Reports about general retail over the long weekend were mixed. While many discounters, most famously Wal-Mart, offered some items at prices so low people waited many pre-dawn hours and nearly stampeded into the stores, some retailers started sales earlier than usual--weeks before Thanksgiving--and may have sated some demand. In addition, it seemed that consumers intent on taking advantage of the early-morning bargains barged by other specialty stores, many of which didn't open until hours later.

Over the weekend, sales rose 22%, according to a National Retail Federation survey of consumers. ComScore Networks estimated that on Black Friday U.S. shoppers spent $305 million online, a similar 22% jump over a year ago, according to the Wall Street Journal. Today is expected to be one of the heaviest online shopping days of the year as employees return to work and wonder how to spend their time.

According to the New York Times, ShopperTrak, a national survey firm, said sales on Black Friday fell 0.9% to $8.01 billion. But Visa USA said use of its credit cards rose 13.9%. Wal-Mart, Toys R Us and J.C. Penney reported higher foot traffic last Friday than Black Friday a year ago.

Hot items included the expected laptops, flat-screen TVs and DVD players. Visa USA said that other hot categories were "books, music and videos." There is no must-have toy this year, giving opportunities to smaller stores. Jack Cohen, owner of four Pittsburgh, Pa., toy stores, told the Journal: "People come in and are open to suggestions."

At least one indicator for the Christmas season has improved slightly. Falling gasoline prices helped the University of Michigan's consumer sentiment index rise to 81.6 in November from 74.2 in October. But because of weaker job growth and a slowdown in the housing market, the index remains way off the 92.8 mark of last November.

Gift cards are becoming ever more popular, and some now offer recordable messages, blinking lights and customers' photographs, the Wall Street Journal reported. Gift card sales should be more than $55 billion this year and are estimated to reach $72.7 billion by 2008. The National Retail Federation estimates that the average U.S. shopper will spend $88 on gift cards this holiday season. (Incidentally the Journal noted that Borders and Barnes & Noble are adding cards depicting the lion Asian from the upcoming film version of The Chronicles of Narnia on some of their gift cards.)

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Among reports from bookstores around the country:

In Cambridge, Md., on the eastern shore, Michael Mitsak, owner of Never on Tuesday, told the Daily Banner that the store was busier on Black Friday than a year ago, in part because "the big stores have sales before Thanksgiving."

Adam Jones, manager of Inklings Bookstore in Yakima, Wash., told the Yakima Herald-Republic that the store had a busy Black Friday and that titles with Christmas themes were the biggest bestsellers.

A Barnes & Noble in Midland, Tex., drew larger crowds this Black Friday compared to last year, manager Aaron Sadeghzadeh said, according to the Midland Reporter-Telegram.

Mary Lou Wright, an owner of the Raven Bookstores in Lawrence, Kan., told the Lawrence Journal-World that the drop in gasoline prices in recent weeks was well-timed. She had "noticed a drop in our out-of-town customers" when prices had risen. "We really depend on out-of-town" customers, she said.

For at least one used bookstore, this is the season of the grinch. At the Book Rack, Fort Wayne, Ind., December is one of the store's two slow seasons, owner Art Tonsing told the Journal Gazette. The reason: "hard-core readers" turn their attention to shopping for gifts and participating in holiday traditions.

And by design one store had a non-Black Friday. According to the Raleigh News & Observer, the Internationalist Books & Community Center in Chapel Hill, N.C., celebrated Black Friday by honoring Buy Nothing Day, the anti-consumerist project that began 13 years ago in Canada and has spread around the world. The store had an afternoon of events, including a bookmaking workshop, free food and a community swap where people can bring gifts to exchange with others.

At Bridge Street Bookshop, Phoenixville, Pa., business on Black Friday continued the trend that has pleasantly surprised owner Suzanne Kelly since she opened the store July 1 (Shelf Awareness, July 1). "Black Friday was fantastic," she said. "I didn't know what to expect. A lot of shoppers stayed local."

Although she has talked up the benefits of supporting local merchants with customers, she said most people in Phoenixville, which has been promoting its downtown, "are aware of it already." A few customers "may have gone" to the nearby King of Prussia Plaza on Friday, but it was hard to tell because of all the traffic downtown.

One of at least five businesses to open downtown since the beginning of summer, Bridge Street Bookshop didn't do much with other stores to promote shopping downtown this season, but Kelly plans "definitely" to do more in the future, including advertising.

Bridge Street Bookshop has had a great five months so far, Kelly said. "Customers are happy I'm here and are proving it every day." From the beginning, the store has based much of its inventory on special orders. When a customer orders a title, Kelly said, she brings in two or three copies of the title. "These are books that are really selling well."

In addition, Kelly taken a step that few if any other stores do. (If Shelf Awareness is wrong about this point, please do let us know!) In addition to shelf talkers written by store employees, the store has encouraged customers to write shelf talkers. This happened when one customer was raving about The Devil in the White City. "I asked him to write up a card," which, she said, "has pushed up sales of the book. More and more customers see those tags and ask to do them. It's driving sales for those titles."

There have been a few surprises at the store. "I'm selling a lot of hardcover fiction," Kelly said. "It's my biggest category, closely followed by children's merchandise." She's also been surprised by the strength of sidelines, which she started selling just two months ago. In October, sidelines, which include journals, cards and calendars, accounted for about 20% of overall sales.

Store bestsellers include some unsurprising titles such as The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, A Million Little Pieces by James Frey and Angels & Demons by Dan Brown. But most customers aren't coming in for national bestsellers, Kelly said. Arcadia's Phoenixville book in its Images of America series and the Phoenixville entry for the Then and Now series have sold well. One of the biggest titles of the season is Weird Pennsylvania from Sterling. ("I can't keep it in stock.") The Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon is also "selling really well."

Although Kelly spent years researching Phoenixville and working at several jobs to improve her knowledge of bookselling (she was general manager of Gene's and worked at Chester County Book Co.), "I knew that Phoenixville needed a bookstore. I've been almost perfect with the timing," particularly as the downtown as become reinvigorated. "I couldn't be happier."

Like many other online retailers, Barnesandnoble.com is discounting, but the B&N division is also trying "more refined merchandising techniques to help glean sales from items outside the bargain bin," a Business section story in today's New York Times said. B&N.com has added weekly video "tours" that feature a category specialist who discusses choices in particular genres. "People have so much information thrown at them, especially in books, where there are hundreds of thousands of new books published each year," said CEO Marie Toulantis. "The challenge is in how you bubble up the best choices for them."

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The film version of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire continues to outsell its Potter predecessors, generating more than $400 million in ticket sales worldwide in two weeks. The biggest markets after the U.S. are the U.K., Germany and Mexico. In North America over the weekend, the movie sold almost $55 million in tickets, for a two-week total of almost $202 million.

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The Ottawa Sun profiles a new-format Indigo Books & Music store in Ottawa, Ont. Among other highlights: "sedate" benches instead of comfy chairs and many, many in-store boutiques. The article features comments from Indigo head Heather Reisman, sort of the Martha Stewart of Canadian bookselling.

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The Deseret News notes the closing next month of the Bookmark in Springville, Utah, a 16-year-old independent Latter Day Saints bookstore. Owner Sharon Ewing, who serves on the board of the Independent LDS Booksellers Association, told the paper that out of the group's 250 members in August 2004, almost half have closed, largely because of competition from chain bookstores and big-box stores such as Wal-Mart. Another hurdle: two distributors in the field have their own bookstores.

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The fleet expands: Borders has opened two more airport bookstores. They are a 1,429-sq.-ft. store in Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, Ariz., and a 1,137-sq.-ft. store in the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, its second store in that airport.

Both stores have about 5,000 book titles, including audiobooks, magazines, newspapers and CD titles. The Phoenix store also sells DVDs and has customer seating.

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Related to a local custom of opening galleries in residences, Kurt Thometz, a rare book dealer, has opened Jumel Terrace Books in his Harlem home in New York City and features books on Africana, Harlem history, jazz, African-American literature and more, according to today's New York Times. Open by appointment only, the store has stock that Thometz has handpicked. "The books I haven't read I want to read," he said.

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The Los Angeles Times's Kenneth Turan celebrates the Gold Cities Book Town Association, which includes booksellers in Grass Valley and Nevada City, Calif., north of Sacramento. Here he sketches eight of the stores in this book town.

This morning Today Show begins decorating for the season with Ralph del Pozzo, author of Christmas Ornaments Recollections (Harper Design International, $14.95, 0060835974).

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Is the cure the new ailment? Today WAMU's Diane Rehm Show talks with Greg Critser, author of Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Houghton Mifflin, $24.95, 0618393137).

Daniel Slager, the former Harcourt editor and new editor-in-chief of Milkweed Editions, has won the American Translators Association's Ungar Award for his translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Auguste Rodin (Archipelago Books, $30, 0972869255). The award is given biennially for a translation from German into English published in the U.S. Glückwünsche, Daniel.

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Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat has won the inaugural Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

Lloyd C. Blankfein, president and CEO of Goldman Sachs, commented, "Thomas Friedman has identified the most important economic and political theme of the early 21st century and has provided us with the vocabulary for debating its merits and challenges."