Even as Barnes & Noble celebrates the opening of its huge 55,000-sq.-ft. store in Manhattan (Shelf Awareness, June 18, 2009), the company "is scaling back its real estate ambitions" for the year, the Wall Street Journal reported, noting that B&N "at one time hoped to open as many as 35 superstores in 2009. Instead, it has 15 in the pipeline, most of which will replace existing neighborhood branches. The retailer will also close 15 superstores this year, five more than earlier forecast."

Developers who've halted building plans are a contributing factor. "The lion's share of [construction] projects in which we thought we'd have stores won't be built," said Mitchell Klipper, B&N's COO. "We haven't seen such a lack of new projects in 20 years."

The publishing industry will feel the effects as well, according to the Journal. "Publishers rely on new-store openings to get their inventory out there," said Evan Schnittman, v-p of global business development for Oxford University Press. "If Barnes & Noble at the end of the year gains 20 new stores, you are theoretically getting 20 new stores' worth of orders. Every industry needs that to help drive growth."

Borders Group "will open only a few superstores in 2009, where it has contractual obligations," the Journal added.

---

Amazon.com informed its North Carolina marketing affiliates "that it would stop doing business with them by July 1" if the state passes a law forcing online retailers to collect the 4.5% sales tax, the Wall Street Journal reported.

"We believe the way North Carolina is going about collecting the sales tax is unconstitutional," said Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith. "It isn't appropriate for us to have to comply with an unconstitutional burden."

Asheville resident Rich Owings, who runs a GPS technology website and makes "enough money from click-through sales to turn it into a full-time job," received the Amazon e-mail and told the Citizen-Times he is petitioning lawmakers to cancel the state's online tax plan. "We're already hurting because of the recession and other things. Our revenue is already down 40% since last year. This would decimate us," he said.

---

An "Open Letter to Booksellers from the ABA Board" in Bookselling This Week appealed to bookstores out of concern "that one of ABA's most valuable services has become one of the most threatened. We are talking about the ABACUS Financial Survey, a singular enterprise that has helped hundreds and hundreds of ABA bookstore members launch, expand, and sustain profitable businesses."

In the letter, ABA president Michael Tucker and board members cautioned that "the ABACUS Financial Survey will only continue if enough booksellers submit their financial data--via a completely secure and confidential electronic form--to this year's project. The unsettling fact is that we saw sharp declines in bookstore participation for the 2007 and 2008 surveys, after strong growth in submissions in the previous three years. If bookstore participation does not increase significantly this year, the project's future is threatened."

---

BTW also noted that further details have been provided by Neil Gaiman on his blog regarding the announcement he made during the Celebration of Bookselling Luncheon at BEA of a contest based on bookstores' Halloween parties with a Graveyard Book theme (Shelf Awareness, June 8, 2009).

"This is the plan," Gaiman wrote. "You have a party. In your bookshop. Better still. You have a Hallowe'en Party in your bookshop. You can have the Hallowe'en party anywhere in the month of October. And you theme it around The Graveyard Book. (How you do that is entirely up to you. Decorate with headstones, or give awards to people who come as characters from the book, or have competitions for making epitaphs, or make graves of cake, or . . . well, honestly, this is your call. It's your Graveyard Book party.)"

Bookstores can document these parties (more details to come) and send the evidence to HarperCollins. A winner will be announced "no later than November 15th," Gaiman added. "Then, in December 2009, I'll turn up on a mutually-agreed day, pens at the ready, to do a reading and an Odd and the Frost Giants signing for the winning store. . . . And that's the plan."

---

"I live among bookshelves," Corey Mesler, co-owner of Burke's Book Store, Memphis, Tenn., told the Commercial Appeal, which profiled the shop as part of a "Making it Work" series. "I've been in the book business since I was 19. Buying is my strength."

Corey admitted that wife and co-owner Cheryl "has the business smarts. You should always marry a woman smarter than you."

"We get along really well," Cheryl said. "I've never had a minute that it doesn't work. Sometimes you're both up at night worrying about payroll, but we talk each other out of panics and if you get an idea at 8 o'clock at night, you have someone to bounce it off of. I think you get all the bases covered when you're doing this. . . . I love what we do. I can't imagine what else we'd do."

"Even I envy us," Corey added.

---

Fire may have damaged a rare book collection in a Coral Gables, Fla., building that once housed Books & Books bookstore. The Miami Herald reported that the "fire, apparently of electrical origin, threatened not just the historic 1924 building but also a valuable collection of rare and antique books, said owner Julius Ser. He has run Fifteenth St. Books at the landmark corner building since nephew Mitchell Kaplan moved Books & Books down the block several years ago."

---

The controversial publication of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye by the pseudonymous J.D. California (Shelf Awareness, June 3, 2009) was put on hold temporarily by a federal district judge in Manhattan. The New York Times reported that Judge Deborah A. Batts "said a new book that contains a 76-year-old version of Caulfield cannot be published in the United States for 10 days while she weighs a copyright infringement case filed by lawyers for [J.D.] Salinger."

"It does seem to me that Holden Caulfield is quite delineated by words, that is a portrait by words," Judge Batts said, adding, "It would seem that Holden Caulfield is copyrighted." The Times noted, however, that "the judge said she would take some time to reflect on whether the new book was sufficiently different from The Catcher in the Rye to fall under the protection of the fair use provision."

---

Tor.com has launched a new online bookstore "with a selection of titles that spans a range of publishers. The only requirement for books to appear in the store's inventory is that they relate to science fiction or fantasy genre in some way," the company said. Tor.com, a joint project of Tor Books and the Macmillan Group, is "a publisher- and format-agnostic space for commentary on all things science fiction and fantasy related, including publishing, video games, movies, and comics. The site also features original short stories, sequential art, and extensive art galleries," the company stated.

---

Lit-savvy teens can now connect with their favorite authors (such as Scott Westerfeld, Holly Black, and Cassandra Clare), new books and like-minded peers in one place with the PulseIt Web site, launched as a partnership between S&S Children's Publishing and S&S Digital. Aimed at teens ages 14-18, this "free, dedicated social networking site" allows users to access new S&S teen titles online, upload photos, express their areas of interest and post links to other media. Pulse It members may also write reviews (and share them with Facebook friends as well as Pulse It members), rank books, create blog posts and chat in message board discussions.
 
Pulse It members will be offered a chance to choose one book per month from a selection of two titles and have 60 days to read them. (The books will be a combination of just-released and soon-to-be published titles.) The Pulse It Online Reader is designed to save the reader's place in the book and offers access to the site's discussion board for that title, where they can comment on and rate the books. Each month Pulse It members will be eligible for prizes such as free bonus (physical) books and points that earn them greater status in the community. The Pulse It site grew out of what was formerly the Pulse It Advisory Board, which was limited to 3,000 members; those members received hard copies of books in exchange for their feedback on the titles

---

Our friend Kathy L. Patrick, owner of Beauty and the Book, Jefferson, Tex., told us that a band representing bookshop's "all-men book club, the Timber Guys," will be performing at the T-Bone Walker Blues Festival this weekend. She said that "what began as a skit at our annual Pulpwood Queen Convention, Girlfriend Weekend, has now turned into a full fledge band composed of Timber Guys Andy Looney and Bill Smith as the Blooze Brothers, and Johnny Nance on guitar, Jay Patrick on keyboards."

Patrick added that the Pulpwood Queens Book Club will have a booth at the festival "with signed books, Pulpwood Queen bodacious items and BLING!"
 
---

Beach Lit 101: More summer book lists.

"Eat your way around the world with this collection of fun summer reads," suggested USA Today in featuring food and travel titles.

For an international perspective, Words Without Borders showcased "Staff Picks for Summer Reading."

In their Books on the Nightstand Podcast, Ann Kingman and Michael Kindness highlighted "Books for your Beach Bag."

---

Some of the late Tasha Tudor's children have raised the stakes in their ongoing family conflict since the death the legendary author/illustrator last year. The Boston Globe reported that "the family battle over her estate, which seemed like it could not get any uglier, has taken a turn for the worse. The artist's grown children, already at odds over her will, are now fighting in Vermont Probate Court over whether and how to bury their mother."

Tomorrow morning on the Early Show: Bethenny Frankel, author of Naturally Thin: Unleash Your SkinnyGirl and Free Yourself from a Lifetime of Dieting (Fireside, $16, 9781416597988/1416597980).

---

Tomorrow on NPR's Weekend Edition: Peter Carlson, author of K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist (PublicAffairs, $26.95, 9781586484972/1586484974).

---

Sunday on Fox & Friends: Julie Morgenstern, author of SHED Your Stuff, Change Your Life: A Four-Step Guide to Getting Unstuck (Fireside, $15, 9780743250900/0743250907).

---

Sunday on ABC Radio's John Batchelor Show: Justine Hardy, author of In the Valley of Mist (Free Press, $25, 9781439102893/1439102899).

The polls are now open for the Independent Booksellers book prize. A shortlist "handpicked by hundreds of independent bookshops from their bestselling titles" goes before British book buyers for "final adjudication," the Guardian reported. The voting helps launch "a week-long celebration of the role of independents."

"They're not the supermarkets' or the chains' choices--they're our choices," said Vivian Archer of the Newham Bookshop, East London. "It's a good, independent mix--and quite a literary mix, which is great."

"It reflects what independents have been selling well," added Eleanor Lowenthal, owner of Pages, Hackney. "Patrick Gale won last year--he was a bestseller, and also critically acclaimed, and the list this year reflects that too. They're all good quality titles, and very sellable."

Customers get to vote "for their choice at independent bookshops around the country until 28 August, with the winner to be announced in September," according to the Guardian.

Shortlist for adult book prize:

• Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
• Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
• The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
• Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill
• Spilling the Beans by Clarissa Dickson-Wright
• The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale
• A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
• When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Shortlist for children's book prize:

• The Crossing of Ingo by Helen Dunmore
• Running on the Cracks by Julia Donaldson
• The Dragonfly Pool by Eva Ibbotson
• Tiddler by Julia Donaldson
• Mr. Gum and the Dancing Bear by Andy Stanton
• Skulduggery Pleasant: Playing with Fire by Derek Landy
• Then by Morris Gleitzman
• Artemis Fowl and the Time Paradox by Eoin Colfer
• By Royal Command by Charlie Higson
• Kaspar by Michael Morpurgo

Margot Berwin earned her M.F.A. from the New School in 2005. Her stories have appeared on Nerve.com, in New York Press and in the anthology, The Future of Misbehavior. Her first novel, Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire, is coming out from Pantheon this month. Berwin lives in New York City's Union Square area. 

On your nightstand now: 

Let's see . . . I've got The Lords and the New Creatures, which is a book of poetry by Jim Morrison. A Guide to Gems, which is exactly what it sounds like. And A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin. There are about 15 books laying around my bed, so I chose the ones whose titles I could see without actually having to get up and move anything. I'm reading all of them off and on.

Favorite book when you were a child:

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. I never could get over that book.

Your top five authors:

This is a truly challenging question. I'm going to put down the first five that come into my mind. Marguerite Duras, Paul Bowles, Carlos Castaneda, Anne Rice, James Baldwin. And I'm going to add Anaïs Nin for writing Cities of the Interior. Dorothy Allison for both Trash and Skin. And finally J. K. Rowling for giving me that wonderful feeling, through eight magical books, of waiting and waiting for the next one to come out.

Book you've faked reading:

Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Everyone was reading it at the time, so I said I was too. And then for years after, I continued to say that I'd read it. Even now I find myself talking about it in ways that actually seem plausible to other people--unless they're just being nice.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda. I've probably read this book four or five times. Marguerite Duras's The Lover. I used to try to write sentences from that book better than she did. Of course, I never succeeded.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Best American Erotica 1998 because it had the word erotica on it.

Book that changed your life:

The Sailor from Gibraltar by Marguerite Duras. This book put me in a kind of trance. It made me feel that everything was sort of mysterious for the whole time I was reading it.

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. When I finished reading it, I felt that it had to be passed on, so I handed it to a stranger sitting next to me in a bar. Maybe it changed his life too.

Oh yes, and Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. The moment I finished it I had to remove it from my apartment. I just opened the door and put it out on the welcome mat. I couldn't sleep with it in my studio.

Favorite line from a book:

I just read Neil Gaiman's truly wonderful book Stardust so I'll choose a line from that:

"There were wonders for sale, and marvels, and miracles; there were things undreamed of and objects unimagined (what need, Dunstan wondered, could someone have of the storm-filled eggshells?)"

Ha! Storm-filled eggshells. I love that!

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

Kerouac's Tristessa, The Subterraneans and On the Road, for the sheer thrill of moving at the speed of light while lying in bed.

The Lover by Duras because it's a thing of such great beauty and perfection.

Ward Just's 16th novel offers further proof that, as much as any author working today, he writes for grownups. Exiles in the Garden is another of his intricate, intellectually challenging character studies that trades flashy action for a psychologically astute investigation into the deepest recesses of public and private morality.

Just's latest novel spans the period from the early 1960s to the beginning of the 21st century. Its protagonist, Alec Malone, is a Washington, D.C., newspaper photographer in his early 70s when the story begins. His decision to turn down his newspaper's invitation to go to Vietnam some 35 years earlier indelibly marks him for what he thinks of as a "sidelines sort of life." Alec's choice is made more problematic by the fact that his father was Kim Malone, a United States Senator for nine eventful terms.

In Kennedy-era Washington, Alec marries Lucia Duran, a Swiss-born beauty and former competitive skier. Her father, Andre, had abandoned his family when she was three, to what Lucia believes was almost certain death in World War II. Soon the newlyweds are living in a comfortable home in Georgetown, next to the shadowy Count and Countess d'An whose garden party gatherings of exiles from around the world give the novel its title. At one of those parties Lucia meets a Hungarian intellectual named Nikolas, and their affair leads to the demise of her marriage to Alec.

On the day of his father's funeral, Alec learns from Lucia that her father is alive in a Washington area boarding house for refugees called Goya House, where Alec soon meets the old man. The long, intensely engaged lives of Kim and Andre reflect poles of experience that contrast sharply with Alec's career-determining choice. In two stark examples, Just illumines with consummate skill, almost casually and without passing judgment, the morally questionable behavior to which powerful and determined men resort in the service of what they adjudge a higher cause: Kim's decision to wiretap his opponent's phone in a tight Senate race and Andre's ruthless conduct as a Fascist-fighting partisan.

Ward Just began his career as a journalist and that training is evident in his keen eye for detail and his ability to penetrate to the essence of his subjects' lives. In characteristic meditative style, he reveals how the choices of his flawed, complex characters resonate down through the decades. His latest novel is one more brick in an edifice of work that someday should be read by historians looking for insight into the world of modern American politics and contemporary statecraft.--Harvey Freedenberg

Shelf Talker: In his 16th novel, Ward Just offers another mature and insightful take on the subject of contemporary public morality.

This is not a ploy to mention a major appointment at Borders yet one more time, rather a sign of a certain dose of frazzledness here.

Arthur Keeney is the man who is joining Borders Group as senior v-p, marketing. Our "correction" yesterday was flawed.

Lead, follow or get the hell out of the way. That's one vision of our digital future in the book trade. 

"What if everything you ever imagined came true?" This line from a movie trailer for Chris Van Allsburg's The Polar Express is another way to think about it, though the strategic placement of one additional word (good, for example, after everything) might make it a touch less ominous.

Like many of you, I think about the book business too much, the way some of my friends think too much about the Yankees or politics or death. Perhaps also like many of you, I came away from BookExpo America wondering about my place in a publishing world where "the book as we've known it" is becoming the book as we don't quite know it yet.

I attended panel after panel about social networking, connectivity, mobile technology; watched the Espresso Book Machine conjure trade paperbacks out of computer files, paper and glue; viewed demos of electronic devices that promised to reinvent the reading experience.

A couple of weeks ago, I compared BEA with the circus, but in the middle of the show itself, I felt less like I was being entertained by dancing bears than that I might be witnessing the birth of, well, the future.

I could easily let my imagination run wild. What if it all came true?

At BEA, I had lengthy conversations with book people who are enthusiastic devotees of texting and Twitter and FaceBook; with casual adapters; with curious bystanders; and with devout followers of the full crucifix-and-garlic-necklace "WebDracula begone!" society of unbelievers.

I listened.

Many people are saying the future is now. Not all of them are happy about it. But if the future really is now, we still have to discover what's going to happen next? Some think they know that, too, and tried to lay it out for us at BEA.

I don't know. I could write about crystal balls or digital I Ching, but I've opted for train travel instead because in the weeks since the show, I realized not where all this is headed, but how I plan to get there.

I'm on the train. It's that simple. I'm on the train.

I work for an online newsletter; I have Twitter and FaceBook accounts; I read on my iPod; I have two--count 'em--two computers on my small desk. And I'm always ready for more.

But something else that happened at BEA made me realize not everyone on the train has to ride in the engine, scanning the track ahead for what's coming round the next bend. For me, the best place to ride is the caboose, since I'm going to arrive where the engine is now within seconds, but I still have a great view of where we've come from out the back window. I want to keep that perspective. 

At one point during the launch party for Book: The Sequel, PublicAffairs v-p and editor Clive Priddle explained that the goal of the 48-hour publishing project was to acknowledge the history of books as well as suggest possible answers to the question, "What comes next?"

The caboose offers past, present and future all for the same low price. And isn't everybody looking for a bargain these days?

About a week ago, I returned to New York for a meeting. Since I live in rural Vermont, this trip does require not-so-magical travel through space and time, including a 2½ hour drive to the train.

As I stood on the platform of the Metro North station just outside Wassaic, N.Y. (a hamlet I've never visited; could be as mythical as the North Pole of Van Allsburg's imagination for all I know), I scanned the relatively pastoral countryside just off Route 22. Beyond the highway, parking lot and railroad tracks, in every direction, I saw nature in full spring mode--hills, trees, meadows, marsh grass, bright sunlight. And I could hear birds singing.
   
Two hours later, I stepped onto another platform in Grand Central Terminal's murky, fragrant depths far beneath the streets of Manhattan. I walked upstairs to the main hall and out the door to 42nd Street, where everything was traffic, scurrying crowds and tall buildings. I heard the irresistible siren song of urban cacophony.

I love both worlds, and it occurred to me that, once upon a time, this seamless transformation had also been viewed as a miracle of unimaginable speed, a vision of the future.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)