Industry News

On Tuesday, February 12, approximately 20 booksellers attended a Booksellers Forum held at the Westford Regency, in Westford, Massachusetts, from 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. The Booksellers Forum followed a meeting of the New England Booksellers Association Advisory Council.

In conjunction with BookExpo America, a number of organizations have come together to launch a campaign to encourage New York City residents to join a citywide book group. Earlier this month representatives from the organizations voted to select as the featured title the novel Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee, (Riverhead Books).

Thanks to a great outpouring of booksellers’ recommendations, we were able to compile a fantastic Poetry 76 Top Ten. The flier will go on press this week; the pad of fliers will go into the March "white box," and they'll get to you in time for April poetry displays.

At the site of the venerable Chatterton’s Bookshop, closed in 1994 after the death of its owner, is Los Angeles's five-year-old Skylight Books, the result of great production, directing, casting, and location.

Bucking an uncertain economy, bookstore sales for December closed out the year 2001 on a strong note. Preliminary December sales of $2,291 million were 9.6 percent ahead of the $2,090 million sales for December of 2000.

Bookstore sales continued to outperform overall retail. Preliminary overall retail sales of $339 billion amounted to a slim 3.0 percent gain for December over the $329 billion in sales recorded the previous December.

Based on a February 12 visit to the American International Toy Fair 2002, it appears that designing a successful plaything this year involves selecting popular toys and games from three or four decades ago and making them edible or covering them with licensed brand or team names. Another popular option is creating something kids can play together with their parents, or even better, with their grandparents, in the safety of their own homes dressed in facsimiles of the uniforms of firefighters and police officers (also known as community workers).

Virginia Hamilton, an internationally renowned and award-winning author of children’s literature, died February 19, 2002, in Dayton, Ohio. She had been ill with cancer for a number of years. Hamilton was 65.

ABA announced this week that the distinguished historian and writer Doris Kearns Goodwin will serve as host for the 2002 Celebration of Bookselling -- ABA's and Book Sense's annual reception for attendees of BookExpo America (BEA). Goodwin is the author of several bestsellers, including No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Home Front During World War II and The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, as well as the memoir Wait Till Next Year.

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.