J.W. Beecroft Books, Superior, Wis., is closing because owners Janet and John Murphy want to retire and "try new things," KUWS Wisconsin Public Radio reported. Janet Murphy, who has owned the store with her husband, John, for 10 years, said that the town "can support a bookstore again. There are customers that would really, really use and participate in another bookstore here rather than going to a chain store." The station commented: "When their doors close, people will have to head elsewhere for fine books, coffee and good conversation--for now."

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May Day! The New England Independent Booksellers Association will hold a spring day of education at the Hilton Garden Inn in Portsmouth, N.H, on May 1. The tentative program includes a morning session with ABA, lunch, a session of NEIBA education, a presentation of the member in-store peer review program and a late afternoon-early evening reception for Emerging Leaders. 

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In recognition of their charitable efforts, Howard and Joy Gersten, owners of the Jeffrey Amherst Bookshop, Amherst, Mass., have been honored with the Siegfried Feller Award for Outstanding Service to the Libraries.

The Massachusetts Daily Collegian reported that, "on Dec. 8, the bookshop held its fifth annual benefit, where the Gerstens donated 10 percent of their proceeds to the UMass campus libraries."

"We love the library and we wanted to do anything we could to help," said Howard.

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For more on the change in ownership of Eureka Books, Eureka, Calif., reported here in Friday's issue (Shelf Awareness, December 7), check out this story in the Times-Standard.

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Another holiday gift list: the Miami Herald recommends travel and adventure titles.

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The December Book of the Month from the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression is You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression by Matthew Rothschild (New Press, $16.95, 9781595581648/1595581642). By the editor of the Progressive magazine, the book contains dozens of stories from his McCarthyism Watch, which chronicles cases since the attacks of September 11 in which people were punished for expressing their right to protest. One example: Todd Persche, a freelance cartoonist who "lost his job with a weekly newspaper for drawing cartoons critical of the Bush administration."

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Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing has acquired the rights to the Beacon Street Girls series, which was created by B*tween Productions Inc., Lexington, Mass. According to the Boston Globe, "The books, written by a stable of ghostwriters, feature the fictional adventures of six girls living in Brookline. B*tween also runs a Beacon Street Girls website and markets an array of branded accessories, including jewelry and clothing aimed at 'tweens'--girls 9 to 12 years old."

B*tween has published 14 books, which have sold about 500,000 copies. Addie Swartz, the company's chief executive and founder, said, "The whole concept was to develop an integrated brand that would reach girls across a variety of touchpoints." 

Rubin Pfeffer, senior v-p and publisher of children's books at Simon & Schuster, told the Globe that the books are "a perfect fit for his company's line of books for girls." The paper continued, "Pfeffer was tipped off about the Beacon Street Girls series by a B*tween board member, Barbara Marcus, a former executive at Scholastic Inc. who helped oversee publication of the Harry Potter books."

The Flying Pig Bookstore

Customers at the Flying Pig Bookstore in Shelburne, Vt., are purchasing an abundance of nonfiction titles. The Rejection Collection Vol. 2 edited by Matthew Diffee, American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic by Joseph J. Ellis and Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain are leading the way to a 13.5% increase over last year's sales during the first week of December.

The strong start is happening despite by the slow pace of hardcover fiction sales. "I'm not seeing a lot of movement with the exception of Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs and Howard Frank Mosher's On Kingdom Mountain," co-owner Josie Leavitt said. "There are very few must-have bestsellers at the moment, which is encouraging people to go to other sections of the store." The thriller The Night Ferry by Australian Michael Robotham is also garnering sales.

Writers close to home are making waves at the Flying Pig, which in the past 10 days has hosted three events with Vermont authors: Rusty DeWees, who promoted Scrawlins, a collection of columns, and the children's book authors Linda Urban (A Crooked Kind of Perfect) and Amy Huntington (Three Lessons for Astair the Bear). Massachusetts author Sarah Marwil Lamstein appeared at the store on Sunday to promote Letter on the Wind: A Chanukah Tale.

Signed books are popular gift choices at the Flying Pig. The store has hosted some 40 events since mid-September, and each author autographed additional stock. Books are displayed on an end cap, and face-out titles are changed daily. Among the offerings are titles by Tomie dePaola, the author of Angels, Angels Everywhere, Guess Who's Coming to Santa's for Dinner? and other picture books, and Bernd Heinrich, whose oeuvre includes The Snoring Bird: My Family's Journey Through a Century of Biology and Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival. "We have a reputation now as a place where you can get some really interesting signed books," said Leavitt.

Among the store's bestselling sideline items are Bush's Last Day merchandise, which includes magnets and key chains with clocks that count down the days until the current president is out of office. Some canines are benefiting from their owners' political stance. Bush Biskits--peanut butter flavored treats featuring a likeness of the commander in chief--are situated near the cash wrap and appealing as stocking stuffers and present toppers. One fervent customer purchased a case to use as party favors.

The Yellow Book Road

The Sisters Grimm Book 1: The Fairy-Tale Detectives by Michael Buckley helped lead the way to a stellar week at the Yellow Book Road in La Mesa, Calif. Sales were up 10% over last year's tally for the first week in December. Other titles customers were purchasing for Hanukkah and Christmas gifts included Doreen Cronin's Diary of a Fly, The Incredible Book Eating Boy by Oliver Jeffers, Jann Brett's Mitten and Three Snow Bears as well as Kiki Strike by Kirsten Miller.

In general, "board books related to Christmas or Hanukkah are selling better than the picture and early/middle reader holiday books," noted owner Kristin Baranski. "I'm a bit surprised that more people aren't giving Christmas picture books as holiday gifts. They're looking for titles children can read year-long."

Young chefs are honing their culinary skills with titles like Fiona Watt's Little Book of Christmas Cooking, one of the Yellow Book Road staff's favorite handsells in the category. "It has a great price point [$6.99], and the cover is cute," said Baranski, while the small trim size makes it easy for children to hold.

Sideline items selling well at Yellow Book Road include Christmas Tree in-a-Box, which is featured in the store's holiday display. "It's perfect for a classroom or office decoration," Baranski said. Puppets and stuffed animals are also proving popular, as well as stocking stuffers located near the cash wrap like children's watches and small board books.
 
Customers seeking holiday gift-giving assistance are making use of the store's shopping service. This past Saturday a woman phoned and asked for recommendations for eight children. Selections were made by store staff after they heard about the personalities and reading level of each child. "It was fun to shop for her," said Baranski, "and even more enjoyable when she loved the books we pulled for her." The personal touch resulted in a $300 sale.

Here are some of the Yellow Book Road's gift suggestions by age range:

• Infant and Toddler: Big Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown
• Picture Book: Toy Boat by Randall de Sève and Knuffle Bunny Too by Mo Willems
• Early Reader: the Junie B. Jones series by Barbara Park
• Middle Reader Pick for Girls: Kiki Strike: The Empress's Tomb by Kirsten Miller
• Middle Reader Pick for Boys: The Seems: The Glitch in Sleep by John Hulme and Michael Wexler
• Young Adult: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Murder by the Book

The bestselling title last week at Murder by the Book in Houston, Tex., was Sue Grafton's T Is for Trespass. Some 300 people turned out for the mystery author's signing last Thursday; the momentum continued Friday and Saturday, when sales were triple those of a normal week. Gift certificate purchases were on the rise as well, said manager McKenna Jordan, and so far this season "everything is looking great."

Grafton's appearance wasn't the only notable event to take place last Thursday. The latest issue of the store's quarterly magazine, The Dead Beat, was hot off the press. Created by assistant manager David Thompson, the magazine is "a fabulous selling tool," said Jordan. "We always see a huge rise in sales the week it comes out." (Customers who couldn't wait for a printed copy had been provided with a PDF via e-mail.) The magazine is sold in the store, as well as by subscription, and a complimentary copy is given with purchases of $40 or more.

This issue of The Dead Beat is the first of two spotlighting Soho Press titles. The decision had nothing to do with co-op advertising, noted Jordan, but rather the staff's enthusiasm for the company's books. Their favored Soho authors include Peter Lovesey, Cara Black and Colin Cotterill, who illustrated the magazine's cover (it can be seen on murderbooks.com). It's the first time an author has lent artistic abilities to the task, and a portion of the proceeds from the sale of this issue will be donated to Cotterill's Books for Laos project (colincotterill.com). The writer's Laos-set thrillers include Thirty-three Teeth and The Coroner's Lunch.  

One of the "Mysterious Gift Ideas" featured in the magazine is Interred with Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell, which is the staff's choice for Best Debut of the Year. Employees are recommending the literary thriller--which features a killer staging murders from Shakespeare's plays--to readers who enjoyed Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale. Picking up speed this week is The Rainaldi Quartet by Paul Adam, which Jordan described as "a really excellent Italian mystery."

Although the store carries a selection of non-mystery and thriller titles--among them Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure and novels by Penny Vincenzi, Dorothea Benton Frank and Jennifer Chiaverini--customers are opting for murder and mayhem. "This time of year," said Jordan, "it's pretty much mysteries."--Shannon McKenna Schmidt

 

Kerry Slattery, general manager of Skylight Books, Los Angeles, Calif., has another cautionary tale about an author appearance scam (see yesterday's Shelf Awareness), one that happened a few years ago. She writes:

"The author Eric Alterman [a columnist at the Nation and author of What Liberal Media?, When Presidents Lie and more] was scheduled to appear at our store, and C-Span was planning to cover it. I got a call that morning from 'Eric Alterman's assistant,' who told me that he was terribly sorry, but that Eric woke up with a serious case of bronchitis and would not be able to catch his plane to do the event and wasn't able to talk at all--and that he felt just terrible about it. It was a very busy moment at the store and I didn't think to get the number, etc. The first thing I thought of was to call C-Span and let them know. I don't know why I didn't think to call the publicity person at the publisher, but I didn't have it handy and I was really busy, and the call seemed convincing to me. When I called C-Span, they contacted the publisher and found out that Alterman was indeed planning to appear and that the call was a scam (apparently from someone who didn't agree with the author's political views)! Fortunately, I hadn't sent out a cancellation e-mail, and everything was fine, but I felt so foolish for being taken in."

 

This morning on Fox News' Fox & Friends: Bruce Littlefield, author of Merry Christmas, America!: Megawatt Displays Across the U.S.A. (Collins Design, $19.95, 9780061348297/0061348295).

Also featured on the show: Our Dumb World: The Onion's Atlas of the Planet Earth (Little, Brown, $27.99, 9780316018425/0316018422).

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Today on the Diane Rehm Show: Clay Gordon, editor and publisher of Chocofile.com, founder of the New World Chocolate Society and author of Discover Chocolate: The Ultimate Guide to Buying, Tasting, and Enjoying Fine Chocolate (Gotham, $25, 9781592403080/1592403085).

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Today on the View, Bill Clinton discusses Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World (Knopf, $24.95, 9780307266743/0307266745).

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Tonight on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, a repeat: Jamie Oliver, author of Cook with Jamie: My Guide to Making You a Better Cook (Hyperion, $37.50, 9781401322335/1401322336).

 

No Country for Old Men, adapted from Cormac McCarthy's bestselling novel, garnered New York Film Critics Circle awards for best picture, director (Joel and Ethan Coen) and screenplay; and Javier Bardem won as best supporting actor.

Other literary winners named by the NYFCC included director Sarah Polley (best first film) and Julie Christie (best actress) for Away from Her, based upon an Alice Munro story. Persepolis, from the graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, won best animated film.

"We started the vote without any clear front runners, but No Country for Old Men quickly emerged as a favorite," said Stephen Whitty, critic and columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger, and NYFCC 2007 chair. "It is a pleasure to welcome back these New York-based filmmakers for their stunning achievement. It was also nice to see several debut efforts by female filmmakers (Sarah Polley for Away from Her and Marjane Satrapi for Persepolis) make our list this year."  

 

Selected titles appearing next Tuesday, December 18:

Hand of Evil by J.A. Jance (Touchstone, $25.95, 9781416537533/1416537538) is the third title featuring Ali Reynolds. In this book, she is in Arizona recovering from the death of her ex-husband.
 
New in paperback:
 
The Hunters: A Presidential Agent Novel by W.E.B. Griffin (Jove, $9.99, 9780515143935/0515143936).
 
Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56 by Rafe Esquith (Penguin, $14, 9780143112860/0143112864).
 
Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil by Deborah Rodriguez and Kristin Ohlson (Random House, $14.95, 9780812976731/0812976738).

 

The German Book Office's book selection for December is The Seventh Well by Fred Wander, translated and with an afterword by Michael Hofmann (Norton, $23.95, 9780393065381/0393065383), published here this month.

Wander was born in Vienna in 1917, survived 20 concentration camps during World War II and later worked as a journalist in East Germany. The GBO called this book, first published in 1970 in East Germany and recently republished in German, "a stark, haunting novel that does not spare the reader gruesome details, yet distills from the forced labor, hunger, and death marches the enduring value of each human spirit that even death cannot diminish."

The Seventh Well "opens in Auschwitz as Mendel Teichmann, a 50-year-old atheist and storyteller, weaves a tale for his fellow inmates, helping them to temporarily forget their surroundings. Throughout the book, the narrator brings the reader into the fold of prison life and records its effect on a host of haunting and memorable characters. Men from all stations of life populate the story, each given a chance to reveal themselves as they were and as they are. Exposed in a frantic rush of poetic language, characters appear and many disappear, leaving palpable emptiness and loss."

A panel discussion with translator Michael Hofmann will take place in New York City at the Austrian Cultural Forum on January 24. Wander died last year.

 

This slender little volume of six novellas, five of which are related, is Japanese novelist Tetsuo Miura's debut in English. The novellas are simply astonishing, plain and straightforward in an artless way but packed with unusual twists and turns and told with a quiet urgency.

Both Miura's unnamed narrator and Miura himself suffer from terror of their own genetic make-up. Miura and his narrator are both writers desperately trying to work out their demons, telling the same story over and over, the story of Miura's real-life family. One sister threw herself into the sea. One sister took poison. One brother disappeared. One brother ran off with the family funds. And then there's Miura. With the history of his brothers and sisters, he can only wonder in fear what will he do to shame his family. Does he not have the same blood?

There's a startling moment when you begin the second story and realize you've already covered this ground, that the tale of the narrator's shattered family and his love for Shino is being told again, but differently this time. Each of the five tales takes a different moment in the same narrative. What is told in one sentence in the third story becomes the subject of the fourth story. As exasperated as the reader gets with the narrator, who refuses to work so that he can lock himself in his room and write stories that he can't sell, the troubled little narratives that have resulted are his redemption and our joy. Slowly you learn more and more about Miura's brave, tragic family and the hair's breadth difference between good luck and bad.

Fascinating minor characters abound--the idealistic bookseller who buys the narrator's books, the cast-off girlfriend of a college buddy, kind neighbors and childhood friends, broom makers and house maids, the unnoticed, forgettable people of the world.

The last novella has nothing to do with the first five. Maybe this means Miura has worked out his demons and can go on to tell another story besides his own. Its central image--a father swinging his daughter in a field and becoming so exuberant he's careless--captures Miura's melancholy sense of the randomness of fate. Jaded readers will find that set-ups in Miura's world seldom lead to the pay-offs we expect. What looks like a "Dear John" letter can really be a proposal of marriage.--Nick DiMartino