Congratulations to Kate Mattes of Kate's Mystery Books, Cambridge, Mass., and the Center of the Book in the Library of Congress, who will receive Raven Awards at next year's Edgar Banquet. The awards are given by the Mystery Writers of America to honor "outstanding achievement in the mystery field outside the realm of creative writing."

Mattes was cited for "her tireless efforts in advancing the genre of mystery fiction," dating back to when she founded the store on a Friday the 13th in 1983. She is a founding member of the National Chapter of Sisters in Crime and the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association and "was also the first to promote nearly every crime writer in the Boston area by hand-selling their books to devoted customers and fans."

The Center for the Book was cited for its "constant support and dedication . . . to literacy education as a whole" and for its Reading Promotion Partners Program and for helping to organize the National Book Festival.

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Books-A-Million opened two new stores recently:

• A 15,500-sq.-ft. store at 2554 East Stone Drive in Kingsport, Tenn., in the northeastern part of the state, the company's 17th store in Tennessee.
• A 15,500-sq.-ft. store in Baton Rouge, La., in the Towne Center at Cedar Lodge at 2380 Towne Center Boulevard. This is BAM's 10th store in Louisiana and second in the Baton Rouge area.

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For the second time in less than three months, Borders Group CEO George Jones has bought 50,000 shares of company stock, Reuters reported. Jones bought the stock last Friday for prices between $11.55 and $11.69 a share--or a minimum of $577,500--and now owns more than 170,000 shares of Borders.

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The website topretirements.com, which is dedicated to helping baby boomers find the best retirement community, has posted a story called "Judging a Retirement Town by its Bookstore." In the story, nine authors talk about their favorite bookstores and towns. More than 30 stores and towns are highlighted.

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Cyber Monday started early for Bigkatts the Book Trader, Naples, Fla. The Naples Daily News reported that the bookstore, which received 37 online book orders Friday, "has already noticed an increase in online holiday sales."

"A lot of people don't want to go to the stores," said co-owner Chris Kobzina, "or there are a lot of people who are working more than one job at this time, so they don't have time. Online you don't have to be standing outside Penney's at 4 a.m. and you don't have to pay $3.39 for gas for your car, either."

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"People have a tendency to want to relive the past. People always like coming into used book shops," Ray Walsh, owner of Archives Book Shop and Curious Book Shop, East Lansing, Mich., told the Lansing State Journal, which noted that "Walsh's stores have stuck to their roots throughout the years even with a changing market and customer base."

 

In an effort to gauge the holiday season, we'll be checking in regularly with booksellers at three stores in the weeks leading up to Christmas. They have graciously (and bravely) agreed to allow us to chronicle their adventures during the busiest selling season of the year. Their stories start today.

The Flying Pig Bookstore

"Friday felt like the first shopping day of the season," said Josie Leavitt of the Flying Pig Bookstore in Shelburne, Vt. "We've been careful not to overwhelm people with Christmas music." While holiday books, cards and advent calendars have been on display for two weeks, it wasn't until Black Friday that holiday tunes began to play in the store. Customers responded to the festive spirit, singing along and spending money. "Our sales for the three-day weekend were up 11% over last year," noted Leavitt.

This year was the store's second holiday season in its current location. The Flying Pig Bookstore was in the neighboring town of Charlotte for 10 years before Leavitt and co-owner Elizabeth Bluemle moved into an 18th-century Shelburne building that once housed the oldest inn in the state. "We tripled our customer base just by moving," Leavitt said. In addition, because the store is located on one of the town's main streets, it attracts more foot traffic.

Weekend sales were boosted by an event with Phoebe Damrosch, who signed copies of her book Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter. The memoir is a favorite of several staffers, including Leavitt, who expects to continue to handsell it through the season. Besides being well-written and funny, she said, "it's a great book that crosses gender lines. It appeals to men and women equally."

Other popular choices of shoppers included Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And You Can Too!), the backlist title Holidays on Ice: Stories by David Sedaris, and the children's tomes Olivia Helps with Christmas by Ian Falconer and Kate DiCamillo's Great Joy. "I felt like everyone left happy with what they bought for the various people on their lists," said Leavitt, "and that's what we strive for here."

The Yellow Book Road

Olivia Helps with Christmas and Great Joy are also expected to be top sellers this season at the children's store Yellow Book Road in La Mesa, Calif. "Kate's book speaks for itself," said co-owner Kristin Baranski. "It's beautiful."

The Yellow Book Road carries books for children from infants to young adults, as well as teaching supplies, and is located in San Diego County. Black Friday proved to be a slow start to the holiday shopping season, noted Baranski. "If we were in a traditional mall area, our sales may have been higher," she said. "We are generally a destination store and our main customer base is teachers. With teachers also being on vacation, they are out shopping in other retail areas than children's books."

Sales increased on Saturday as patrons came in "looking for holiday gift books," Baranski said, and the mood of shoppers was upbeat. Buyers benefit from the expertise of the store's staffers, all of whom have experience in education and can suggest books based on kids' interests and reading levels. Six are current or former teachers, including Baranski and co-owner Mary Hayward.

"Picture books were definitely the big sellers this weekend," said Baranski. The classic Dr. Seuss tale How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and The Legend of the Poinsettia by Tomie dePaola led the way. One of the Yellow Book Road staff's favorite handsells for young bibliophiles this year is Deborah Heiligman's festive pictorial tome Holidays Around the World: Celebrate Christmas with Carols, Presents, and Peace.

Murder by the Book

Selecting books for gift recipients is a service rendered with enthusiasm at Murder by the Book in Houston, Tex. Store staffers each have a specialty category, from cozy to hard boiled and everything in between, and they had ample opportunity to put their skills to use this past weekend.  

Black Friday started off sluggish, noted assistant manager David Thompson. Customers didn't show up until late morning. Sales turned brisk in the afternoon, though, and the store ended with one of its best-ever Black Fridays. Saturday, typically the busiest day of the week, proved even better with sales exceeding those of the day before by about a third.

One of the store's biggest sellers this weekend was A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir edited by Edgar Award-nominee Megan Abbott and published by Thompson's Busted Flush Press. Another popular title this season is Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, a reprint of a 1939 book that was recently selected by a Men's Journal editor as one of the best thrillers ever written. "It really is an amazing book," said Thompson, "and we have them at the counter to handsell to anyone who buys a thriller." His pick for the best book of the year--staffers' choices are prominently featured at the front of the store--is Martin Limón's The Wandering Ghost, a military mystery set in Korea.

A display catching customers' interest is one chock full of mysteries that take place at Christmas, Hanukah or New Year's. Among the selections are The Alto Wore Tweed, a humorous tale by Mark Schweizer, one of the store's bestselling authors over the last several years; Slay Ride and Hell for the Holidays by Chris Grabenstein, which Thompson notes will appeal to James Patterson fans; and Frost at Christmas by R. D. Wingfield, the first book in a series of police procedurals set in England. The store has sold more than 100 copies of Wingfield's book in the two months since Thompson discovered and read the backlist page-turner, which he described as "a wonderfully perfect book for the Christmas season."--Shannon McKenna Schmidt

 

This morning on Good Morning America: Rich Blake, author of The Day Donny Herbert Woke Up: A True Story (Harmony, $23, 9780307383167/0307383164).

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This morning on the Today Show: Paula Deen, author of Christmas with Paula Deen: Recipes and Stories from My Favorite Holiday (S&S, $23, 9780743292863/0743292863). She will also appear today on Oprah.

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Today on the Diane Rehm Show: Patricia Hampl, author of The Florist's Daughter (Harcourt, $24, 9780151012572/0151012571).

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Today on Talk of the Nation: James Lileks, author of Gastroanomalies: Questionable Culinary Creations from the Golden Age of American Cookery (Crown, $23.95, 9780307383075/0307383075).

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Today on All Things Considered: Andrea J. Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz, authors of The Daring Book for Girls (Collins, $24.95, 9780061472572/0061472573).

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Today on NPR's Jim Bohannan Show: Rick Beyer, author of The Greatest Presidential Stories Never Told: 100 Tales from History to Astonish, Bewilder, and Stupefy (Collins, $18.95, 9780060760182/0060760184).

 

This past week, the following movies opened:

The Mist, based on the novella by Stephen King. Adapted by Frank Darabont (The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption), the movie stars Marcia Gay Harden and William Sadler as townspeople under siege by mysterious creatures after a bizarre storm. The tie-in edition is from Signet ($6.99, 9780451223296/0451223292).

Starting Out in the Evening, starring Frank Langella and Lauren Ambrose, is based on the novel by Brian Morton. In the story, a graduate student becomes attached to an elderly writer she once idolized. The tie-in edition is from Harvest ($14, 9780156033411/0156033410).

Selected new titles to be published Tuesday, December 4, and Thursday, December 6:

Antony and Cleopatra: A Novel by Colleen McCullough (S&S, $26.95, 9781416552949/1416552944) chronicles the famous love affair and Antony's rivalry with Octavian.
 
T Is for Trespass by Sue Grafton (Putnam, $26.95, 9780399154485/0399154485) is the 20th Kinsey Millhone mystery. This time the private investigator must care for an elderly neighbor injured in an accident.
 
A Year with the Queen by Robert Hardman (Touchstone, $30, 9781416563488/1416563482) provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the English royal family.
 
A Bull in China: Investing Profitably in the World's Greatest Market by Jim Rogers (Random House, $26.95, 9781400066162/1400066166) gives advice for investing in the world's fastest-growing economy.
 
Jim Cramer's Stay Mad for Life: Get Rich, Stay Rich (Make Your Kids Even Richer) by James J. Cramer and Cliff Mason (S&S, $26, 9781416558859/1416558853) is a compilation of investment advice from the host CNBC's Mad Money.
 
Murdered by Mumia: A Life Sentence of Loss, Pain, and Injustice by Maureen Faulkner and Michael A. Smerconish (Lyons Press, $24.95, 9781599213767/1599213761) is the story of the famous case from the point of view of the widow of slain Philadelphia police officer Danny Faulkner.
 
New in paperback next week:
 
Twilight Eyes by Dean Koontz (Berkley, $7.99, 9780425218648/0425218643).

 

In this day of divisive national debates on individual rights to privacy, executive privilege and fiscal accountability, we see animosity among opposing camps reaching flashpoints and wonder if fierce antagonists can ever resolve differences and forget ugly disagreements. In his timely book, Walter S. Holland shows that such debates and animosities are as old as our nation; he also points out that at many points in our history some variant of Christian charity has played a crucial role in reestablishing peace and social commitment. He argues that extending sympathy, affection and forgiveness to all members of our nation, time and again, has enabled rededication to common goals. To illustrate his thesis, he provides close readings of a selection of documents from Colonial, Revolutionary and Civil War history. The words of John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, as well as Holland's astute analysis of these historically seminal texts are inspiring, illuminating and, most of all, provocative.

Holland's analysis of the evolution of Thomas Jefferson's thinking between drafting the Declaration of Independence and his First Inaugural Address is particularly fascinating. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson studiously downplayed references to God that would smack of John Winthrop's Puritan/Calvinist theocratic positions; his focus then was on rights of citizens and prevention of tyranny. Jefferson's gradual realization that a community needs something akin to Christian charity (even if a demystified version) in order to bind its members to each other is testimony to his presidential genius in a time of change.

For Abraham Lincoln, the stakes were even higher. A nondenominational man faced with leading a nation reeling from the Civil War, Lincoln certainly built on the lessons of Winthrop and Jefferson; he also saw in 1865 that something powerful (was it God's guidance?) had to be invoked to overcome forces threatening American democracy. The story of Lincoln's illumination in a time of national crisis could not be more moving or inspiring.

Inspiration runs throughout the book, along with Holland's call for increased awareness of the power of Christian charity in our time. With equal parts inspiration and provocation, the book has a rare potential for stimulating thoughtful discussions in book clubs, community forums and town meetings.  If the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, arguably our two greatest presidents, were open to rethinking long-held positions to achieve a greater good, why not the rest of us?--John McFarland