"I think it's the kind of book that rewards multiple buying."--Stephen Colbert lauding his soon-to-be-released I am America (And So Can You!) on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. (For more on Colbert, see Notes items below!)

 

BookWorld Companies, the distributor of some 105 small publishers, with headquarters in Sarasota, Fla., and distribution facilities in LaVergne, Tenn., closed its doors at the end of last week. The company did not file for bankruptcy.

AtlasBooks, the book distribution division of BookMasters, Ashland, Ohio, is talking with BookWorld's publishers and is taking on "a majority" of them, according to BookMasters COO David Wurster. "All of them can have a new home with us if they want," he told Shelf Awareness.

Within two weeks, AtlasBooks hopes to begin selling former BookWorld publishers to the trade. "It's mostly a paperwork issue," involving vendor of record agreements and other business, Wurster said, since most inventory has been transferred. Even if the publishers don't sign on with AtlasBooks, "we will help them out," he added. Still, some smaller BookWorld publishers have decided already to close.

The shift of publishers to AtlasBooks has been aided by the coincidence that AtlasBooks's v-p of sales Randall McKenzie was until this spring v-p of sales at BookWorld and thus is familiar with the defunct company and its clients and customers. Booksellers and librarians with questions may reach him at RMcKenzie@bookmasters.com or 419-281-5100, ext. 1114.

Wurster noted that BookWorld's main secured creditor is the bank on which the company had a line of credit that has about $1 million outstanding. The difficulty for BookWorld publishers will be "making it through financially despite lost BookWorld receivables and the negative cash flow that will occur when they start with us," he said. He stressed that the company will do everything it can to aid them and is taking on "a lot of return liability" and working with major wholesalers and retailers to make a "peaceful" transition.

"It's another tragedy in the book distribution world," Wurster commented. "There's only a shrinking handful of us still standing."

AtlasBooks represents some 800 publishers to the trade and provides full distributor services for them; it offers limited fulfillment services to another 700 publishers. BookMasters also has divisions that handle a range of book services, including composition and design, offset and digital printing, binding and storage.

Headed by Ron "Ted" Smith, BookWorld had expanded in recent years, adding Spanish-language sales staff, more sales reps and Small Press Central, a website that listed small press titles and linked to BookWorld.--John Mutter

In a unanimous vote, the Los Angeles City Council granted landmark status to the San Vicente Boulevard building that houses Dutton's Brentwood Books. According to the Los Angeles Times, the designation "was unopposed by Charles T. Munger, the property's billionaire owner. It paves the way for a 180-day period during which the developer and residents can try to negotiate a compromise that could preserve portions of the mid-20th-century structure and, many bibliophiles hope, Dutton's itself."

Although the designation would not prevent the owner from "developing the property or even demolishing the building," it does establish a review process.

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Sadly because of declining sales, in part after a move a year ago, the owners of Eso Won Books, Los Angeles, Calif., will, in late December, consider closing the store that specializes in African-American themes, the Wave reported.

Besides competition from chain stores and Internet retailers, co-owner James Fugate cited a decline in purchases from institutions such as the Los Angeles Unified School District and public libraries. Last week he made a pitch to those customers via e-mail, saying in part, "Supporting us keeps books in the community, especially since we've moved over here, there really isn't a bookstore around, [for] miles. There's no real place--so people come here not just only [for] black books but they come here for school books."

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Because of concerns about the safety of some of the actors in the movie and disputes with them and their families, Paramount Vintage plans to delay the opening of The Kite Runner by six weeks to December 14, the New York Times reported. The filmmakers apparently would like to resettle the actors outside Afghanistan permanently.

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Borders has signed a lease for a former funeral home on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported. The store, which should open in November 2008 after the space is gutted and rebuilt, would be "the first national bookstore chain in Orleans Parish since BookStar closed its 12,000-square-foot French Quarter store in 2003."

Seen as a sign of vitality by some, the news has been greeted unhappily by some local booksellers. For one, Tom Lowenburg of Octavia Books said, "It's a deliberate, predatory move against independent bookstores."

But Britton Trice, owner of the Garden District Book Shop, said, "We welcome the competition. People will always go and check [the new Borders] out, but I believe in the loyalty of our customers. . . . We'll all get through this with excellent customer service, excellent book knowledge and knowing our customers."

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The audio version of Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!), an abridgment/creative adaptation narrated by Colbert, Amy Sedaris and a dozen others, will be available for digital download at midnight on Friday from audible.com and iTunes, according to the New York Times. The book appears next Tuesday.

Donald Katz, audible's CEO, said that audio sales can help drive sales of the traditional book: "People have these profound experiences of these works and then either want to memorialize them with a physical incarnation or they actually want to go back and read the texts."

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Name that bookstore! The Hornsey & Crouch End Journal reported that Tim West and Simon Key, former Waterstone's employees who plan to open their own bookshop in Wood Green have launched a contest asking "local wordsmiths to come up with a name for their store." Follow the developing stories of both bookshop and moniker at their entertaining blog, Open a Bookshop, what could possibly go wrong? 

"Can you imagine if you had given W.H. Smith its name?" said West. "Every time you walked past the shop you would have a surge of pride. It becomes a thing potentially of legend--it could change someone's life."

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Before you open that used bookstore you've always dreamed of, you might want to consult Entrepreneur.com's list of "10 businesses facing extinction in the next decade." Used bookshops have been "closing fast, and those that are still open are relying on what's making them obsolete: the Internet. . . . Odds of survival in 10 years: Some of them will still be eking out an existence, but the handwriting is on the wall."

Tim Carson, owner of  Carson Books & Records, Vancouver, B.C., told the Vancouver Sun that, despite the dire predictions at Entrepreneur.com, he is confident of survival. He admitted, however, that the "Internet has had a dramatic impact. I sell some books online, but I don't make as much profit as I'm losing from people who use the Internet all the time and no longer buy directly from me."

On the other hand, Jim Roberts, owner of the Books End, Syracuse, N.Y., told WSTM-TV that the Internet had improved his business. "We do a great part of our business now online, probably 50 percent. I'm not worried, as long as there are books and readers, we will still be here."

And in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, Larry Pruner, owner of Valley Books, Amherst, Mass., said, "I've been on the brink, the fence, about whether I should continue myself with a retail space. Forty to 70 percent of my gross retail sales are from the Internet, beginning seven years ago." 

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Harry N. Abrams announced the following appointments:

• Jennifer E. Brunn has joined the company as director of publicity. She was most recently publicity manager at ReganBooks and earlier worked for Running Press.
• Alexis Banyon is joining the sales department as director, trade and proprietary sales, and will manage the company's commission book sales reps, act as liaison with the Canadian distributor and be the main sales contact with Abrams U.K. She was formerly sales manager at InnovativeKids, where she sold to warehouse clubs and specialty accounts and developed proprietary projects. Earlier she worked for seven years at Candlewick Press, most recently as merchandising director.
• Jody Mosley has joined the sales department as gift retail sales manager. She formerly worked at Hachette as a manager selling to the educational wholesale market and museums. Before that, she was a gift sales rep for Holtzbrinck and earlier worked at Random House, Keyholder and Barnes & Noble, the last as a gift section manager in stores in New York, Colorado and Florida.

 

This morning on the Today 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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Today on the Diane Rehm Show: Michael Neufeld, author of Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (Knopf, $35, 9780307262929/0307262928).

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Today on the View: Jack Cafferty, author of It's Getting Ugly Out There: The Frauds, Bunglers, Liars, and Losers Who Are Hurting America (Wiley, $24.95, 9780470144794/0470144793).

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Today on KCRW's Bookworm: William Gibson, author of Spook Country (Putnam, $25.95, 9780399154300/0399154302). As the show put it: "What's happened to William Gibson? Along with the most sophisticated future-predictions, speculations about the sociology of cities, and adventures in virtual post-realities, he has finally learned how to get his characters from one room to another. We explore this accomplishment (in which he takes a good deal of pride)."

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Today on NPR's Fresh Air: Garry Wills, author of Head and Heart: American Christianities (Penguin Press, $29.95, 9781594201462/1594201463).

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Tonight on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Jack Goldsmith, former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel who resigned over the "torture memos" and author of The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration (Norton, $25.95, 9780393065503/0393065502).

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Tonight on the Colbert Report: John Kao, author of Innovation Nation: How America Is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why It Matters, and What We Can Do to Get It Back (Free Press, $26, 9781416532682/1416532684).
 

Favorite Nursery Rhymes from Mother Goose, collected and illustrated by Scott Gustafson (Greenwich Workshop Press, distributed by Workman/Artisan, $19.95, 9780867130973, 100 pp., ages 2-up, September 2007)

While there is no shortage of Mother Goose anthologies, Gustafson's lush full-page and full-spread framed illustrations, coupled with the ample trim size (10.5" x 12") and luxurious paper hark back to 1940s children's books and make this an ideal gift. He begins with a fair-haired, blue-eyed Little Bo Peep on a hilltop, a breeze blowing her ruffled petticoat and pastel pink dress in the direction in which she searches for her lost sheep; her woolly charges mount the hill behind her, their eyes conveying their loyalty to their keeper. But many more of the images transmit the artist's sense of humor--and even of justice: Humpty Dumpty, perched on a wall, looks so haughty he seems to deserve his imminent fall, for instance (the horses and king's men appear as a boy's toys); similarly, the trio of blind mice ooze menace from their pores, so that we nearly root for the farmer's wife as she grabs her carving knife. The artist makes sense of a few nonsensical rhymes, too: Goosey, Goosey Gander sports the bright red cap and coat of a bell hop as he labors under the weight of his lady's belongings ("Goosey, goosey gander,/ Whither shall I wander?/ Upstairs and downstairs/ And in my lady's chamber"), and Jack, a grasshopper, nimbly jumps over the candlestick to woo a butterfly with the present of a lily. Mindful of the nursery-age set, Gustafson depicts Jack, a pig, still in the act of falling down, before he's broken his crown; and in "Sing a Song of Sixpence," "the maid in the garden" warily observes the slit-eyed blackbird just prior to its "peck[ing] off her nose." In all of his paintings, the artist captures a moment, perhaps none more masterfully rendered than the portrait of Little Miss Muffett, who has laid down her violin for a snack of curds and whey, when a spider descends in a red coat and plumed hat; the look of surprise on both her face and that of her King Charles spaniel is worth the price of admission.--Jennifer M. Brown

Our mention yesterday of The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff, which appears next February, misidentified the publisher. Rather than HarperCollins, the publisher is Voice, the new imprint at Hyperion. HarperCollins will be distributing the title per its distribution agreement with Hyperion.

Our apologies!

 

More than half a century ago, Thomas Merton wrote, "We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest."

I was thinking about Merton last weekend while at the New England Independent Booksellers Association Trade Show in Providence, R.I. I stayed at the Westin Hotel, which is connected on one side to the Rhode Island Convention Center and on the other to the Providence Place Mall, a multi-level, 170-store tribute to sensory overload that is described on its website as "the ideal venue for tour de force shopping excursions."

The NEIBA trade show, by contrast, seemed an utterly civilized alternate universe. People were having quiet conversations about books. There was "product" on display, but it would have been a stretch to call what was happening there a calculated plan to "excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension." It was downright bookish. Words mattered.

At the Friday author breakfast, novelist Tom Perrotta said, "I like to work in microcosm." And legendary Knopf editor Judith Jones shared her at once simple and complex decision-making process decades ago when she acquired Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking: "If there's me, there must be others. And that is the hunch editors go on anyway."

It is the hunch we all go on. Bookstore owners, buyers, events coordinators and frontline booksellers also work in microcosm, taking the deluge of information coming their way and fashioning from it the tighter personal narratives of business plans, orders, events schedules, handsells. At the NEIBA show, these professional readers studied the titles on display, searching for the books that might cause them to think, "If there's me, there must be others."

On Friday afternoon, I was on a panel, "Doing Digital Right," moderated by Len Vlahos, ABA's director of education and director of Booksense.com. Joining us were Heather Gain, Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Mass., and Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, McNally Robinson NYC, New York, N.Y.

We discussed bookstore blogs and email newsletters, MySpace and Facebook, Shelfari and LibraryThing and much more. We talked about investing precious time in Web marketing, about trusting staff and about the act of faith involved in working with online strategies that might not pay obvious, immediate benefits. We spoke, as we all often speak, of using the Web to enhance a bookstore's inherent strengths.

Jessica, whose personal blog about bookselling, The Written Nerd, has been thriving for years, shared her thoughts on in-store and out-of-store blogging. "It's just another way of doing the things we do well," she said.  

Heather explained how Myspace and Facebook are playing an increasingly important role in opening lines of communication between bookstores and patrons, particularly younger readers, and how Harvard Book Store's MySpace site encourages connection with the large student population in the Cambridge area.

Ultimately, what we talked about was giving bookstores an online voice.

When Judith Jones said, "If there's me, there must be others," a little lightbulb shined for a moment over my head. If you were at the author breakfast, you may have noticed it.

I thought about how I choose the next book I'm going to read, a ceremony that has a lot to do with "voice." In the first few pages of a book, I consider two important questions: Is this is a special place? Do I want to stay here for awhile.

If there's me . . .

During our panel, Len Vlahos discussed the concept of Web 2.0, and the participatory nature of online life now, the ongoing conversations with unlimited potential. "I think people are looking for a blend of professional and amateur information," he said.

There are so many ways to accomplish this, and most of them do look like conversations. When I highlighted some bookstore websites during the panel--destinations like breathe books, Beauty and the Book and Wordsmiths--I was trying to show that the conversation already works well for some bookshops.

Doing digital right is not necessarily doing digital expensively or complexly. Doing digital right is showcasing your bookstore's voice online, and trusting that if there is you, there must be others.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)