Federal prosecutors withdrew a subpoena seeking the identities of thousands of people who had purchased used books through Amazon.com Inc., according to the AP, which reported that "newly unsealed court records" indicated the "withdrawal came after a judge ruled the customers have a First Amendment right to keep their reading habits from the government."

In a June ruling, U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker wrote, "The (subpoena's) chilling effect on expressive e-commerce would frost keyboards across America. Well-founded or not, rumors of an Orwellian federal criminal investigation into the reading habits of Amazon's customers could frighten countless potential customers into canceling planned online book purchases."

CNET interviewed David Zapolsky, Amazon.com's vice president for litigation, who said, "We think this is a significant decision because it recognizes and adopts in the federal grand jury context a doctrine that has kind of been development over the past 10 years in the prior cases . . . The Kramerbooks case, which grew out of the special prosecutor's investigation of President Clinton and then the Tattered Cover bookstore case in Denver, Colorado, which resulted in a very fine Colorado Supreme Court opinion which goes through the history of this legal doctrine." 

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Doris Lessing, this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, will not be able to travel to Stockholm on Dec. 10 for the Nobel ceremony due to back problems, the AP reported. A foundation spokesperson said, "Unfortunately her medical advisers have said she must not travel." The $1.5 million prize will be presented to Lessing in London. 

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Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Mass., hosted an event honoring author, journalist and Harvard alum, the late David Halberstam. According to the Harvard Crimson the event included reminiscences from friends and colleagues as well as the Out of the Book series film about The Coldest Winter.

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The Universal Library project has now scanned more than 1.5 million books and continues to add thousands of titles daily. The AP (via the International Herald Tribune) reported that "much of the recent work in the Million Book Project has been carried out by workers at scanning centers in India and China, helped by $3.5 million in seed funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation and in-kind contributions from computer hardware and software makers."

The library includes books published in 20 languages, including 970,000 in Chinese, 360,000 in English, 50,000 in the southern Indian language of Telugu and 40,000 in Arabic.

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Under the delectable headline "Catcher and the Rye," the Bites section of Nashville Scene featured Sherlock's Deli, which just opened at Sherlock's Book Emporium and Curiosities, Lebanon, Tenn.

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Milwaukee TV station TMJ-4 reported that "our kids could be getting a megadose of sex education every time they enter the bookstore." The station's "I-Team" planted hidden cameras in Borders and Barnes & Noble stores and found that "some of those young eyes are wandering past some very adult books on the way to the kids section. It's just a few short steps to get from Baby Einstein to The Bedside Kama Sutra."

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"I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon," Philip Pullman told the BBC in response to accusations from the U.S. Catholic League that his novel, The Golden Compass, upon which a new film is based, "promotes atheism and denigrates Christianity. . . . The League says that parents might be taken in by the toned-down film--but will then be fooled into buying the 'overtly atheistic and anti-Christian' books."

According to League president Bill Donohue, "Eighty-five per cent of the people in this country are Catholic or Protestant and I'd like them to stay at home, or go see some other movie. Pullman is using this film as a sort of stealth campaign. He likes to play the game that he's really not atheistic and anti-Catholic. But yes he is and we have researched this. This movie is the bait for the books."

Pullman dismissed the accusations as "absolute rubbish."

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Effective immediately, the following publishers are now being distributed to the trade by National Book Network:

• Jaman Mas Books, London, England, publisher of A Gamelan Manual: A Player's Guide to the Central Javanese Gamelan.
• New Trends Publishing, Washington, D.C., which publishes health and nutrition books, including Nourishing Traditions by journalist, chef and nutrition researcher Sally Fallon.

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Mike Jones, most recently director of sales and marketing at Graphic Arts Center Publishing, Portland, Ore., is enjoying a homecoming. Effective December 3, he will join Keen Communications, which includes Menasha Ridge Press and Clerisy Press, as director of special sales. He was associate publisher at Menasha Ridge Press in Birmingham, Ala., for 10 years before becoming publisher at Wilderness Press in Berkeley, Calif. Jones will continue to work and live in Portland while selling for the two Keen Communications offices, Menasha Ridge Press in Birmingham and Clerisy Press in Cincinnati, Ohio.

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Fictional Firearm Clarification Dept.

Stephen Meyer, manager, sales and publicity, for Eastern Washington University Press, wrote to us in response to a Reuters article noted in yesterday's Shelf Awareness. The head of recruitment for MI6 was quoted as saying that, unlike James Bond, "We don't have a license to kill--we don't carry Berettas--that's simply not true."

Stephen took exception to the quotation, writing, "Good God old man, everyone knows James Bond carries a Walther PPK."

Actually, Ian Fleming equipped Bond with a Walther PPK in Dr. No, after five previous novels in which Bond had used a .25 Beretta. He is shamed into the switch by M at the beginning of Dr. No, when a Major Boothroyd, "the greatest small-arms expert in the world," tells Bond that the Beretta is a "ladies' gun" and M insists that he upgrade.

Bond smiled thinly. "I know, sir. I shan't argue. I'm just sorry to see it go."

So, everyone is correct, more or less.

 

Book sales for the month of September increased 5.7%, based on data released by the Association of American Publishers, which also reported that sales for the year to date rose 9.9%.

Stronger categories:

• Audiobooks were up 36.5% (with sales of $22.5 million).
• E-books rose 27.7% ($2.9 million).
• Adult hardcovers gained 23.6% ($246.5 million).
• Higher education rose 17% ($270.7 million).
• Children's/YA paperbacks increased 8.7% ($58.1 million).
• University press hardcovers were up 7.5% ($6.6 million).
• Religious books increased 1.6% ($83.1 million).
• El-Hi, basal and supplemental K-12 increased 0.6% ($381.2 million).

Weaker categories:

• University press paperbacks declined 6% ($6.1 million).
• Professional and Scholarly decreased 6.3% ($55.2 million)
• Adult mass market dropped 7.5% ($71.6 million)
• Adult paperback sales were down by 10.7% ($148.1 million).
• Children's/YA hardcovers fell 12.8% ($87.1 million).

 

Today on the Diane Rehm Show: James Lipton, author of Inside Inside (Dutton, $27.95, 9780525950356/0525950354).

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Today on KCRW's Bookworm: Millard Kaufman, author of Bowl of Cherries (McSweeney's, $22, 9781932416831/1932416838). As the show put it: "Millard Kaufman has written a classic comic novel that belongs in the tradition that runs from Charles Dickens to Evelyn Waugh. At the age of ninety, Kaufman has discovered that comedy has its own vocabulary--one that many readers no longer understand. He describes why political incorrectness is necessary in order to break conventional attitudes and awaken indignation."

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WETA's Author Author! features Michael Dirda, author of Classics for Pleasure (Harcourt, $25, 9780151012510/0151012512).

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Today on the View: Steve Martin, author of Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life (Scribner, $25, 9781416553649/1416553649).

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After a year-long hiatus, the Writer's Roundtable, which covers the art, craft and business of writing, is starting up again today on the new San Diego Union Tribune station and is accessible through the Internet at signonradio.com. Show times are Thursdays, 3:30-4:30 p.m., Pacific time. Today's guest is Eric Kampmann of Midpoint Trade Distribution and Beaufort Press, who will talk about publishing and why Beaufort published O.J. Simpson's If I Did It. The host is Antoinette Kurtz.

 

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Monday and focuses on political and historical books as well as the book industry. The following are highlights for this coming weekend. For more information, go to Book TV's website.

Saturday, December 1

9 p.m. After Words. Timothy Naftali, director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, interviews Sir David Frost, author of Frost/Nixon: Behind the Scenes of the Nixon Interviews (Harper Perennial, $14.95, 9780061445866/006144586X), in which Frost recounts the preparation and execution required to produce his television interviews in 1977 with former president Richard Nixon. (Re-airs Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m., and Monday at 3 a.m.)
     
10 p.m. Diana West, author of The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization (St. Martin's, $23.95, 9780312340483/0312340486), argues that Americans are in a state of perpetual adolescence that has its roots in the 1950s and 1960s. (Re-airs Sunday at 7 a.m.)

Sunday, December 2

12 p.m. In Depth. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is the guest for a live interview. Viewers can participate by calling in during the program with questions or by e-mailing booktv@c-span.org. (Re-airs Monday at 12 a.m., Saturday, December 8, at 12 p.m., and Monday, December 10, at 3 a.m.)

7 p.m. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, author of Leading Ladies: American Trailblazers (Harper, $25.95, 9780061138249/006113824X), talks about her book profiling the lives of 63 pioneering women in military service, journalism, public health, social reform, science and politics. (Re-airs Monday at 7 a.m.)
     
8 p.m. Ronald Brownstein, author of The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (Penguin, $27.95, 9781594201394/1594201390), analyzes the history and forces that have made American politics divisive and partisan.

 

Melissa Lion is the author of Swollen and Upstream. Upstream has recently been optioned for a motion picture. She writes cookbook reviews for Malibu Times Magazine, Blogcritics and Bookslut. She was a bookseller for five years and has just moved into her own home in Portland, Ore.--a dream come true. Her first book review in Shelf Awareness appears below. Here she answers questions we put to people in the industry.

On your nightstand now:

Amy Bloom's Come to Me and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You. These two collections capture longing and loving and sex so beautifully. Many of her stories center around lovers, people in unhappy or simply fulfilling marriages who seek another's touch. In our culture, where breaking from a monogamous relationship deserves punishment, Bloom's stories ignore damnation in favor of exploring the hunger people feel for connection to another, and this hunger is, for Bloom's characters, punishment enough, though that punishment is often sweet and sought after again and again. After each story, my eyes burned with tears.  
 
Favorite book when you were a child:

Amelia Bedelia. She was so cool, but I think her literalness affected me badly. At my first job I was asked to leave the balance of the files in the drawer. I looked and looked and finally had to ask my boss what the balance was.

Your top five authors:

Kate Atkinson, Michael Connelly, Jane Austen, Siri Hustvedt, Amy Bloom

Book you've faked reading:

Shadow of the Wind. I read half of it, and I couldn't stand it. I had predicted the ending, confirmed that I had predicted the ending, and I closed the book, only to pick up Louise Erdrich's Master Butcher Singing Club, which is an infinitely better book. What's worse is I've faked loving Shadow of the Wind since before it was released. This honesty is refreshing.

Book you are an evangelist for:

The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter. This is the most beautiful book I've ever read. Baxter captures love in all of its forms--hot sultry teenage love, unrequited love, lost love, the love between very old people. Few people have my enthusiasm for this book, but I believe that if I am enthusiastic and domineering enough, more people will come around.

Book you've bought for the cover:

I was a bookseller for five years and so a more appropriate question would be: book you bought after paying rent and standing in the beer aisle only to decide that an author's potential literary greatness is worth more than being drunk. I still don't have an answer because not only was I a bookseller, but I was extremely cheap and so my books came by way of the galleys sent to the store addressed to long-gone managers and my groveling e-mails sent to reps. But the book that I would have bought for the cover and the content would have to be Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog. I went to school in California post-Prop 13 and this book would be a glimpse into a life with words I was born too late to have. Or maybe I would have bought Extraordinary Chickens.
 
Book that changed your life:

Little Stalker by Jennifer Belle. This book is absolutely remarkable. Belle's control over her totally out-of-control characters is masterful. On the surface the book seems like fluff, but about halfway in, the reader understands that she is about to take a very hard look at herself. After finishing this book, I thought, I want to write a book like that, and I sat down and began writing my novel in response. I'm a little more than halfway finished, and I'm so in love with my book that I want to iron its picture to my pillow and make out with it in the night. I feel this way about Jennifer Belle too.

Favorite line from a book:

"I do not love mankind, but he was different."--The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken. I have a tough relationship with this book. I always say I thought it was an okay read, but I've read it four times. Every time I move, I put it on the shelf with my favorite books. And if it is just an okay book, why have I moved with it at least five times? Why do I say that line at least once a week? Okay, Elizabeth McCracken, I give in. Your book is not okay, it's wonderful.

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

Pride and Prejudice. I also wish I had never read this book as it has set a horribly high bar for all men in my life, though I certainly require more than £10,000 a year.

 

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When's the best time to try cooking something brand new? When company's coming over to your brand new house, of course. And don't make something simple, something easy. No, this is time for pie.

I grew up in the '80s in Southern California. When asked recently to make a pie as a sort of mother-daughter bonding thing, my mother was modern enough to reply, "Are you on crack?" And then, "We'll just go to the store and buy one." And so we did.

I own a house now in Oregon, with a sweet little mustard yellow oven that sits above the stove, which charms me to no end. So as our housewarming party approached, I thought I would make pies. The morning of the party, as I was preparing the dough, I grew concerned. I was thinking that in other states, there are pie-baking contests. Perhaps, just perhaps, I had gotten in over my head. But then I thought, when was the last time these people have actually eaten a homemade pie?

I felt very superior until our guests arrived and I told them that I had made pies and they started recollecting their mothers' pies. One told a story about winning a pie contest.

When I told our guests that these were my first pies, their faces fell a little. So I went to the kitchen and visited my pies. I had used the simple recipes from Bubby's Homemade Pies for the Mile High Apple Pie and for the Peach Vanilla Bean Pie. I inhaled deeply. They smelled very good. They looked very good.

As I stood in the kitchen, a friend came to help me. I repeated that I had never made a pie before--and that I was from Southern California! She put her hand on my shoulder. "It's okay, Melissa" she said, "You've crossed the border and something magical has happened. You can bake now."

It seemed like hocus pocus, but as I served my guests, as their forks cut into the golden crust, as chunks of tender apple, brown with sugar and spices, perfumed the air, my guests gave my very first pies good marks. They ate silently and nodded as they cleaned their plates. They came back for seconds. It was true--my friend was right!  Something magical had happened when I crossed the border. But I credit the cookbook.
 
I love Bubby's Homemade Pies because the pies are organized by season, with savory pies after sweet, then crumbles and crisps and finally ice cream and sauces. The recipes for the crusts are clear, with nice line drawn images for bakers who are still unsure when dry is too dry.

From Lobster Empanadas to Concord Grape Pie with Crème Fraiche, the broad selection of clear recipes alone is enough to recommend this book. But the main reason to run right out and buy this book is the Autumn Apple Crisp, quite possibly the best thing I've ever put in my mouth. Let me be more specific. I tasted a piece of apple after I'd assembled the crisp, but before I put it in the oven. There's nutmeg and clove and cinnamon, there's the tart, crisp apple and the sweet, rich crust. One bite is an explosion. It was a memorable bite. No, a revelatory bite. I wish I could live that first bite over and over again. Bubby's Homemade Pies--worth every penny of the cover price.--Melissa Lion

 

Our apologies for leaving out a salient fact yesterday in our story about Water Tanks of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban Legacy by Larry W. Green ($19.95, 9780978967604/0978967607), which Eric Miller's Wicker Park Press is publishing. Partners Book Distributors is acting as wholesaler for the title.