This year's Miami Book Fair, which takes place November 8-15, will charge for some events "due to the loss of corporate sponsorships and cuts in state funding," the Miami Herald reported. Attendees "will pay $8 for admission to the weekend street fair on Saturday and Sunday and $10 for formerly free ''Evenings With . . .' programs that run opening night and through the week. Kids under 18 will still get in free, and fair-goers over 62 will still pay $5 for the street fair."

''I would prefer everything to be without charge, but we have to think out of the box on ways to ensure the future of the fair,'' said the event's chair and cofounder, Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books and Books. "We're going to try and streamline what we do a bit. . . . This is an incredibly difficult period. As the landscape shifts in the literary and publishing world we have to think of ways to make sure that this precious thing . . . continues."

Opening-day festivities, the street fair parade and international pavilions will be discontinued, according to the Herald. Organizers "plan to scale back readings and panels, but there will still be some 300 authors," including Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Alexander, Peter Mayle, Orhan Pamuk, Al Gore, Sherman Alexie, Barbara Kingsolver, Jeannette Walls and Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

"The challenge . . . becomes creating a program with people who have enough of a profile that people would want to pay to see them,'' said Kaplan. ''I'm confident we will keep this book fair going."

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With Independents Week coming to a close July 7, Bookselling This Week reported that the "number of participating bookstores and other indie businesses has jumped significantly since Inkwood Books in Tampa, Florida, held the first Independents celebration in 2002."

"This year, the buzz around Independents Week preparation and celebration has been palpable," said Jennifer Rockne, director of the American Independent Business Alliance. "Participants, whether local groups or individual businesses, embraced the opportunity to bring citizens and local independent business owners together in a variety of ways. Many adapted our new poster, button, banner, and other designs for local use. Several business owners sent us print ads that included mention of Indie Week along with data from economic impact studies. This repetition is so powerful--when an Independent Business Alliance and its members are saying the same thing."

"The response was wonderful!" said Caroline Green of Malaprop's Bookstore/Café, which led Independent Retailer Week in Asheville, N.C. "Lots of people participated--whether they were meaning to or not! There were a number of local people who wanted to be more active in future celebrations, and other parts of town that would like to participate. I hope that next year we will at least double the number of participating businesses--there are lots of indie businesses here that recognize this kind of unity can only increase awareness in the local and tourist communities. It is essentially free advertising--with a cause!"

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Take a virtual tour of Shakespeare & Company in Paris because "even the most florid prose cannot begin to describe the visual cacophony of the shop and Tumbleweed Hotel, places whose book-lined walls assault the visual sense. Fortunately, there are new technologies that allow a new type of illustration which will be used to attempt to compensate for the failings of the written word."

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The National Book Foundation's celebration of the 60th anniversary of the National Book Awards will include a public vote choosing the Best of the National Book Awards Fiction. To publicize this effort, the NBF has "created a book-a-day blog, featuring all of the fiction winners from 1950-2008. ABA members will be able to promote the vote as well as sales with a special edition poster featuring original jacket images, author photos, and a complete list of winners that will be sent to stores in an upcoming Red Box mailing," according to BTW.

Six finalists will be announced September 15, and the shortlist "will then be presented for a vote by the public between September 21 and October 13 via the Foundation's website," BTW reported, adding that people "who cast their votes (one vote per e-mail address) will have a chance to win two tickets to the November 18, 2009 National Book Awards Ceremony and Dinner and a two-night stay at the Marriott Hotel near Wall Street in New York City."

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Call it Harry Potter and the Battle of Reader Theories.

The Wall Street Journal contended that as anticipation rises for the release of the new Harry Potter movie next week, "the bespectacled wizard faces a new challenge: how to compete for the attention of a young audience that has been growing up--and is starting to prefer the angsty teen romances and cooler, edgier characters of the Twilight books and movies."

The Telegraph, however, offered a different take: "But whatever happens, there will never come a day when Hogwarts, muggles, quidditch and Voldemort are meaningless names and words as they were only a dozen years ago, just as we cannot erase Neverland, Wonderland, Narnia, chortling, galumphing, boojums, heffalumps and woozles from our collective consciousness. Almost more surprising than the money and the fame is this legacy: a permanent place in a corner of everyone's imagination."

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Bound for Success, an exhibition at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, "showcases the 117 shortlisted submissions in the first Designer Bookbinders International Competition, in which entrants from 29 countries offer their interpretations of the theme of water," the Guardian reported.

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Ready to buy while the housing market is in a downward spiral? You could be the proud owner of Daphne Du Maurier's former home overlooking Readymoney Cove in Fowey, Cornwall, which served as the setting for her novel, Frenchman's Creek. The Telegraph reported that it can be yours for only £2 million (US$3.3 million).

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Fore-part harmony? Singer Justin Timberlake reportedly wants to write a golf book. According to the New York Observer, "agent David Vigliano--who has recently repped books by celebrities like Shannon Doherty and Clay Aiken--sent editors a short proposal by the singer last month. . . . Though neither Mr. Vigliano nor Mr. Timberlake’s publicist, Sonia Muckle, would comment on the project, we hear it’ll be something of a memoir, consisting of stories of rounds he has played and people he has played with."

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Every tchotchke tells a story, or at least might inspire one at Significant Objects. The New Yorker's Book Bench blog showcased the website where "some otherwise-forgettable item--e.g., a toy hot dog or a smiling mug--gets a cute, short story, and the package--item + story--is put up for auction. The contributors are some heavyweights, too: Susannah Breslin, Claire Zulkey, Lydia Millet, and the New Yorker’s Ben Greenman, among others."

The game isn't over after all for Moneyball, the film based on Michael Lewis's bestseller that made news last month after Sony pulled the plug days before shooting was to begin (Shelf Awareness, June 24, 2009).

Variety reported that "Sony is still game on" to make the movie, "tapping Aaron Sorkin to polish an early script by Steve Zaillian. Brad Pitt is still attached to star . . . but Steven Soderbergh will no longer direct the pic."

The proposed script changes "will be more in line with the version the studio favored all along, which focuses on Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane, who assembled a contending baseball club on a shoestring budget by employing a sophisticated computer-based analysis to draft players. Soderbergh's draft and production plans took a more documentary approach that the studio felt wouldn't cross over commercially with moviegoers," according to Variety.

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Working Title Films has named Tomas Alfredson to direct a new adaptation of John Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Variety reported that "Peter Morgan, who previously worked with Working Title on Frost-Nixon, has written the script and will exec produce along with Debra Hayward, Liza Chasin and John Le Carre. Working Title co-toppers Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner will produce."

Filming will begin next year. The movie will have to compete with a long shadow cast by the critically-acclaimed BBC version from the late 1970s, starring Alec Guinness as what many Le Carre fans considered the quintessential George Smiley.

"Tomas is one of the most hotly sought-after and gifted directors in the industry at the moment and we're really looking forward to working with him on such an exciting project," Bevan told the Hollywood Reporter. "The timing is right for a new screen version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy so it's great for us to be able to continue our creative collaboration with Peter Morgan on this and to have Tomas onboard who we've no doubt will bring a unique vision to the material."

British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy announced "a new prize celebrating poetry in all its forms, following her first audience with the Queen." The Guardian reported that the Ted Hughes award for new work in poetry will be "funded by Duffy's donation of her yearly £5,750 (US$9,374) stipend as laureate to the Poetry Society" and "will be awarded annually throughout Duffy's 10-year term as laureate."

The prize, "worth £5,000, will go to a U.K. poet working in any form--including poetry collections for adults and children, individual poems, radio poems, translations and verse dramas--who has made the 'most exciting contribution' to poetry that year."

"I'm delighted, with the assistance of Buckingham Palace and the Poetry Society, to be founding this new award for poetry," said Duffy. "With the permission of Carol Hughes, the award is named in honour of Ted Hughes, poet laureate, and one of the greatest 20th-century poets for both children and adults." The initial winner will be named next March.

Steve Hockensmith is the author of the Holmes on the Range historical mysteries for St. Martin's Minotaur. The first book in the series was nominated for the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony and Dilys awards. The latest, The Crack in the Lens, hasn't been nominated for anything, but maybe that's because it won't be out till July 21. Hockensmith and the narrator of his books, cowboy detective "Big Red" Amlingmeyer, share a blog at stevehockensmith.com.

On your nightstand now:

The Thurber Carnival, an anthology of early detective stories called The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, a biography of Rex Stout, Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets by Dav Pilkey (I have a five-year-old) and a lamp.

Favorite book when you were a child:

That depends on your definition of "child." When I was four or five, it was anything by Richard Scarry (or so my mom tells me). When I was seven or eight, it was Michael Bond's Paddington at Large. When I was 10 or 11, it was Animal Farm. (Go figure.) When I was 14 or 15, it was Breakfast of Champions. And by the time I graduated from high school, it was Catch-22, which happens to be my favorite book as an adult, too, so I guess that tells the whole story.

Your top five authors:

Kurt Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Chandler and Kurt Vonnegut. In that order. Oh, and if I could make the list longer, I'd throw in David Sedaris, Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen, too.

Book you've faked reading:

Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, but that was in seventh grade. I did a book report on it based on the illustrations and the Disney movie version. And I got an A. So let that be a lesson to you, kids!

Book you're an evangelist for:

Well, my own, of course, but I always feel sort of dirty afterward. I mean, my novels are dandy and all. Really. Try one, you'll like it! I just hate hustling. And other than self-promotion . . . gee, I really don't do enough to talk up other people's stuff. So let me take this opportunity to say that Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem is the best book I've read in the last five years. Ahhhhh. Now I feel better.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Mission to Moulokin by Alan Dean Foster. It had this cat-creature alien guy climbing up the rigging of a sailing ship--skating over a sea of ice! Cool! I was 10 years old when I spotted it. As I recall, the book was no Animal Farm, but I liked it.

Book that changed your life:

Gosh, it'd be nice to say Remembrance of Things Past or Plato's Republic or something, but I'm not that kind of guy. Stumbling across Slaughterhouse-Five in the high school library was certainly a stroke of good luck, but I'm not sure if Vonnegut changed me or if I loved him because we were a good fit to begin with. I suppose if there were one book that really and truly changed my life, it would be The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. Before I gave it a try, I hadn't done much reading in the mystery genre. Afterward, I not only read everything I could get my hands on by Chandler, I started writing mystery stories myself. And they started getting published and I got an agent and I sold a mystery novel and I was asked to do a Q&A for the fine folks at Shelf Awareness, which brings us right up to today. So a book that gives you a whole new career? That's change you can believe in.

Favorite line from a book:

"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't" is pretty good. That's from Douglas Adam's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Just about everything in Breakfast of Champions would probably qualify as a favorite line, too. Even the drawings.

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

I would like to start reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand again for the first time so that instead of struggling through to the last page, I can say "This is bull&%*$!" on page 50 and stop there.

As I watched Angels with Dirty Faces recently for the zillionth time, I found myself thinking about this series on bookseller blogs, especially when hoodlum Rocky Sullivan (James Cagney) greets his childhood buddy-turned-priest Father Jerry (Pat O'Brien) with, "Whadda ya hear? Whadda ya say?"

And so, in the spirit of 1930s gangster films, I suggest that we steal the salutation and make it our motto for book trade social networking in the 21st century because, well, larceny is an art form in the information age.

Whadda ya hear? Whadda ya say?

Can blogs get booksellers in trouble? It's conceivable. Maybe not enough trouble to land them in the Big House, but certainly enough to heighten their awareness of how they present themselves to readers.

When and how to use your blog--whether institutional or personal--to address controversial issues is something we've all dealt with. Jessica Stockton Bagnulo (Written Nerd) notes that "there are some bloggers who have used their public/personal forum quite effectively when there is a real problem that needs to be addressed (Arsen Kashkashian springs immediately to mind). And there have been a couple of times when I've drawn attention to something I thought was wrong--or even complained when I've had a bad day. But even then, the tone is the same online as it is on the sales floor. You can be casual, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be professional. I actually like doing it--it's kind of a pleasant discipline. I've certainly slipped and made some faux pas in writing that offended someone or gave the wrong impression, but for the most part it hasn't been too difficult. There are lots of different temperaments than mine, though, and a lot of different ways of handling this issue--mine is only one."

Kashkashian, head buyer at Boulder Bookstore, Boulder, Colo., observes that on his blog, Kash's Book Corner, he doesn't "have many limits on what I write. I won't write anything that will get me fired and I try not to write anything that will jeopardize the store's position with its customers or publishers. I think I've been able to do that without much trouble. The publishers don't seem to hold my rantings against the store. My boss is quite forgiving so I don't worry much about him. Our customers seem to love the inside scoop that I give them in the blog."

He believes in the importance of candor: "I won't write about a topic if I don't think I can be completely honest about it. I also like topics that stir up some passion in me. That passion can be anger over a publisher's policy or humor over something that seems absurd. Most of all I write the blog for me. I don't want it to be a bookstore blog because I don't want to be held to a schedule and I don't want to feel required to write about anything in particular. I also think that makes finding my voice a lot easier. It has to entertain or provoke me and hopefully by extension it will entertain or elicit some emotion in others."

Writing the in-house blog for Vroman's Bookstore, Pasadena, Calif., Patrick Brown says he "is grateful that Vroman's has basically given me free rein to write about what I want as long as I try, whenever possible, to bring it back to books. We have internal discussions, from time to time, about the direction of the blog. For a while, there was some concern that it was too focused on publishing industry chatter. The feeling was that though these posts attracted a lot of traffic, it was more the choir than the congregation. We're trying to reach out and cover more topics of interest to the local community, as that's our core clientele anyway."

Brown strives to keep his personal blog "as separate from work as possible. I don't link to it (at least not the one I'm using now), and I treat it as my own personal space. That's not to say it's private. I mean, it is a blog, after all. I assume some readership. Even so, I don't tend to advertise on that blog that I work for Vroman's. The two blogs are maintained through different email accounts, and they link to different Twitter and Facebook accounts."

Next week we'll explore the Globe Corner Bookstore's blog, which is a group effort that even includes "alumni staff" contributors.

Whadda ya hear? Whadda ya say?--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)

The following were the bestselling titles at independent bookstores in the Chicago area during the week ended Sunday, July 5:

Hardcover Fiction
 
1. Shanghai Girls by Lisa See
2. Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
3. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
4. The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
5. Finger Lickin' Fifteen by Janet Evanovich
 
Hardcover Nonfiction
 
1. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
2. The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin
3. Gale Gand's Brunch by Gale Gand
4. Lincoln on Race and Slavery by Henry Louis Gates
5. The Girls from Ames by Jeffrey Zaslow
 
Paperback Fiction
 
1. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
3. The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
4. The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
5. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith

 
Paperback Nonfiction
 
1. In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
2. Cubs by the Numbers by Al Yellon
3. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Chicago White Sox by Mark Gonzales
4. When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
5. The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan
 
Children's
 
1. Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer
2. Elephants Cannot Dance by Mo Willems
3. Goldilicious by Victoria Kann
4. Why I Fight by J. Adams Oaks
5. L.A. Candy by Lauren Conrad

Reporting bookstores: Anderson's, Naperville and Downers Grove; Read Between the Lynes, Woodstock; Book Table, Oak Park; the Book Cellar, Lincoln Square; Lake Forest Books, Lake Forest; the Bookstall at Chestnut Court, Winnetka; and 57th St. Books; Seminary Co-op; Women and Children First, Chicago.

[Many thanks to the booksellers and Carl Lennertz!]

USA Today's bestsellers for the second quarter of 2009 were:

1. New Moon by Stephenie Meyer
2. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
3. Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer
4. Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
5. The Shack by William P. Young
6. Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto by Mark. R. Levin
7. My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult
8. Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man by Steve Harvey
9. Angels & Demons by Dan Brown
10. Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan
11. Vision in White by Nora Roberts
12. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows
13. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw by Jeff Kinney
14. The 8th Confession by James Patterson
15. Tribute by Nora Roberts
16. Glenn Beck's Common Sense by Glenn Beck
17. Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris
18. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
19. The Host by Stephenie Meyer
20. Where Are You Now? by Mary Higgins Clark