Category: publishing

A plucky young Canadian editor is mounting what might be considered the ultimate Quixotic challenge of the book world: building, opening, and running a major new independent bookstore in the heart of New York City. “She knows that the city’s independent booksellers have been dying off, squeezed out by skyrocketing rents and stiff price competition from large chains, such as Barnes and Noble, which gives no quarter in the town where it began.” But Sarah McNally comes from a family of experienced indie booksellers, and her family is throwing its considerable financial weight behind her new two-level, 7000-square-foot store in downtown Manhattan. The store opens this week with a staff of two dozen, and will stock 40,000 titles.

Boston’s independent WordsWorth bookstore closed this fall, offering yet one more reminder of how much is lost to a community with the failure of an institution that everyone had assumed would always be there. “Sitting among the litter, among posters of authors such as Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jack Germond and not far from a dracaena that looked dried out and defeated, [the store’s owners] pondered what they’d lost to bankruptcy — the bookstore at 30 Brattle Street that had led to their meeting and, eventually, their marriage, their two children, and all the exhilaration derived from nearly three decades of doing what they loved, which is living among, or… just touching books.”

When Greg Gatenby was director of Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre’s literary programming, he collected review copies of books. Thousands of them. Now he’s planning to sell about 28,000 volumes worth an estimated $2-million, amassed in part during his time as director of Harbourfront. The issue (and the controversy): “When publishers send out free review copies of a book for promotional purposes, are they sending them to the individual or to the institution the individual works for? Gatenby maintained that the publishing industry sends them to the person and that the books then become that person’s property.

Who looks at those best-of-the-year book lists? “Every year, literary editors feel that there is nothing their readers want more than a group of superannuated literary types telling them what they have enjoyed during the previous 12 months. There is no evidence that anyone reads these self-satisfied musings, but the papers persist anyway, competing desperately for the glitziest names.”

With small independent bookstores being squeezed out of business all over America, a new private venture aims to succeed in lower Manhattan…

A group of 21 prominent authors have contributed stories to a book project to raise money to fight AIDS in Southern Africa. “Telling Tales, a collection of short stories by Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, Susan Sontag, Woody Allen, John Updike and 15 others, will be launched at the United Nations headquarters in New York by Kofi Annan tomorrow, before World Aids Day.”

It’s not a bookstore, not a library, and definitely not a profit-driven enterprise. It’s Book Thing, the Baltimore-based book exchange where rich meets poor, elitism dances with populism, and everyone goes away with either a good book or a good feeling.

A Borders bookstore in Minneapolis has approved a new union contract for its workers. The move is significant because the outlet is only the second Borders store in the country to go union, and the contract comes more than two years after workers had initially voted to unionize. During the interim, the workers who organized the union drive quit in disgust and the company was accused of trying to break the workers’ resolve through intimidation. Now, the hope from the union is that the contract will provide it an opening into other area booksellers.

Want to be a literary star? Lit Idol is based on the format of TV’s Pop Idol. “Writers must submit up to 10,000 words from the opening chapters of their novels and a synopsis. Professional readers will choose a shortlist of five following the competition closing date on 14 January. The final five will then have to read their work in front of judging panel. A public vote will also take place, which will account for 25% of the final decision.”

Restorers are working on 62,000 heavily damaged rare books from a fire at the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar in September. “About 10 percent of the library’s collection of a million books has been irreparably damaged, library officials say. But the 600-piece Bible collection, including Martin Luther’s 1534 copy, and the huge Faust and Shakespeare collections have been saved or only slightly damaged. And between 25,000 and 30,000 other rare books are presumed lost, listed like missing persons in a databank on the library’s Web site.”