Books Etc., which has operated in the Old Port section of Portland, Me., since 1973, is closing the store at the end of June, when the lease expires, and hopes to reopen in another Portland location by the end of the year. In the meantime, Books Etc. will focus on its Falmouth, Me., store.

Books Etc. owner Allan Schmid said that "high rent and the poor economy" were causes for the decision to leave the space, where Ken Cadigan founded the store. Schmid bought Books Etc. in 1987 and doubled the space to its current 2,400 square feet. The store is the last of the original retail businesses that were in the Old Port area when it was redeveloped in the early 1970s.

The Falmouth store, which Schmid opened in December 2000, has 4,650 square feet of space.

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Daniel Goldin, who is opening Boswell Book Company in the former Harry W. Schwartz store on Downer Avenue in Milwaukee, Wis., let us know that the store will have its soft opening on April 3. He added, "Soft meaning . . . no signage."

Contact information is: 2559 N. Downer Avenue, Milwaukee, Wis. 53211; 414-332-1181; boswellbooks.com. Sign up for Boswell Book Company's e-mail newsletter at info@boswellbooks.com.

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Collected Works Bookstore, Santa Fe, N.M., plans to relocate to a much larger space that currently houses Foreign Traders, which will close after more than 80 years. The New Mexican reported that the move will more than double the bookshop's size as well as provide space for a café and reading room.The bookstore's relocation will begin May 1 and is expected to be completed by June 1.

Dorothy Massey, co-owner Collected Works, said the change will "allow us to expand several of our more popular sections as well as add new items, without sacrificing space for anything else. . . . It's a big move, especially in this economic climate, but we believe in downtown Santa Fe, we believe in our customers, and we believe in Collected Works' mission to bring the city together in a bookstore that offers something for everyone."

Mary Massey Wolf, Dorothy's daughter and a co-owner,  observed that the move was being made because Santa Fe "has a very supportive community of readers and writers, even with the influx of Borders and Amazon.com. There's something about personal attention and knowing the bookseller and our great employees who are writers and readers themselves . . . that has definitely helped us. And there's also the idea of having a community space in a bookstore where people like to hang out."

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Today's New York Times looks at challenges faced by the city of Portland, Ore., using Powell's Books as an example of the city's impressive growth during the past four decades before noting that "this year, growth has given way to anxiety."

"It's going to take a period of time to recover," said owner Michael Powell, who recently dropped plans for a $5 million expansion and who indicated sales are down nearly 5%. "Whether it's 2 years or 10 years I don't know, but I don't think it's going to be quick. People are nervous."

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In Bookselling This Week, Len Vlahos, ABA chief program officer, reported on his recent Califonia trip to attend CAMEX in Anaheim and the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association Spring Meeting in Pasadena. [Shelf Awareness's own reporting on CAMEX and the meeting of the National Association of College Stores will appear on Monday.]

Vlahos observed that bookseller interest in social media opportunities continues to grow rapidly, noting that among the encouraging aspects of a session titled Social Media and the Independent Bookseller "were the great questions from the booksellers in attendance. We had a vibrant give-and-take about how booksellers and consumers are using tools like Facebook, Twitter, and Vimeo to engage in conversations both whimsical and substantial, and how independent booksellers would be well served to participate in that dialogue, and to cultivate those relationships.

Interest is also high among Southern California booksellers regarding digital content as well. Vlahos wrote, "It seems that a consensus is building that while e-books won't replace p-books, they will have an impact on our business, and sooner rather than later. I explained ABA's plans to develop e-content tools for the newly upgraded ABA E-Commerce Solution sites, and our plans to continue to carefully monitor developments."

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Books-A-Million's board of directors has put into effect a plan to buy up to $5 million in shares of company stock that replaces a previous program that was to end on April 30. Under that plan, which began a year ago, BAM bought $1.8 million of its stock. The company has 15.6 million shares of stock currently worth about $68.1 million.

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Should publishers "'re-masculate" books to attract more male readers? Writing in the Guardian's book blog, Jean Hannah Edelstein suggested, "One option, I suppose, would be to publish special gentlemen's editions of books that are currently targeted at women, but might actually have male appeal. Female protagonists could be given male names, and romantic plots could be tweaked slightly to be more about football. My editor was not a fan of my suggestion of a special manned-up print run of my (quite feminine) book with a cover featuring a tractor and a pint, but I am holding out hope for the second edition once the trend catches on."

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This year's Diagram Prize for oddest book title of the year went to The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais by Philip M. Parker, the Associated Press reported. The book edged out shortlist contenders Baboon Metaphysics, Strip and Knit With Style, The Large Sieve and its Applications, Curbside Consultation of the Colon and Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring.

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A two-week bidding war resulted in what the Times of India called "publishing history," when historian Ramachandra Guha "clinched close to a Rs 1 crore [US$197,726) deal with Penguin India for a series of six books--the definitive Gandhi biography, an anthology of 12 thinkers who shaped modern India, and a collection of his previously published essays."

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John Hays has joined Inner Traditions, Bear & Co., Rochester, Vt., as director of sales and marketing. He formerly held sales and marketing positions with Motorbooks and Tuttle Publishing.

Rob Meadows remains with the company and has become director of content and consumer sales.

In this economy, many people are looking to start their own businesses, which was the motivation of a majority of the 26 people who attended the workshop Opening a Bookstore: The Business Essentials, sponsored by the Bookstore Training Group of Paz & Associates and the American Booksellers Association this month on Amelia Island, Fla. Students' professional backgrounds encompassed information technology, law, education and human resources, among others. Here graduates line the steps with professors Donna Paz Kaufman (c.) and Mark Kaufman (to her left).

Photo: Marsha Wood of Ingram.

This morning on Good Morning America: Jodyne L. Speyer, author of Dump 'Em: How to Break Up with Anyone from Your Best Friend to Your Hairdresser (Collins, $15.99, 9780061646621/0061646628).

Originally scheduled for earlier this week, this segment was bumped (not dumped) and will now be longer, including some taped pieces in which the author helps several people end relationships with, variously, a barber, hairdresser and friends.

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Tomorrow on Weekend Edition: Jeffrey Archer, author of Paths of Glory (St. Martin's, $27.95, 9780312539511/0312539517).

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Sunday on NPR's All Things Considered: Nancy Harmon Jenkins, author of The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook: A Delicious Alternative for Lifelong Health (Bantam, $35, 9780553385090/0553385097).

Thanks to the phenomenal success of the Jason Bourne film juggernaut in recent years, Hollywood has kept calling on the late Robert Ludlum's novels for more "projects to head to the multiplex and reinvigorated the author's status with a new generation of readers, not to mention inspiring new video games," according to USA Today.

In addition to "Untitled Jason Bourne 4," other Ludlum books currently being developed as film projects include The Matarese Circle, in which "Denzel Washington plays a CIA agent, and Tom Cruise is negotiating to play his Russian rival," The Chancellor Manuscript, for which "Leonardo DiCaprio's representatives say he is looking to produce and star," The Parsifal Mosaic, The Sigma Protocol and a remake of The Osterman Weekend.

Sana Krasikov's debut short story collection, One More Year, has won the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for emerging writers. The Jewish Book Council noted that Krasikov earned the honor "based on her demonstration of a fresh vision and evidence of future potential to further contribute to the Jewish literary community."

Allen Hoffman, one of this year's fiction judges, said, "Her characters are often alienated and confused, but her stories are always clear and precise, because Krasikov deeply understands her characters' aspirations, fears, and stubborn passion for survival. Her elegant, revealing narratives imbue their fragile, vulnerable lives with an imposing dignity."

The $25,000 Sami Rohr Prize Choice Award went to Dalia Sofer, author of The Septembers of Shiraz. Krasikov and Sofer will receive their awards in May during a ceremony held at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan.

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The shortlist for this year's Orwell Prize includes books that, according to director Jean Seaton, "all illuminate our present and our present problems. If you want to understand what Britain is today, go and read these books," the Guardian reported.

The Orwell Prize shortlist:

• Fishing in Utopia by Andrew Brown
• Reappraisals by Tony Judt
• Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews
• Chinese Whispers by Hsiao-Hung Pai
• Descent Into Chaos by Ahmed Rashid
• The White War by Mark Thompson

The winner will be announced April 22 during an awards ceremony at the Foreign Press Association in London.

Robert Goolrick is the author of the memoir The End of the World as We Know It and the novel A Reliable Wife, published by Algonquin Books next week. He says: "Born and raised in Virginia, I worked at a regular job for almost 30 years, living in New York City, but thinking always of the Blue Ridge Mountains and Goshen Pass. I am miraculously 60 years old. By the time he was my age, E. M. Forster had ceased writing for nearly 20 years. I'm a late starter. I better be a good closer." After reading A Reliable Wife, we'd say he definitely is.

On your nightstand now:

At Home with the Marquis de Sade by Francine du Plessix Gray; Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips; The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje; The Book of Common Prayer.
 
Favorite book when you were a child:

To Kill a Mockingbird.

Your top five authors:

Jane Austen, William Faulkner, William Shakespeare, Marcel Proust, John O'Hara.

Book you've faked reading:

Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. I don't think anyone in college actually ever read that novel.
 
Book you're an evangelist for:

Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy.
 
Book you've bought for the cover:

None that I can think of, although I do read the flaps.
 
Book that changed your life:

Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust.
 
Favorite line from a book:

"He was a child, he was eleven years old, but he had a soul, and he protected it as the eyelid protects the eye."--Anna Karenina.
 
Book you most want to read again for the first time:

Anna Karenina.

It seems every week brings news of the bankruptcy or disappearance of another newspaper--the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is the latest in that forlorn roster. These developments give especial relevance to 90-year-old Robert Phelps's candid memoir of his more than half century in print journalism.

In a career that began on a small town Pennsylvania newspaper, included a perilous stint as a Navy reporter covering the Battle of Okinawa and saw him reach the peak of the newspaper world when he joined the New York Times in 1954, Phelps had the opportunity to report on virtually every type of news story. But it's apparent from this account that his real passion lay in the exacting work of editing, "a shadow figure in the backfield, blocking for, cheering on, and sometimes scolding star reporters and top editors."

Phelps, who became news editor of the Times's Washington bureau in 1965, at the height of the Vietnam War, succinctly describes the events that led to the paper's controversial decision to publish the Pentagon Papers and offers a particularly incisive account of its failings in the investigation of the Watergate break-in and subsequent coverup. Honest to a fault, he concedes the Times consistently followed in the wake of Woodward and Bernstein, assigning himself "major responsibility for our failure to follow up on our best opportunity for an early Watergate breakthrough."

A fair portion of Phelps's account of his years at the Times focuses on the internecine struggles among powerful editors of that era, giants of the newspaper business like A.M. "Abe" Rosenthal, Max Frankel, James "Scotty" Reston and Tom Wicker. If there's a villain in the story it's Rosenthal, and while Phelps makes no effort to downplay the frequent clashes between New York and Washington, he's quick to acknowledge that Rosenthal "produced a far better newspaper than the one he took over."

Phelps left the Times in 1974 for the Boston Globe (now owned by the New York Times Company), with principal responsibility for covering the fractious desegregation of the Boston public schools. More intriguing than that story is the account of his efforts (only intermittently successful) to prevent the political bias of its powerful editor, Thomas Winship, from infiltrating the news pages.

While more modest in scope, God and the Editor stands as a worthy companion to Gay Talese's monumental The Kingdom and the Power, whose history of the Times ends in the late 1960s. Students of what someday may be regarded as the final flourishing of newspaper journalism should be grateful that Robert Phelps has survived into his 10th decade to share these memories and that he's done so with such honesty and style.--Harvey Freedenberg

Shelf Talker: A crisp and insightful account of one man's fascinating life at the pinnacle of American journalism.

The books signed by three authors for a fundraiser during Fortuna Library Day, as shown in a photograph here yesterday, were provided by--not published by--Eureka Books, Fortuna, Calif. Our apologies!

As a relatively innocent victim of St. Patrick's Day inspiration, I was compelled last week to lobby for Brian Moore's mostly OP novels. By the way, for those who asked, Catholics (Loyola Press, $12.95, 9780829423334/0829423338) and The Black Robe (Plume, $15, 9780452278653/0452278651) are still available.

But this walkabout did leave some unfinished business regarding our earlier discussion on just how much indie booksellers should tell customers about bad times in BookWorld.  

In response to the first column in that series, in which I shared Linda Ramsdell's letter to her customers about controlling inventory during the slower winter season, Diane Van Tassel, owner of Bay Books, Concord and San Ramon, Calif, observed that this made her consider "how my customers think about these expensive books. For many readers, the latest book by a favorite author is such a wonderful treat, but they complain that the book is too heavy (tough when it falls on you when you fall asleep in bed) and that it costs too much, especially if they inhale it in one day. So even though there are a few people who will brave the cost of the hardcover, most will wait until it comes out in paperback.

"So wouldn't it be a good idea to have one or two copies of the latest hardcover, but mainly have a huge selection of great paperback titles that they would be tempted by instead? And, of course, the knowledge of other alternatives. Basically what I am saying is that customers want the latest Janet Evanovich, at a whopping $25 plus, but can often be just as tempted by a new paperback Sarah Strohmeyer or Nancy Bartholomew which are similar in tone. So the bookstore didn't sell the expensive hardcover but the customer, if they love the series, will come back and buy the whole series--at the $8-$10 range, which will actually bring in more money in the long run because you have given them a new author to collect. This takes homework and study by the bookseller, but the customer is turned on to another author and is thankful that the bookstore is so helpful and friendly."

And Tordis Isselhardt of Images From the Past suggested that "the public doesn't understand what's involved in being an independent publisher any better than it understands what's involved in being an independent bookseller: the choices we make, the choices that aren't ours to make, the risks and the rewards, the cash (and inventory) flow and so much more. Like [booksellers] we deal in ideas rather than packages, and delight as much in sharing the process of bringing an author's story to life and to its readers, as [booksellers] do in expanding and enriching readers' lives with books!"

David Henkes of University Book Store, Bellevue, Wash., responded to my wondering what we tell the indie customer who also loves her Kindle: "We need to thank her first and foremost for embracing the written word. We are still facilitators of everything book related. Whether that book is physical, digital, or audio, we are responsible for selling the idea of a story. I have been browbeating friends and family every time they tell me about a book they just read, and loved, and then proceed to tell me that they purchased on Amazon. I cringe, beat my chest, count to ten, and then discuss the book with them and not dwell on how they obtained it. My personal belief in the its-already-here look at the future of the digital application of books is that it will be another means for a book to live on. The Kindle is a difficult thing to hug, to embrace as words pour forth and envelope you. Yet, it is a means to an end--reading.

"My response might sound rather philosophical as opposed to a concrete sales pitch to win over a client," he continued. "If I focus too much on the business side, I lose sight of why I'm 'in' books in the first place--to facilitate the written word."

Perhaps we'll end by accentuating the positive. Susan Weis of breathe books, Baltimore, Md., happily responded to the big question--"Is 'Doing Great!' the wrong thing to say right now?"--by noting that shortly before reading that column, she had sent her e-mail newsletter, telling "over 4,000 people on my list that we are doing great! And, of course, thanking them. I've heard from a few people who told me they are so happy the store is doing well--relieved really. I think it shows them that they are giving their money to a viable store. Makes them feel good about supporting breathe books."--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)