscar winner Anna Paquin (The Piano, The X-Men) as Sookie. The show makes its debut in January.

The reason for Harris's devotion? Former Murder by the Book manager Dean James read an early draft of a Sookie book and encouraged Harris when no publisher was interested. He believed it to be the best thing she'd ever written.

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Kelly Amabile, who writes One for the Road, a daily book recommendation for AOL's travel blog, Gadling.com, offers a profile of the Bookworm, a "lending library, bookshop, restaurant and events space" that opened in Beijing in 2004 and is expanding elsewhere in China. A second store opened in Chengdu last year, and a third is under construction in Suzhou. Bookworm stocks some 20,000 English-language books and sponsors literary events and author talks. The owners are Alexandra Pearson and Peter Goff. Beginning this fall, Pearson will be booking authors to do mini-tours of all three Bookworm locations.

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Newsmax profiles Mary "Mimi" Havemeyer Beman, owner of Mitchell's Book Corner on Nantucket, Mass., an 800-sq.-ft. space stocking some 40,000 books started by her parents in 1968. Her clientele includes the rich and famous such as Richard Mellon Scaife, Tommy Hilfiger, Teresa Heinz, Bob Wright, Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, Brian Williams, the late Princess Grace and the late Jacqueline Onassis.

A current bestseller is Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 by Marcus Luttrell, which "appeals to the men who like male things--heroism, patriotism, and Navy Seals," Beman said. "We have CEOs and political types and celebrities from Washington, New York, and Palm Beach reading this book."

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Next April, Barnes & Noble plans to open a store in Cumming, Ga., near Atlanta. The store will be in the Avenue Forsythe shopping center at the intersection of Georgia Highway 141 and Ronald Reagan Parkway. 

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Effective August 27, Andy Heidel will join Houghton Mifflin as assistant director of publicity. He is currently publicity manager for Dutton and Gotham Books at Penguin. He was previously publicity manager for the Sci Fi Channel and publicity manager at HarperCollins.

 

Haworth Press, which includes Harrington Park Press, is being merged into Taylor & Francis, pending approval by regulatory authorities in the U.S. and Europe, according to Haworth, whose headquarters is in Binghamton, N.Y. The company publishes 194 scholarly/academic journals and about 150 books and monographs a year. Assuming the deal goes through as expected later this month, most nonfiction Harrington Park Press will be published and distributed by Taylor & Francis but all fiction titles and some trade titles will be "divested to another publishing house." New publicity and advertising for Harrington Park Press fiction titles has been temporarily suspended and some fiction titles in the publishing pipeline have been halted.

Haworth publisher and editor-in-chief Bill Cohen commented:

"One factor [in the sale], in our view, that was in order to grow, Haworth needed a consistently creative Internet platform that could compete successfully with other platforms of major houses. Informaworld at Taylor & Francis was most attractive in this sense. It is a resplendent hosting service, interweaving core journals along with eBooks, abstract databases, and reference works of historic importance. The stability of a prodigious international publishing house also adds an important dimension in regard to digital permanency.

"For Haworth Press authors and journal editors, the opportunities for increased access to libraries through consortia deals and stronger journal packages foreshadow increased impact, usage, and both subscription and intellectual growth. This is a magnificent development for them. I will also be joining Taylor & Francis as a specialist editor/publisher."
 

WORD Bookstore, the new store in Brooklyn, N.Y., owned by Christine Onorati (Shelf Awareness, May 1), has won Lonely Planet's Encounter display contest and will receive a $500 cash prize. In June, booksellers were challenged to design an original window or table display featuring Lonely Planet's new Encounter Guides. Onorati's display included an old typewriter and suitcase and many Lonely Planet titles.

This morning on the Early Show: Nancy Horan, author of Loving Frank: A Novel (Ballantine, $23.95, 9780345494993/0345494997), a fictional account of the romance of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney.

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This morning's Book Report, the weekly AM radio book-related show organized by Windows a bookshop, Monroe, La., features interviews with two bookseller-memoirists:

• Lewis Buzbee, author of The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop (Graywolf, $17, 9781555974503/1555974503)
• Betsy Burton, author of The King's English: The Adventures of an Independent Bookseller (Gibbs Smith, $15.95, 9781423601241/1423601246)

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 the Readers Review on the Diane Rehm Show focuses on The Good Earth by Pearl Buck.

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Tonight on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Stephen F. Hayes, author of Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President (HarperCollins, $27.95, 9780060723460/0060723467).

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Tonight on the Colbert Report: Michael Wallis, co-author of The Lincoln Highway: The Great American Road Trip (Norton, $39.95, 9780393059380/0393059383).

 

Today's New York Times celebrates the 50th birthday of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, which sells about 100,000 copies a year in several paperback editions--and is a favorite shoplifting object, according to Robert Contant, co-owner of St. Mark's Bookshop, New York City.

As part of the birthday festivities, Viking is releasing a 50th anniversary edition of the book as well as a book reproducing the famous 120-ft. scroll on which Kerouac typed the final manuscript; the Library of America is including On the Road in a new Kerouac tome to be published in September; and the New York Public Library will open a Kerouac exhibition in November.

"It's a book that has aged well," Martin Sorensen, floor manager at Kepler's Book and Magazines, Menlo Park, Calif., told the Times. And Erik Barnum, sales floor manager at Northshire Bookstore, Manchester Village, Vt., called On the Road "a book that a bookstore has to have on the shelf or somebody's going to say, 'What do you mean you don't have Kerouac's On the Road?"

Appropriately Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a Kerouac contemporary, Beat poet, publisher and bookseller, said that he had re-read the book last month and "it is really still 'with it,' you might say."

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Wrong continent, right idea. Amusingly while studying in Germany many years ago, we were introduced to On the Road--the ultimate American road trip book--by an enthusiastic German friend, who had just read it while on the road traveling around Europe. We did the same.

Selected titles appearing in paperback next Tuesday, August 21:

To Scotland, With Love by Karen Hawkins (Pocket, $6.99, 9781416525042/1416525041)

Break No Bones: A Novel by Kathy Reichs (Pocket, $9.99, 9780743453035/0743453034)

The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright (Vintage, $15.95, 9781400030842/1400030846)

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer (Anchor, $13.95, 9780307387172/0307387178)

Summer by Karen Kingsbury (Tyndale House, $13.99, 9780842387484/084238748X)

I Gave You My Heart, but You Sold It Online by Dixie Cash (Avon, $13.95, 9780060829728/0060829729)

The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever by David M. Friedman (Ecco, $26.95, 9780060528157/006052815X)

The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn (Harper Perennial, $15.95, 9780060542993/0060542993)

 

The following is from Carolyn Bennett of BookStream, the Poughkeepsie, N.Y., wholesaler, and daughter of John and Betty Bennett, who are closing their bookstore, Bennett Books, Wyckoff, N.J.

 

Back in 1988, my 10-year-old heart burst with a secret. My parents were going to open a bookstore. All they needed was a location, shelves and books, and we were going to be in business! After harboring this secret for months, the plan finally came to fruition, and I was allowed to tell my friends that my town of Wyckoff, N.J., was finally getting its own bookstore and my parents were opening it! Thus began two decades of an extremely successful bookstore.
 
In the past few days, my heart has been bursting with another piece of news. Because of recent rent increases, flat book sales, the explosion of the Internet and the high cost of much needed capital improvements, it is impossible for the store to remain in business. Bennett Books will be closed by September 30.

In the past 19 years, I've been filled with pride for my parents' achievements. From the first book sold (The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump), to the day they finally had enough books to fill the shelves, and the two times that burgeoning stock allowed them to expand the size of the store, to the time they proudly sold and displayed The Satanic Verses as well as Sex by Madonna despite threats of a boycott made by a small-minded local pastor during a sermon, to the time they found a loophole in Bergen County's blue laws which allowed them to sell books on Sundays when the chains on the highway closed (and still do) like the rest of the malls, and throughout their participation in the American Booksellers Association and the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression and the Chamber of Commerce, my parents, John and Betty Bennett, have been outstanding booksellers. It's deeply unfortunate that all great things cannot last, and while I'm devastated to see my favorite bookstore go, I remain confident that independent bookselling will remain an important part of our country and communities.

The world has changed by leaps and bounds since 1988, and I don't think that anything will stop the free distribution of information on the Internet, which creates formidable competition for booksellers. Even I have downloaded recipes and travel instructions instead of looking them up in a book. Despite the competition, the traditional book is not dead, and some bookstores are finding creative ways to evolve with technology. But this is not the only obstacle booksellers face.
 
Recently I had a conversation with my mother about where she purchased books before the store opened. Her answer was that she, like her neighbors, had to drive to other towns, or to the mall, or not purchase books at all. Now that Bennett Books is closing, residents will yet again have to drive long distances to buy books instead of making the short trip to the town center. In the past year, almost every publisher has released at least one book about the importance of buying locally for the sake of the environment and the economy. It would be a shame if they don't make the connection that they have the power to help prevent independent bookstores from closing, and keep these vital community businesses alive. With pricing and terms that would allow independents to compete with chains, it would prevent the ever-growing centralization of book distribution and allow local businesses to stay in business. This would be good for communities, individuals and the publishing industry itself. Unfortunately, it's too late for the people of Wyckoff, N.J., because starting October 1, they will no longer be able to buy their books from a local retailer.