Notes: Germany's Largest Bookseller Gets Larger
Germany's Federal Cartel Office has approved the purchase by DBH Buch Handels--the Weltbild-Hugendubel joint venture--of most of Karstadt department store's 52 bookstores, according to Forbes.com. The Office did not approve the purchase of eight stores and said that the takeover was "problematic from an anti-trust perspective in the cities [of] Kiel, Leipzig, Wiesbaden, Frankfurt and Munich."
DBH, which has more than 400 outlets, is already Germany's largest bookstore chain.
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Focusing on comic books
alone and resisting the temptation to diversify has been the secret to
20 years of success for John and Susan Bonner, owners of Halley's
Comics, Old Town Fort Collins, Colo.
In a Fort Collins Now
article portraying the city as a "comics conclave," John said the old
fashioned comic book is still a great niche market: "Wal-Mart is not
going to start selling 50-year-old comic books."
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On the Arkansas Times's
"To-do List" for this coming Saturday is "Lorenzen's Last Day."
Lorenzen & Co. Booksellers, Little Rock, Ark., is closing, and
"after Saturday, when all of the store's remaining books will be half
off, there will be no local major retailer of used books. Who cares if
you can buy a used copy of Go Down, Moses on Amazon for a
dollar? I want the unexpected. Go tell Rod [Lorenzen] you'll miss him
and pick up something strange for the road."
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The East
Side Book Cafe, Big Bear City, Calif., is a place "where everyone knows
everyone's name. A place where people exchange ideas and stories,"
according to the Big Bear Grizzly, which reported that the business will close April 14 "because of a rent hike."
Owner
Gail Sefl opened the used bookshop in 2004, then expanded with a café in
2005, a decision that "was less about a profit margin and more about a
place for people to gather," she said. "We didn't have a community
center in the East Valley. There was no place for people, especially
young people, to meet."
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Happy fifth birthday to Biblio.com, the online book marketplace that is celebrating by relaunching its site with the aim, among other things, of improving search capabilities and result matching. The company has also redesigned the site.
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"Bookstores overflow with food stories that have nothing to do with recipes," according to the Eugene, Ore., Register-Guard, which explored the evolution of the "Food Lit" section in recent years: "Let us remember Julia Child and M.F.K. Fisher, John McPhee and James Beard, who have been thinking and writing about food for longer than there were bookshelf merchandisers." A reading list is also featured.
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Mo Willems, artist, script writer, author and Caldecott Honor winner, will be a guest of honor on Kids Day, Sunday, April 20, the last of the three days of New York Comic Con. Kids Day aims, the show says, "to rekindle kids' fascination with comic books and to showcase all the benefits of having a young enthusiast in the family. It will be devoted to providing a full day of activities designed to entertain young fans."
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This is a book whose emotional pull creeps up on you, pitch by pitch. Organized around the six innings of a Little League championship game, the story will appeal to longtime fans of baseball as well as those who know nothing about the sport. Preller assumes his audience's intelligence and seats readers diamond-side. He zeroes in on each player during the course of the game and begins and ends with Sam Reiser. "Three weeks short of thirteen," Sam is a better player than his best friend, Mike Tyree, but as the game begins, Mike is on the field, and Sam is in the announcer's box ("A true friend, a best friend, would be happy for Mike. . . . Sam wasn't glad. Not for Mike, not for anybody"). As the innings progress, we learn that Sam is sentenced to the press box by a diagnosis of osteosarcoma. Yet Sam lifts the spirits of many of the players; as one teammate puts it during the top of the sixth in a nail-bitingly close game, "No matter how sick [Sam] felt, he kept showing up at the games. It was his way of saying, It's gonna be all right." But this is a book as much about on-the-field action as it is life lessons. Pitchers ignore catchers' calls, catchers pull pitchers out of their funks, kids who've never made a clean throw come through, and when a relay throw is bungled, one kid "coasts into third with a stand-up triple. The coolest play in baseball." Even sports veterans will savor many of Preller's observations--especially about pitchers (e.g., "All pitchers have a little bit of rock star in them"; "It is a job for an egotist. And an optimist. No others need apply"). After all, it's the losing pitcher with whom Sam most identifies, "The star player still yearning for one final chance to win the game." Like the boys on the field and in the press box, readers will feel this is a game to remember.--