Sam Weller's Books, a downtown Salt Lake City landmark since 1929, is introducing the world to some of the best of Utah's writers while the Olympic Games are played down the street. The store is offering a packed schedule of appearances by about 30 local writers, musicians, and visual artists (many from the area) during the two-week period between February 8 and February 23, Roxann Campbell, Weller's events coordinator, told BTW.

The ABA Bylaws provide a procedure for candidates for the Board of Directors to get on the ballot via petition, in keeping with the association's strategic plan that "the nomination and election process [be] open and fair." However, all petitions must be submitted by February 28, 2002.

For more information on the petition process, click here.

For more information on the work of the ABA Nominating Committee, click here.

Since launching online last month, Bookselling This Week is available free of charge. Our expanded, daily coverage of bookselling and the publishing industry is available with no password restrictions at the BTW home page (http://news.bookweb.org) -- and all bookstores are encouraged to sign up their staff (either work or home e-mail address) to receive their own copy of the weekly BTW e-mail edition, which is sent every Thursday.

Avin Mark Domnitz, ABA CEO, will be holding three financial sessions through March and April 2002 in conjunction with ABA’s 2002 Spring Bookseller Forums across the country. The sessions, "Basic Bookstore Finances," will discuss operating within a system of financial controls to help predict performance and measure outcomes against those predictions, and cash flow control. Attendees will receive a computer disk with worksheets, which will help them integrate the session’s ideas into their everyday business.

Based on the nominations of ABA member booksellers, the Book Sense Book of the Year Award finalists in five categories were announced on February 13 by the American Booksellers Association. Booksellers will vote for one winner in each category -- Adult Fiction, Adult Nonfiction, Children's Literature, Children's Illustrated, and, new this year, Rediscovery. Nominations were drawn from the Top Ten Book Sense 76 picks of 2001.

On February 6, 2002, the fight over free speech on the Internet returned to a Brattleboro, Vermont, courtroom, as the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) continued the legal case over the constitutionality of a Vermont statute criminalizing sexual content communicated via the Internet. But the hearing -- held almost a year to the day after ABFFE and a diverse group of civil rights organizations and businesses first filed the complaint -- was more a battle over legal language than free speech.

Claude Brown, the author of the classic 1965 semi-autobiographical novel Manchild in the Promised Land (Simon & Schuster), died on February 2. The cause of death was a lung condition.

Brown was born in New York City in 1937 and grew up in Harlem. He graduated from Howard University in 1965 and attended law school first at Stanford, then Rutgers. He also wrote a book called The Children of Ham in 1976. He spent much of the following two decades writing magazine articles, lecturing, and teaching.

Madison, Wisconsin -- famous for its independent spirit; community of passionate readers and thinkers; and great cheese.

On Tuesday, February 12, Disney Children’s Book Group, LLC, announced that it was voluntarily recalling the children’s book Zowie’s 123, part of the Rolie Polie Olie book series. Disney made the move, in cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), after it heard that a 15-month-old boy broke a bead from the book cover and placed it in his mouth. An adult removed the object, and the child was not injured.

On Thursday, February 8, The Red Balloon Bookshop, a St. Paul, Minnesota-based childrens bookstore, was host to a panel discussion on free expression. The innovative idea grew from an incident last November, when a Red Balloon Bookshop customer wanted to ban a book she had never read. The patron (an educator, in fact) came to store manager, Roxanna Markie, incensed that the bookstore carried the book Little Black Sambo. Based only on the title, the educator assumed the book to be racist. It isnt.