Notes: Borders Board to Deboard; A Bookstore Without Books
Seven of the current 10 members of the board of directors of Borders Group are leaving as of the annual meeting May 21 or in the coming months, the company said yesterday. The departing board members have all been members since at least 2005. Borders has retained a search firm to find replacementsis and is accepting nominations. Borders intends to limit the new board to eight members.
In January, shortly after Borders's management team was replaced, Mick McGuire, who has been a partner at Pershing Square Capital Management, the hedge fund that is Borders's largest shareholder, became chairman. He replaced Larry Pollock, who has remained a director but is one of the seven who will leave this year. It's likely that new board members will have Pershing Square connections or backing.
Borders also said that it will not seek approval at the meeting of an amendment to allow a reverse stock split. That measure had been considered because of a New York Stock Exchange policy of delisting companies whose stock price falls below $1 a share. But the Exchange has temporarily suspended the policy, and Borders's shares recently rose above $1 a share.
Wall Street liked all the news. Yesterday Borders stock rose 18.6% to close at $1.72.
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Yikes. As part of an effort to cut $30 million from its 2010 budget, the California Institute of Technology is "eliminating books from the bookstore," as Campus Marketplace put it. The Caltech Bookstore is being merged with the campus convenience store and will be known as the Caltech Store. The new store will sell clothing, food and logo items. The only books available will be by Cal Tech authors.
Texts will be sold online; the staff of the store is creating a site that it hopes will link easily to a campus-wide program that is used regularly by faculty and students.
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As part of a series profiling ABA board candidates, Bookselling This Week focused on incumbent Becky Anderson, who is "part of the fifth generation of Andersons at the helm of the family business that started as a pharmacy, which also sold books. Today the business encompasses Anderson's Bookshops in Naperville, Aurora, and Downers Grove, Illinois; the 134-year-old Oswald's pharmacy; and W.W. Wickel, a children's book wholesaler, which handles school bookfairs and educational events. Becky Anderson and her three brothers own the businesses together, and she serves as the group's marketing and events coordinator, as well as the children's book buyer for the bookstores and the buyer for the wholesale business." She's also a free speech advocate, an IndieBound proponent and president of the Association of Booksellers for Children, which is considering a merger with the ABA.
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Barnes & Noble has moved its customer service center to Lyndhurst, N.J., from Secaucus. The 30,000-sq.-ft. building houses some 200 staff members and "state-of-the-art technology and training facilities." The service center reps will handle inquiries from customers of both B&N and B&N.com.
In a statement, B&N.com president William Lynch, said, "While the trend at many consumer companies is to outsource call center operations, we are proud to make this significant investment in both technology and in our people that not only keeps jobs in our country, but right in our own backyard."
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The ABA's Day of Education on Thursday, May 28, on the eve of BEA, begins with a keynote session on the relation between authors and indie bookstores. The moderator is Roxanne Coady, owner of R.J. Julia, Madison, Conn. Panelists are authors Sherman Alexie, Jon Meacham, James Patterson and Lisa Scottoline.
Panels address such topics as book clubs, the bookstore as "the third place," children's book marketing, handselling, social media, viral marketing, selling e-content and more.
For information about panelists and moderators, see Bookselling This Week.
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Luanne Kreutzer, who has owned St. Helens Book Shop in St. Helens, Ore., for 17 years, is selling the store to Lori Cardiff, an employee, effective April 27, BTW reported. The store will move July 1 to Columbia Boulevard, and Cardiff plans to expand the children's books and toy section while maintaining strong adult fiction and nonfiction sections. The new space has more space for events, storytelling and browsing.
Besides being a bookseller, Cardiff has worked as a teacher, nonprofit development manager and a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa. She was also recently appointed to the St. Helens Public Library board.
Kreutzer is not severing all ties with the store: she will work there part-time after the sale.
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The Phoenix Best of 2009 list included the "best way for a bookworm to simultaneously buy local and save the environment," which went to the Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Mass., and Metro Pedal Power. As the paper wrote:
"So you just saw Revolutionary Road and now you want to read the book. You could shell out $4 or so in T fare to get to the nearest bookstore and back. You could be an asshole and drive over. Or you could call Harvard Book Store and have them bike the book to you. The store, in conjunction with Metro Pedal Power--which operates via emissions-free vehicles--is now offering same-day/next-day delivery to Cambridge and parts of Somerville and Allston for $5 (the surrounding Boston area will have to wait one-to-three business days for orders). The service is offered six days a week, with a $1 charge for each additional book ordered. So, that's one or two measly bucks more than the cost of a subway ride and you're helping support two excellent local businesses as well as the environment? We feel greener already."
Harvard Book Store also won the Phoenix's more traditional "best bookstore for new books" award.
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Effective May 4, Joy Dallanegra-Sanger will join the Macmillan Children's Publishing Group as senior v-p, director of marketing, a new position. She was formerly v-p, director of field sales, for Random House Children's Books and before that was v-p, associate publisher for trade paperbacks, in Random House's Doubleday Broadway imprint. Earlier she held sales and marketing positions at the Knopf Publishing Group, including Vintage, Pantheon and Schocken, and worked at Waldenbooks.
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Kathy Warren has joined Dover Publications as national accounts manager, where her account responsibilities include Amazon, Ingram, Follett stores, NACS and Books-A-Million. She previously worked at Sellers Publishing.
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Effective May 1, RoseMary Honnold becomes editor-in-chief of VOYA (Voice of Youth Advocates) magazine. Honnold is young adult services coordinator at Coshocton Public Library, Coshocton, Ohio, and was until recently editor of YALS, the journal of the Young Adult Library Services Association, a division of the American Library Association. She was a member of the YALSA Teen Read Week Committee and is a presenter and author about teen reading.
VOYA is owned by Scarecrow Press, part of the Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, and is published bimonthly. VOYA was founded in 1978 by librarians and intellectual freedom advocates Dorothy M. Broderick and Mary K. Chelton "to identify the social myths that keep us from serving young people and replace them with knowledge."
At first glance, the Javits Center may appear to be located in a culinary wasteland. But fear not: Fodor's has scouted out the best, bargain-oriented lunch spots nearby to ensure that you'll have a tasty place to refuel before busy afternoon meetings and sessions. 
Diana Preston is a British writer and historian who studied modern history at Oxford University. She enjoys writing about events that illumine human motivation and experience and help us look with a clearer eye at our world today. She and her husband, Michael, who is also a writer and with whom she has co-authored several books, love travelling and seek any excuse for far-flung research. Their explorations have taken them from the Isthmus of Panama, where they followed in the footsteps of the buccaneer scientist William Dampier, to the Ross Sea in Antarctica in pursuit of Captain Scott, to Armenia, Egypt and the Middle East to recreate the world of Cleopatra and Antony. Her latest book, Cleopatra and Antony: Power, Love, and Politics in the Ancient World, was just published by Walker & Co.
In that deep sleep she dreamt about the wind. She heard it whistle under the windowsills and through the cracks of an empty house, heard it rattle the loose No Hunting sign on a weathered post, and slam open and shut again the sagging door of an old barn. In the drifting sand she heard the story of her life. When the wind stopped, she woke to silence and to a square of light on the ceiling of a dark room. She stared into the light until she slept again--this time a sleep without dreams.