For a Capital Times article featuring Madison, Wis., bookshops Booked for Murder, Avol's Bookstore and Room of One's Own Feminist Bookstore, the topic of the day was "independent bookstores fight for survival."

Booked for Murder owner Sara Barnes gives new customers "a personalized tour of the store and her sales pitch about why someone should buy a book as a gift, even in a tight economy."

"Books are practical gifts," she said. "Look to past bad times; a book is a great investment. In terms of the max bang for your entertainment buck, a book is primo."

The Times reported that Ron Czerwien, owner of Avol's Bookstore, "has helped the store survive by listing more than 18,000 used books online for purchase . . .  Currently, online sales account for about 40% of the store's revenue, and without the online bookselling, Czerwien said the store would not be in business."

Sandy Torkildson, owner of A Room of One's Own, said people are beginning to realize the importance of shopping locally, and customers understood "that this is a hard time for retailing and that they wanted to be wise about how they spent their money so that places they really care about will be around after things get better."

Barnes added that despite a "a great, great, loyal customer base," she plans to continue to adapt to the changing marketplace. "I can't afford to take chances," she said. "Everybody is scrambling and scared, but I want to be the little store that could."

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Barnes & Noble is maintaining its dividend of 25 cents a share. It is payable March 31 to shareholders of record on March 10. At the current stock price of $16.78 a share, B&N's dividend yield is 5.8%.

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Although the building occupied by Heights Books, Brooklyn N.Y., has been sold, co-owner Tracy Walsch told the Brooklyn Paper that the shop will reopen next month at a new location in the nearby Cobble Hill neighborhood.

"My preference was to stay in the Heights, but the new space is nicer," said Walsch, who added she could appreciate the new location even more if the economy improved. "In this market, it's tough. Retail sales are down, and moving is expensive.

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Park Row Booksellers, Clinton, N.Y., is on the market. Owners Debbie and Paul Tennis "hope to pass the business on to someone new," according to the Utica Observer-Dispatch.

"We aren't closing," she said. "The store is for sale."

When asked what might happen if a buyer cannot be found, Allyn Beardsell, the business broker who is working with the Tennises, said, "It stays on the market until it can be sold. We don't anticipate that because we have some interested parties."

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Ursula Abrams, owner of Twice Told Used Books, Ballston Spa, N.Y., will close her shop by the end of March, the Saratogian reported. She had been trying to find a business partner since last fall (Shelf Awareness, November 4, 2008). Abrams will continue to sell books online.

"It’s a difficult business to begin with," she said. "The economy has made it impossible to survive. We've seen a huge downturn in volume and right before Christmas, credit card sales stopped. People were really afraid of their future."

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Ian McEwan told the Guardian that his trio of "first readers" for any new work are poet Craig Raine, historian Timothy Garton Ash and philosopher Galen Strawson. McEwan and Raine have a shorthand way of warning one another when they are descending into the comforting but dangerous realm of cliché. They write "FLF" in the manuscript's margin, for "flickering log fire."

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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, an "early, long-unpublished work by J.R.R. Tolkien," in May, the Associated Press reported, adding that the book, written in the 1920s and 1930s, is "a thorough reworking in verse of old Norse epics that predates Tolkien's writing of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy."

From March 3 to 31, a trailer promoting the novel City of Fire by Thomas Fitzsimmons (Forge Books) will be shown on digital billboards operated by Adspace Networks in 105 malls in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston and 35 other cities. Each mall has between four and 29 screens (for a total of 1,389), and the trailer will run a dozen times per hour on every screen.

The campaign is "an excellent opportunity to test a non-traditional medium for publishers," remarked Phyllis Azar, executive marketing director at Forge, a Macmillan imprint. "These days it's harder and harder to reach a wide demographic, especially young people, in traditional venues. Mall advertising lets us bring our message in the form of a live action 15-second video right where people are and ready to spend."

City of Fire is the story of Michael Beckett, a veteran cop in the Bronx, N.Y., who wants to trade crime fighting for acting. But he puts his dreams of stardom on hold to find the perpetrator of a string of arson fires, part of a deadly scheme. Fitzsimmons worked for a decade as a New York City police officer and is now head of security for many Hollywood A-listers.

Fitzsimmons's thriller is a mass market original, making it "perfect for impulse spending and for trying a new writer," said Azar. Forge is working with bookstores located in the participating malls to promote City of Fire (on sale March 3) with front-of-store visibility and floor display placement.--Shannon McKenna Schmidt

Alfred A. Knopf Jr., who helped found Atheneum Publishers in 1959, died Saturday. He was 90. In his obituary, the New York Times chronicled Knopf's professional life, noting that, as "the only child of the publishing giants Alfred A. and Blanche Wolf Knopf, Pat Knopf, as he was called, worked at his parents' company, concentrating mainly on sales and marketing." After a disagreement with his parents over editorial succession, Knopf "decided to join [editor Simon Michael] Bessie and Hiram Haydn, an editor at Bobbs-Merrill, in founding Atheneum."

Last week at the Westwood Borders in Los Angeles: (from l.) Geoff Boucher, pop culture and entertainment reporter for the Los Angeles Times; Michelle Sucillon, senior event marketing manager at Borders; and Quincy Jones, who discussed and signed copies of his new book, The Complete Quincy Jones: My Journey & Passions (Insight Editions, distributed by PGW).

Tomorrow morning on the Today show: Suze Orman, author of Suze Orman's 2009 Action Plan (Spiegel & Grau, $9.99, 9780385530934/0385530935).

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Tomorrow on KCRW's Bookworm: Micheline Aharonian Marcom, author of The Mirror in the Well (Dalkey Archive, $12.95, 9781564785114/1564785114). As the show put it: "Micheline Marcom's works squeeze themselves between uncomfortable alternatives: Is her new novel, The Mirror in the Well, erotic or pornographic? Is the unnamed woman who narrates it obsessive or masochistic? Is she redeemed or degraded? How do the poles of transgression relate to Marcom's aesthetic?"

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Tomorrow on Oprah, in a repeat: Peter Walsh, author of Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat?: An Easy Plan for Losing Weight and Living More (Free Press, $14, 9781416560173/1416560173).

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Tomorrow night on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, in a repeat: Thomas E. Ricks, author of The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 (Penguin Press, $27.95, 9781594201974/1594201978).

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Tomorrow night on the Colbert Report, in a repeat: Robert Ballard, discoverer of the Titanic and author of Titanic: The Last Great Images (Running Press, $40, 9780762435043/0762435046).

PBS will air "The Tales of Charles Dickens" on Masterpiece Classic this spring. Adaptations of four of the author's works are scheduled to run from now through May. According to USA Today, the series, which began with a three-hour version of Oliver Twist (airing last Sunday and February 22), will continue with "a two-part David Copperfield (March); a five-episode Little Dorrit (March 29 to April 26) and The Old Curiosity Shop (May 3). All but Copperfield, which features Daniel Radcliffe, Bob Hoskins, Maggie Smith and Ian McKellen, are new productions."

Claire Foy, who plays Amy Dorrit, noted the relevance of Dickens's work for our troubled contemporary world. In comparing characters in Little Dorrit with those involved in the Bernard Madoff scandal, she said, "It's completely bonkers. The timing of it is quite scary."

Joss Whedon has won the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America's Bradbury Award for excellence in screenwriting. The creator of hit TV series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and Dollhouse, as well as the Web hit, Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog, will be honored during the Nebula Awards Weekend, April 24-26, in Los Angeles, Calif.

"Like everyone who picks up a pen, I was a rabid Bradbury fan and as greatly influenced by him as any other writer I read," Whedon said. "To receive the award named for him is an honor I'd not dreamed of. In my defense, it didn't exist back then. What did exist were the very lovely, very twisted and very human stories that warped my impressionable mind, and that I have tried, in whatever medium they will let me, to measure up to."

SFWA president Russell Davis praised Whedon's "substantial and superior body of work . . . His impact as a writer, producer and director on the science fiction and fantasy film and television landscape is undeniable, and he is more than deserving of this recognition from our organization."
    
In 2010, this award will become the annual Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation for works including motion pictures, television, Internet, radio, audio and stage productions.

Also at the Nebula Awards Weekend, Harry Harrison will be honored as the next Damon Knight Grand Master, and M.J. Engh as Author Emerita. The SFWA Service Award will be presented to Victoria Strauss, while Kate Wilhelm, Martin H. Greenberg and the late Algis Budrys will be honored with the inaugural SFWA Solstice Award.

Tim Green has written 12 previous thrillers and the nonfiction bestseller The Dark Side of the Game. He played eight years in the NFL and is a member of the New York State Bar. Tim also writes a series of middle grade novels for young readers set in the world of sports.  He lives with his wife and five children in upstate New York. Grand Central is publishing his latest legal thriller, Above the Law, February 24. For more information about the author, visit timgreenbooks.com.

On your nightstand now:

American Rust by Philipp Meyer.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Watership Down by Richard Adams.

Your top five authors:

Charles Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, Patrick O'Brien, Ernest Hemmingway and Pete Dexter.

Book you've faked reading:

Moby-Dick.

Books you're an evangelist for:

Wicked City by Ace Atkins and Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell.

Book you've bought for the cover:

The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara.

Book that changed your life:

Ruffians by Tim Green (debut novel).

Favorite line from one of your books:

"She had everything now that she dreamed of then. But now she dreamed of him." From Outlaws.
 
Book you most want to read again for the first time:

The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

We probably don't need a book to remind us that good manners have done a disappearing act in our world. All it takes is five minutes in a crowded restaurant exposed to one side of a heated cell phone exchange or the same amount of time watching political antagonists implore each other to "Let me finish!" as the volume of their argument escalates. But for those driven to despair by such behavior, former Australian diplomat Lucinda Holdforth's spirited and witty extended essay exploring the essential link between manners and life in civilized society can serve as a handbook full of trenchant insights about why we urgently need to begin repairing the holes such boorish behavior has rent in our social fabric.

Invoking such distinguished allies as Aristotle, Edmund Burke and Orwell and ranging across a wide swath of Western history, Holdforth (whose name alone, it seems, makes her eminently suited to tackle the subject of this book), argues that manners are much more than the tricks that passed for proper behavior in what once was called "polite company." More crucially, in her view, they're essential social lubricants and shock absorbers that help cushion the inevitable friction that arises from the pursuit of each of our goals in increasingly complex human networks. "Manners are a civil mode of human interaction," she writes. "They matter because they represent an optimal means to preserve our own dignity and the dignity of others."

Holdforth's claims for the importance of manners are expansive but crisply and persuasively argued: They're an antidote to excessive self-absorption, a necessary adjunct to a legal system whose reach has become both more intrusive and less effective in defining proper conduct, a counterweight to fundamentalists of all creeds and simply a way of increasing our overall happiness. Dismissing works like Amy Vanderbilt's 1952 etiquette tome as "practically useless," she offers an eight-point "modern template for manners," with prescriptions as elegant and blunt as "Wait your turn" or "Watch what you are doing: multitasking is the enemy of manners" or "Most of the time, shut up." She even offers an intriguing paradigm of mannerly behavior: the Rotary Club.

On a planet inhabited by almost seven billion people, advancing toward nine billion in 2040, sources of conflict inevitably will increase. In this understated, elegant little book, Lucinda Holdforth reminds us that if we don't soon set about the task of treating each other more civilly, that world is likely to be one in which a fair number of us won't want to live.--Harvey Freedenberg

Shelf Talker: A witty and thoughtful look at the decline of civil behavior in modern society and some useful prescriptions for resurrecting it.

Earlier this month in New York, the Children's Book Council held the first CBC Forum, called "The Buyer's Perspective: Looking Back on 2008 & Looking Ahead to 2009." Panelists were Becky Anderson, owner of Anderson's Bookshops, Downers Grove and Naperville, Ill.; Elizabeth Bluemle, owner of Flying Pig, Shelburne, Vt.; Trevor Dayton, v-p, kids and entertainment, at Indigo Books & Music, the Canadian bookstore chain; and Laura Pennock, director of product management for Levy Home Entertainment, which provides books and services to BJ's Warehouse, Kmart, Rite Aid, Target, Toys R Us and Wal-Mart, among others.  

What had audience members buzzing after the panel was the feedback that author-driven marketing is by far the most effective promotion and the discussion of how to address e-books, which all of the panelists believe will only grow in power and presence. The four panelists discussed the importance of partnerships, either with local businesses and schools or through charitable donations (or both).
 
While physical authors' presence in the bookstore is ideal (authors not only draw crowds to the stores but also spur sales of autographed books for weeks after their visit), the panelists realize that this is not always possible. Other successful riffs on this idea are: author and artist virtual visits (via real-time "chats" in the stores), author websites to which stores can provide links from the bookstore website, and pre-recorded messages that stores may leave on teens' cell phones. (Dayton called Stephenie Meyer's message for Breaking Dawn "pitch-perfect"; Anderson did an e-mail blast for Meyer's book to 1,200 teens. These teens can later be informed of future YA events.)
 
With the Local First/Indiebound programs, Anderson helped build awareness in her community about the need to support local businesses; Bluemle's community held a "Shelburne Shops" event over the holidays, and Flying Pig also had a float in the town's parade. Since opening, Bluemle's bookstore has given $50,000 in charitable donations for local causes, schools and fundraisers. Dayton said that Indigo's Love of Reading Foundation has raised $6 million in total funding to Canadian schools. Book group partnerships are another way that both Anderson and Dayton reach potential customers. Anderson has opted into adult book groups who use goodreads.com. Indigo has a "community" site (a link on their home page) with more than 200,000 members. "Authors participate, book editors post routinely; the bigger challenge is getting to teens," according to Dayton.

The Personal Touch

The curatorial role of the independent bookseller continues to be essential to their success, both Anderson and Bluemle said. Bluemle carefully selected titles for Flying Pig's 30-page Kids Holiday Gift Guide; Anderson said that 85% of the copies of Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer that were sold were handsold, and the mock Newbery event resulted in sales. Anderson also sold Gone by Michael Grant and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins as successfully to adult readers as she did to young people. Similarly, she sold books aimed at adults such as Mudbound by Hillary Jordan to teens. Science Fair by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson was Anderson's sleeper hit. Bluemle said that at Flying Pig, mysteries are the hot ticket category right now, and she'd like to see more in the vein of the Gilda Joyce mysteries by Jennifer Allison. At Anderson's Bookshops, sci-fi continues to sell well.
 
Keeping Books Viable

Dayton and Pennock both felt that their challenge is "to keep books a viable option" to customers, in Pennock's words. Levy did national advertising to drive customers into the stores over the holidays; Indigo extended the holiday purchase period. Indigo was up 15% for children's books on December 22 and 23 this year over last year. While the success of the Twilight Saga's fourth book by Stephenie Meyer, Breaking Dawn, was expected, the surge in sales upon the movie's release did come as a surprise, said Dayton, since the spike was greater than it had been for the Harry Potter movies' release. Both Dayton and Pennock are seeing "a halo effect" from Meyer's books for romantic, dark supernatural books. But while Dayton has seen a tapering off in series like Gossip Girls, Pennock, who said her customers tend to follow trends a bit later, said that Gossip Girls is still going strong. Indigo's big hits: Diary of a Wimpy Kid and the Bone series.
 
The Way Ahead in a Tough Economic Climate

Anderson Bookshops is a test site for Above the Treeline's Edelweiss electronic catalogue intitiative (Shelf Awareness, February 3, 2009). Anderson believes this will help her stores be leaner and greener, managing inventory more carefully while also saving trees. She'll also be using the store's website for social networking, using YouTube, encouraging customers to pitch in their two cents, and expanding the store's ecommerce capabilities.

Levy's Pennock said, "We're maximizing sales, making sure we have stock available but not taking as many chances [on titles]. We have to be nimble." Dayton will continue to promote books as a "value purchase."
 
Make Way for E-books

All of the panelists agreed that e-books will gain ground in the coming months, especially once smart phones allow owners to get everything in one place: phone calls, e-mail and reading material. Dayton warned that Indigo has seen a 20% decline in music sales as a result of electronic distribution. Anderson posed the need for publishers and booksellers to join together in the face of this challenge: "I want to be able to sell digital content, to bundle titles together [hardcover, audio, digital]," she said. "We have to work together. Can we still be the middleman? I have the curatorial sensibility and I want to keep that." (Kristen McLean, who heads the ABC, lays out a thoughtful argument for this strategy on this bundling idea--for both booksellers' and publishers' consideration--on her Web site pixiestixkidspix.com, which began with a proposal by HarperStudio's Bob Miller as discussed in Shelf Awareness and at the Winter Institute.)

All four panelists agreed that teens are key to this transition, as the readers coming of age during the rise of digital literacy. "Kids may wind up reading serially, digitally--just as readers couldn't wait for the next chapter during Dickens' day," said Bluemle. "They'll read each chapter on their iPhone as it becomes available." But Bluemle also suggested that those same teens may still want to buy the bound book at the end of that experience. Pennock agreed, "We need to keep every form of reading fresh." And Dayton pointed out that teens still like to curl up with a book, and they need to be with their peers: "Studies show that 80% of teens do their research online and then make their purchase in person." He added, "Kids still won't read for pleasure on a device. Give them beanbags and a coke machine; create a space where they want to hang out."--Jennifer M. Brown