Anne Irish plans to retire as executive director of the Association of
Booksellers for Children on February 15, according to ABC's monthly
newsletter. She will work as a "transition consultant" through next
year's BEA.
ABC president Ellen Davis of Dragonwings Bookstore, Waupaca, Wis.,
wrote that when Irish took the job four years ago, "ABC had a declining
membership, depleted initiatives and a nearly empty bank account." Now
membership is growing, initiatives abound, there are new member
benefits and the association is financially stable.
At a recent meeting, the board decided to relaunch ABC's literacy
initiative next year with a new slogan, Books Make Everything Better,
which will replace Read With a Child on the association's posters and
catalogue cover. Publishers are invited to submit illustrations from
frontlist books for consideration to accompany the slogan.
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In the wake of the announcement that Ariel Booksellers will close, New
Paltz, N.Y., resident Caitlin Welles, who has worked in chain and indie
bookstores, has organized the New Paltz Book Co-Op Project, which aims
to create a nonprofit, cooperative bookstore, the
Times Herald-Record reported.
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The controversy about textbook prices has made the pages of the
New Yorker.
The Financial Page column of the current issue notes that students are
"remarkably good at gaming the cycle of revisions." In "textbook
fashion," students buy fewer new copies of a textbook about to be
revised, a dynamic that "serves as a check on publishers, who know that
if they revise too frequently they could end up losing sales." The only
losers in the game, the column concludes, are "those who buy textbooks
and hold on to them: graduate students, bookworms, and lazy people."
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Foodies alert! The
Los Angeles Times
offers a smorgasbord of stores in the area that sell cookbooks, from
those that specialize in cookbooks--Cook's Library in West Hollywood
and Cook's Books in Pasadena (with more than 30,000 used volumes)--to
bookstores with healthy cookbook sections--Vroman's, the Bodhi Tree,
Children's Book World and Kinokuniya, among others--to nonbookstores
such as le Sanctuaire, a food and cookware boutique in Santa Monica,
and the Autry National Center, a museum of Western history.
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Happy birthday to Diane's Books, Greenwich, Conn., which was founded
November 5, 1990, by Diane Garrett. The 3,000-sq.-ft. store, which has
a customer base of nearly 10,000, celebrated with a combination
Halloween-birthday party last Sunday at which Garrett unveiled a
nearby streetlamp she had bought "as a permanent marker of the store's history
in town and a gift to the community."
"I believed that there was a place for a family bookstore, where adults
and children might shop together and choose books together and learn to
love reading together," Garrett said in an announcement. "And the
community responded."
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Retail chain store sales are expected to rise 4% in October, up one
percentage point from the previous estimate, according to the
International Council of Shopping Centers. The revision upward is because of increased demand for seasonal goods, ICSC said.
In the last week of the month, sales rose 0.4% because of "a chill in the air and a consumer dash for spooky goods."
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Today's
New York Times interviews Man Booker Prize winner John
Banville, who seems to loathe many critics and other writers as much as
they loathe him.
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The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression is organizing a
program for investigative reporters to speak at bookstores to educate
the public about the importance of confidential sources for a free
press.
ABFFE is working with the MLRC Institute, which will identify a
reporter in the bookseller's area who has worked on major stories that
could not have been reported without the use of confidential sources.
Interested booksellers should contact ABFFE president Chris Finan at chris@abffe.com or
212-587-4025.
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