At the National Book Awards ceremony, which will take place Wednesday, November 14, Joan Didion will receive the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and Terry Gross, host of NPR's Fresh Air, will receive the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

Camille Paglia will announce the 20 finalists for the awards on October 10 at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the oldest public library in the U.S., founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1731.

For more information, go to the National Book Foundation's website.

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Happy anniversary to Sheila and Tom Daley of Barrett Bookstore, Darien, Conn., who will celebrate their first 10 years as owners of the 68-year-old business Saturday, September 22. "It's a special day for us," said Sheila told the Darien Times. "We really have felt honored for the past decade--to be the caretakers of this very special business. We also wanted to find a way to thank the customers who have been part of the success of the store."

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On October 1, Back Pages Books, Waltham, Mass., which sells new and used books, is moving to another location on Moody Street that will also house the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University and a range of studios for artists, the Justice, Brandeis University's student newspaper, reported. The store also will co-curate an art gallery next to the building.

Alex Green, who founded Back Pages Books in April 2005, told the paper that the new space "is just a better space that allows us to be the community institution we always wanted to be."

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Barnes & Noble will simultaneously close a store and open a new store in Boulder, Colo., in June 2009. The stores are in the Crossroads Commons on Pearl Street. 

The new, two-story 32,000-sq.-ft. store will be built just south of the existing one-story store and is the first step of redevelopment for the shopping center, according to the Boulder County Business Report. The change will allow for an expansion of Whole Foods and parking lot improvements. 

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Along with Sears, Wendy's and Carmike Cinemas, Borders Group was cited by today's Wall Street Journal as an example of a stock that fared worse than the averages this summer because hedge funds, which own at least 40% of each those companies, have had difficulties--blame the credit crunch and mortgage woes--and needed to cut some holdings.

David Kostin, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, and others have argued that the selling of such stock by hedge funds, the Journal said, "was due to the de-leveraging, not because of reduced earnings expectations or other fundamental factors that usually weigh on shares." Kostin wrote in a recent report: "Buy these stocks which have dropped due to ownership composition, not necessarily fundamentals."

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Kate Mattes, owner of Kate's Mystery Books, Cambridge, Mass., told the Boston Globe that "she's not sure how much longer she'll be chatting up fellow fans and famous writers at her current location. Mattes has put the house in which the bookstore resides up for sale." According to the Globe, Mattes "doesn't plan to sell the business, but is looking for a partner so she can move her 15,000 titles to a larger space and allow the business to continue far into the future."

"It's a kind of family planning," she said. "No one in my family wants to run the bookstore someday or own the house."

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O'Reilly Media has set its second Tools of Change for Publishing Conference for next February 11-13, in New York City. The company is issuing a call for proposals for presentations and material to cover. For more information, go to O'Reilly's website.

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Effective September 17, Dave Nelson is joining Union Square Press, the Sterling Publishing imprint, as executive acquisitions editor, in which role he will focus on mind/body/spirit titles as well as health and self-improvement books. He is currently publisher of Beaufort Books, recently in the news for the impending publication of If I Did It by O.J. Simpson.

Union Square's Philip Turner commented: "I've known Dave Nelson more than 20 years, since he made a selling visit to the bookstore I owned then, and always admired his knowledge of the market and his creative approach to publishing quality authors and their books. As a senior sales executive who's created competitive strategies for marketing hundreds of notable books, Dave helped launch such bestselling authors as Garrison Keillor, Terry McMillan, Mary Karr, Geneen Roth, and Peter Kramer."

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David Hyde has been promoted to v-p of publicity at DC Comics. He has been director of publicity since 2003. Before then, he was assistant director of publicity at Anchor Books and earlier was senior publicist at Vintage Books.

 

The next Southern California Independent Booksellers Association bookstore tour, to be held Saturday, September 29, will visit four Los Angeles-area museum stores:

• The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, where a docent will talk about the Desert Garden, which is celebrating its centennial, and conduct a tour.
• The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where Carol Norcross, guest curator, museum store buyer and author of Flowers of Hannah Borger Overbeck, will discuss the production of the book and its corresponding exhibit.
• The Hammer Museum, where the group will browse the galleries and museum store.
• The Norton Simon Museum, where a professional lecturer will discuss collector Norton Simon and the museum.

For more information, go to SCIBA's website.

This morning on Good Morning America: Senator John McCain, presidential candidate and author of Hard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them (Twelve, $25.99, 9780446580403/0446580406). He will also appear today on NPR's Diane Rehm Show.

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Also on the Diane Rehm Show: Ira Flatow, author of Present at the Future: From Evolution to Nanotechnology, Candid and Controversial Conversations on Science and Nature (Collins, $24.95, 9780060732646/0060732644).

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Tonight on the Colbert Report: Garrison Keillor, whose new book is Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon (Viking, $25.95, 9780670063567/0670063568).

 

Celebrating (in this life) the publication of The Reincarnationist, the new novel by M.J. Rose (Mira, $24.95, 9780778324201/0778324206), at Partners & Crime, the New York City mystery bookstore, last week: (from l. to r.) Margaret Marbury, an editor at Mira; M.J. Rose; Meryl L. Moss of Meryl L. Moss Media Relations; and Loretta Barrett of Barrett Books, the literary agency. Incidentally this week Rose is guest blogger on powells.com, interviewing each day "a mega bestseller about reincarnation--Deepak Chopra, A.J. Jacobs, Doug Preston, Diana Gabaldon and Christine Feehan."

 

Human Dark with Sugar by Brenda Shaughnessy (Copper Canyon Press) has won the 2007 James Laughlin Award, which gives $5,000 to the most outstanding second book by an American poet published in the previous year. The finalist for the award is Kate Northrop, for her collection Things Are Disappearing Here (Persea Books).

The judges offered these comments:

• Caroline Knox: "In Human Dark with Sugar, the speaker's voice brims with verve, rueful good humor, and self-knowledge: 'To be wise is simply to be understood, even missed.' "
• Matthea Harvey: "Human Dark with Sugar is both wonderfully inventive (studded with the strangenesses of 'snownovas' and 'flukeprints') and emotionally precise. Her 'I' is madly multidexterous--urgent, comic, mischievous--and the result is a new topography of the debates between heart and head."
• Peter Gizzi: "The agility and surprise of the book's verbal sleights of hand and the immediacy of its address, its braiding of an existential dark with the 'sugar' of eros."

Harvey Freedenberg practices intellectual property law and litigation with a Harrisburg, Pa., law firm. In 2000, he took a six-month sabbatical from his law practice and studied creative writing with novelist Susan Perabo at his alma mater, Dickinson College. Since then, he's been writing steadily. Four of his short stories have won prizes, and he has written an as yet unpublished novel. Harvey is a freelance reviewer and is member of the National Book Critics Circle. He has also served on the board of his county library and as a member of the selection committee for the "One Book, One Community" program sponsored by eight counties in Central Pennsylvania. We welcome Harvey to Shelf Awareness as a book reviewer. His first two reviews appeared appeared in the last week: Quirkology and The Braindead Megaphone.

On the nightstand now:

Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo; Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg; In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders; Selected Short Stories by Anton Chekhov; Rock Springs by Richard Ford; and The Meaning of Life by Terry Eagleton

Favorite book when you were a child:

A Separate Peace by John Knowles

Top five authors:

Richard Ford, Tim O'Brien, Charles Baxter, John Cheever and John Irving

Book you've faked reading:

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Book you're an evangelist for:

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

Book you've bought for the cover:

The Days of Awe by Hugh Nissenson

Book that changed your life:

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Favorite line from a book:

"But in the world according to Garp we are all terminal cases."--John Irving

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

The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter

Book you've reread:

Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow

Despite amazing prices that help the bottom line and interesting titles that can spice up a store, the remainder market remains an often murky phenomenon for many independent booksellers. Last October, at the biggest U.S. remainder book fair, CIROBE (the Chicago International Remainder and Overstock Book Exposition), Shelf Awareness talked with four independent booksellers with years of experience buying and selling remainders. Here they offer their observations and tips about this quirky but rewarding part of the business.

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First, the logical reasons for stocking remainders. "Remainders are a way for a store to set itself apart from competitors," Mark Mouser, general books manager at the University Book Store, Seattle, Wash., told Shelf Awareness. "Remainders give the customer a great deal, but have the latitude to pay the bills."

With frontlist titles, most stores "are all basically representing the same titles and following the publishers' marketing campaigns," Mouser continued. "With bargain books, there is a huge difference in what customers see at the chains and independents. For example, most of Barnes & Noble's offerings in this area are promotional and proprietary publishing. There are very few true remainders, and if they do them, they're very commercial."

Some booksellers believe remainders "devalue the integrity of new books," Mouser noted. "But that definitely is not our experience."

Gayle Shanks, co-owner of Changing Hands, Tempe, Ariz., emphasized that certain genres "are difficult to sell at full price but work as remainders." Like Mouser, she appreciates remainders' margins. Because of their economics, "gifts and remainders are no brainers," she said.

Remainders can be a fun challenge, too. Carole Horne, general manager of the Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Mass., noted that at many remainder booths she sorts through a thousand books "to find the 15 that work for us. It's always so great when you find one. It's like Filene's Basement!"

In addition, "there's nothing you have to have," Horne said. "You can focus on what will sell the best, not how it's promoted or whether it's on the New York Times bestseller list."

The Art, Science and Hard Work of Buying

Bob Sommer, co-owner of Changing Hands, cautioned that "it takes a couple of seasons for a bookseller to understand the market."

Horne agreed, calling remainder buying "its own special category of buying. It requires a funny combination of gut sense of what will sell as a remainder and being willing to beat the bushes to find the odd things that no one is finding. You have to stay on top of what's available and get them before they're gone. It's a combination of science and art and hard work."

She added that the best remainder buyers "develop an instinct for books that may do O.K. as new hardcovers but will be special as remainders. Sometimes you remember or check stock and see how they did in their earlier incarnations."

At Changing Hands, some of the categories that work best as remainders are cookbooks, art books, fiction hardcover and children's hardcover. For example, Shanks said, "I can no longer buy more than two or three copies of a new art book. They're in the $50-$75 range. But as remainders priced at $20-$30, they work."

The Harvard Book Store does really well, Horne said, with art, architecture and photography books, which as remainders "can have a pretty high price but are a great deal compared to the list price." Other strong categories are literary fiction, history, biography, essays--"a lot of the same stuff we sell well as new books." The store also sells remainder children's books and cookbooks, but not many craft titles. The store sells very few promotional books.

Display

Gayle Shanks lamented the misperception that remainders are "great disaster books" about such topics as hurricanes and the Hindenburg explosion. As Bob Sommer pointed out, remainder titles vary widely in terms of quality and allow a bookseller "to distinguish the store. There is such a selection that you don't have to buy crap."

University Book Store in Seattle displays remainders "in the front" and makes them an impulse item, Mouser said. "We like to stack them up and blow the stacks out." He adds that he does not like to treat remainders as "second-class citizens. When you do that, customers pick up on it. I like customers who look on remainders as a good opportunity to build a fine library on a budget."

Harvard Book Store stocks some remainders on its main floor, "on the right and wrapping around the windows," Horne said, with newest arrivals featured. Some 45% of the basement is remainders; the rest of the stock in the basement is used.

Remainder trends

Among changes that the booksellers have noticed in recent years, sometimes chains or remainder dealers buy a complete lot of remainders, so that "we're fighting over midlist rather than frontlist," as Bob Sommer put it.

Mark Mouser lamented that some major publishers would rather pulp overruns than sell them as remainders. Books destined for pulping often make it to the market anyway. "It would be better to make sure that everything [involving these titles] is done aboveboard and all get a fair shot," he said.

Another change: remainders are sold online, too, of course. Several booksellers said this has made their work easier, but others said that they need to see many of the books before buying them. Also some purchasers of online bargain books are consumers, further adding to the buying competition.

Mouser begins stocking up partway through the year for the holiday season. At CIROBE, which is always in late October, "I'm hoping to find great coffee table book gifts. I'm looking for true remainders and great titles with general appeal." Buying has become "more subtle than it used to be," Mouser continued. "We're not buying 300 copies of a hot title." And he buys more promotional gift titles than he used to. CIROBE remains important for us "to get enough stock to get through December."

One of the joys--and difficulties--of remainders is the sense of the hunt. By definition, remainders are not going back to press soon. Good material can disappear quickly. As Mark Mouser put it, "You snooze, you lose."

As a result, booksellers need to adopt what Bob Sommer called "the zen of remainder buying." He explained: "You can't focus on what you missed. You have to remember that there is always more to find."--John Mutter


CIROBE, held this year October 26-28 at the Hilton Chicago, is the largest remainder show in the country and draws a range of American and international dealers and booksellers. There are also two remainder shows in Atlanta, Ga., the Spring Book Show, which will be held March 28-30 at the Georgia World Congress Center, and the Great American Bargain Book Show, to be held next August at the same site. This year for the first time, BookExpo America had an extra early day for bargain book buyers and sellers. The next BEA will be held in Los Angeles May 29-June 1.

A tip about CIROBE: for many buyers and sellers, the show starts when dealers begin selling in hotel breakout rooms a few days earlier than the show's official opening.