"A good way to judge whether a city has the desired level of 'coolness' is to look at its bookshops. If there is more than one bookshop selling books in foreign languages on an extensive range of topics, from cookery to philosophy, if one can find what one is looking for there and, furthermore, if one is allowed to stroll through the books while having a sip of coffee from the bookshop's café, it is an ultimate plus for the intellectual outlook of the city, enticing for anyone considering moving to that city. Bookshops, with their design, their smell, their location and their staff are among the important visitor's attractions of a city, although not many people think about bookshops as 'places to visit.'"--From Today's Zaman, an English-language newspaper in Turkey.

In the third quarter ended June 27, revenue at Indigo Books & Music, Canada's largest bookseller, rose 1.6% to C$193.6 million (US$178.9 million), and the net loss rose to C$2.3 million (US$2.13 million) compared to a C$1.2 million (US$1.11 million) net loss in the same period last year.

Sales at Indigo and Chapters superstores open at least a year rose 1.4%, while comp-store sales at the smaller Coles and Indigo Spirit stores were up 0.8%. Sales at the company's online store, chapters.indigo.ca, fell 9.1% to C$19.1 million (US$17.65 million) after "the elimination of certain nonprofitable business."

In a statement, CEO Heather Reisman said, "Given the challenging economic environment, we believe these results highlight the resilience of our brands. In addition, the slight drop in bottom line results reflects our increased operating investment this year in both Pistachio and Shortcovers."

Shortcovers, launched in February, is a web-based digital download service that can be accessed via computer and many handheld devices, including the iPhone, Blackberry and Palm Pre. Pistachio is an eco-friendly paper, gift and apothecary retailer and wholesaler.

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Bookselling This Week wrote about two stores, Harleysville Books, Harleysville, Pa., and BookPeople, Austin, Tex., that "both have developed summer programs that regularly sell out and raise revenue." Go to camp here.

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A "thank you" book tour that the late E. Lynn Harris had planned for this fall will go forward despite his death last week. USA Today reported that Harris wanted to meet "with fans in small cities to get back to promoting his novels on a 'grass-roots level,'" according to Karen Hunter, whose Pocket Books imprint will publish his novel Mama Dearest in September.

Instead, a number of the author's friends, including Eric Jerome Dickey and Kimberla Lawson Roby, will meet with local book clubs. "They want to make his new book successful as a tribute to him," said Hunter. "I would much prefer E. Lynn to be here. It's so sad when you know where this man was going."

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Book trailer of the day: Violet by Tania Duprey Stehlik, illustrated by Vanja Vuleta Jovanovic.

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Ladies and gentlemen--and Man Booker Prize fans the world over--place your bets, please. The Guardian reported that "J. M. Coetzee's latest fictionalised memoir Summertime is not even published yet, but the two-time Booker winner and Nobel laureate has shot to the front of the race for this year's Man Booker prize."

Coetzee tops the Ladbrokes board at 3/1, followed by Sarah Waters (5/1), Colm Toibin and William Trevor (6/1), James Scudamore (8/1), A.S. Byatt, Samantha Harvey and Adam Foulds (10/1), Sarah Hall (12/1), Hilary Mantel and James Lever (16/1), with Simon Mawer and Ed O'Loughlin trailing the field at 20/1.

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Effective August 15, Square One Publishers has become a primary book distributor for InnoVision Health Media, Boulder, Colo., which publishes books and professional and consumer magazines, including Natural Solutions: Vibrant Health, Balanced Living, on integrative medicine.

Early last year, Square One took on all health titles published by Vital Health Publications and Professional Books. Square One president Rudy Shur commented: "By aligning our own health book publishing program with these excellent titles, we are building our position as one of the most aggressively alternative health publishers in the country--and we're building it book by book."

Under the agreement, Square One will also publish a new group of health books as part of the Natural Solution Health Series. InnoVision Health Media was formerly distributed through Ten Speed Press/Random House.

Arrrr! Warner Bros. will see if there's life on other planets for the pirate genre. Variety reported that the studio "has set Michael and Peter Spierig to direct and John Brownlow to write a new version of Captain Blood, the 1935 swashbuckler pirate classic that starred Errol Flynn as a wrongly imprisoned British doctor who escapes to become a pirate in the Caribbean." This new version of the classic novel by Rafael Sabatini will be set in outer space.

"At first, I felt like I was in that scene in The Player, where Buck Henry pitches the sequel to The Graduate," said producer Bill Gerber. "But when I took a look at their animatic depiction of a pirate battle in space, it had such a distinctive visual look to it that, that I said, 'Great, I get it.'"

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Ron Howard will direct The Parsifal Mosaic, to be adapted by David Self from Robert Ludlum's novel, according to Variety.

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Steven Spielberg is "seriously considering" a film based on secret agent Matt Helm, who was featured in 27 novels by Donald Hamilton. Variety reported that "the question of whether Spielberg will direct involves a series of complex issues that touch on the relationship between Paramount and DreamWorks, and the latter studio's new finance partner, Reliance. Spielberg's camp said he is attached to produce, but it's unclear if he's going to direct. Clearly, Spielberg is excited about the project again after the rewrite that Paul Attanasio delivered last week."

Ground Up by Michael Idov (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $14 trade paper, 9780374531546/0374531544, July 21, 2009)

Opening lines of books we want to read:

The evening was an unrelieved success. If it were a play, Nina would have received a standing ovation. In a way, a play it was: we had put on a small-scale pageant--a piece of dinner theater starring ourselves as a couple remarkably like ourselves, with a few crucial differences. Our characters lived in a cleaner apartment, dressed better at home, were more effusive about figure skating, took care to plate their food in eye-pleasing designs before scarfing it down, and were (let's be cruel but honest here, to set the tone for the rest of this slender tome) slightly more in love.

In fact, hours earlier Nina and I had had a fight. It flared up in the kitchen, with forty minutes to go until the announced feeding time of eight o'clock . . . The fight thus couldn't even proceed along the normal arc wherein one of us would storm off to the corner diner and wait for the other's phone call over a cup of terrible coffee. Like most spousal dustups, it was an exercise in bilateral escalation: I had inquired if there was a reason behind Nina's marked lack of enthusiasm for the party. Nina said it was nothing. I told her not to hold it in because I could tell it was something. Nina asked me not to badger her, I took umbrage at the word "badger," Nina took exception to the word "umbrage," and it was off to the opera from there. By the time the duet crescendoed past yelling and into hissed logistics ("It's your place, you stay. I'll sleep in a motel, I don't care"), it was 7:40 and we both knew we had to fast-forward right to the reconciliation. Somehow, working in concert, we nailed the peacemaking note seconds before the doorbell rang.

--Selected by Marilyn Dahl

I grew up in Seattle, which I think explains a lot. It's pretty hard to have a sunny disposition when you're constantly living under a dark cloud. As a child, I realized that if I just never went outside, I wouldn't get rained on, and I don't mean that metaphorically, even though I wish I did. I really don't go outside.

Fortunately I like my house. My office has nice windows that look out over Puget Sound, which makes it almost like being outside. And that's where I don't write. Too much stuff in there. I write in my kitchen, where the food and coffee is. Unfortunately, there's a TV in the kitchen so that I can watch shows while I don't cook. So even though I write in the kitchen, I don't get a lot of writing done there.

Miraculously I have written two novels. The first one, We Are All Fine Here, was really good. My second book just came out from St. Martin's Griffin, and it's even better. It's called Gone to the Dogs, a title that wasn't my idea, but what are you going to do? If I were the type of person to go outside, I just might consider getting on an airplane and flying to New York to tell those people at St. Martin's what I think about that title. But I don't fly either, so it would be a total waste of energy to force myself out of my house only to drive to an airport and not get on a plane.

Are you still reading this? If so, you are probably my type of person. Come on over sometime and we can watch Law and Order together. It's on all the time.

On your nightstand now:

Does this mean literally what is on my nightstand now or do you mean what am I reading at this moment? At this moment, I am carrying around a copy of Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, which I plan on reading at some point in the near future, probably during commercials when I really should be using the time to write. I keep clothes on my nightstand.

Favorite book when you were a child:

I didn't read when I was a child. I watched TV. My favorite shows were Ed Sullivan, the Man from U.N.C.L.E., Mission Impossible, Lost in Space, Bonanza and Star Trek. Also the Brady Bunch and the Partridge Family. And that show with Bobby Sherman as the stuttering youngest brother. On weekends, I liked to watch Tarzan movies. Those were the glory days of television. Billy Mumy, if by any chance you are reading this, I still have a crush on you.

Top five authors:

If you were to ask me this same question tomorrow, I might give you an entirely different list. But for today, I'll say: Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Nick Hornby, Mark Salzman, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (Can I have a number six? Jonathan Evison.)

Book you're an evangelist for:

I've told a million people to read She's Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan, which is a memoir about a man who becomes a woman. I like transgender stories. I'm really fascinated by the idea of all humans being on all sorts of continuums, including a gender one. She's Not There is a really brave book.

Book you've faked reading:

I'm a terrible liar, so I'm pretty upfront about the books I haven't read. I do, however, fake my hair color. And I wear contacts. And I once had braces on my teeth and a few sessions of electrolysis. I'm very lucky to have been born in modern times or else I would have been very unattractive.

Book that changed your life:

Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems by Richard Ferber.

Favorite line from a book:

I wish I were the type of writer who kept neat little journals with all of my favorite lines from books written in them. But I'm not. So I'm going to have to go seek out a good line. Okay, I have just retrieved An Underachiever's Diary, a novel by Benjamin Anastas, from my shelf and opened it to this great line: "If the underachiever were a mixed drink, he would be a dry martini, one part obscurity (vermouth), three parts unhappiness (gin)."

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

I think I'd like to read Beloved again and see if I have the same reaction as when I first read it. I was completely crazy in love with that book. Reading it was like a spiritual experience. Not long after I finished it, I happened to get on an elevator and there was Toni Morrison, looking totally fabulous. And I completely attacked her with praise. I mean, I went nuts screaming about what a spiritual experience I'd had reading that book, how the words must have come directly from the man upstairs and that he must have shot them straight through the top of her head so that they traveled all the way down her arm to the hand where she held her pen. Oh boy, you've never seen anyone more desperate to get out of an elevator than Toni Morrison. Later, I saw her again in the lobby and had someone take a snapshot of the two of us. It's one of my favorite photos. She looks petrified and I look out of my mind.

Book you wish you wrote:

My next one, duh. But also, there are times I read a story and I think, man, if I could write just one story like that, I could die happy. That happened when I first read Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" in the New Yorker. That story killed. And it happened when I finished Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold. And So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell. And there's a very sweet book called Pobby and Dingan by Ben Rice that got to me, too.

In our mention of results in different romance categories (Shelf Awareness, July 29, 2009) we inadvertently said that Debbie Macomber and her titles were losing a little ground. Not so. Our apologies!

Where do authors go when they die? Like the rest of us, of course, their mortal remains are placed in coffins or urns. Often, a requisite memorial shrine of their works is erected briefly on retail mourning displays in bookshops. The New York Times or the Guardian runs an obituary summing up an entire lifetime in a single, reductive headline like "bestselling mystery writer" or "Booker prize winner" or "beloved children's author." Their books, in the best of circumstances, outlive them. Tragic, indeed, is an author who outlives his or her words.

Recently the death of two authors affected me, both professionally and personally, for vastly different reasons. The loss of Frank McCourt was certainly the more publicized one. So much has been written about him that I did not plan to add anything to the chorus, but then another author's demise jarred my reader's conscience.

I didn't really know Frank. I bought him a beer once. He ordered a Heineken, which shattered all my illusions about Irish writers. But I was one of those lucky booksellers who happened to read an ARC of Angela's Ashes in the spring of 1996 and knew immediately, after a dozen pages, that I had to do whatever I could to get this writer I'd never heard of to the bookstore for a reading.

I don't know if we were among the first bookshops to put in an event request, but we were lucky enough to be successful. By early fall, as word-of-mouth momentum began to build for the memoir and bestsellerdom loomed, everybody wanted Frank.

On the desk beside my laptop as I write this is a first edition of Angela's Ashes, with an inscription:

4 Dec. 96
For Bob
Frank McCourt
With thanks for your warmth.

Maybe Frank signed everybody's book with the same words, but I don't care. On that cold Vermont night, in the Marsh Tavern at the Equinox Hotel, I introduced him to a couple hundred people who were as enthusiastic as any audience I've ever seen at a reading. The pub atmosphere helped a bit, too.

Moments earlier, as I escorted him through the packed crowd to an improvised podium, people had applauded, shaken his hand and patted him on the back. Frank laughed and said: "I'm not even running for office." Introducing him was like introducing a rock star. I could have said, "qua, qua, qua," and they would still have applauded wildly as soon as I ended with, "Please welcome Frank McCourt."

His reading was perfect. Afterward, he signed for a long line of fans and was an absolute pro, engaging each person in a brief conversation while his hands reached toward me for the next book.

Yesterday I opened a glass-enclosed bookcase in my office where I keep the signed copies of books that I've acquired over the years. I took out Angela's Ashes and flipped through until I found my favorite sentence:

There are bars of Pear's soap and a thick book called Pear's Encyclopedia, which keeps me up day and night because it tells you everything about everything and that's all I want to know.

In 1999, at BookExpo in Los Angeles, I saw Frank again at an author breakfast. He was a star by then, but I will always know that I was one of his first readers.
 
Like writers, however, readers rest on laurels at their peril. Last weekend, British author Stanley Middleton died. Here was a man who wrote 44 novels, won the Booker prize in 1974, and, according to Philip Davis in the Guardian, "went his own way, diffidently tough, formidably serious and unshowily learned."

Davis noted that in a poem, Middleton "recalls the names of all the long-gone families he knew in the gas-lit Bulwell street where he lived as a child":

They had their moment, these folk,
unearned
Centres of verbal interest. Now
they're dead,
I guess. One family I can't put even
vague
Figures to. I am somewhat equivalent.
Somewhat. A circle of light, a centre of
Talk. My name is loosely attached.
Fifty years hence somebody will pull
me
Out of his head. I am not displeased.

Here's my confession. Until I read the Guardian obit, I'd never heard of Middleton. My remedy has been to order two of his books; my remedy is that I will read him now.

Maybe that is eulogy enough.

Where do authors go when they die? They go, if they're lucky, to their readers.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)