Wait, wait! I have one more thing! I’m not trying to have the last word. Frank had all the best last words (and I’m jealous, Frank. YOU got to see Keir).

But I just read this intriguing little biblio-tidbit while in the car to Joplin, MO today. It’s from Service and Style: How the American Departmet Store Fashioned the Middle Class by Jan Whitaker. In 1904 Wanamaker’s Philadelphia store was the biggest bookshop in the world. Department stores had been taking a critical drubbing for only selling bestsellers, undercutting the competition, and selling under the list price. They also received praise for always paying their book suppliers on time, exposing a wide readership to books and creating public interest in living authors by using promotions such as book fairs and teas.

The most powerful person in retail was one Marcella Burns Hahner, a book department manager for Marshall Fields. After ten years with the store, her department was deemed the largest retail book business in the world and she “held the power to make a book a best seller.” Take that, Oprah and Wal-Mart!

“Plus ça change plus ça le même chose.”

Never one to rest on her considerable laurels, J.K. Rowling is reportedly haunting the coffee shops of Scotland and working on a post-Harry Potter mystery novel.

Never one to rest on my not-quite-so-considerable laurels, I’m heading back to my two blogs and podcast in anticipation of Keir’s imminent return.

I enjoyed seeing him last weekend in Montana, and I’ll continue to enjoy hanging out here in the comments section. But my time on the Likely Stories front page is pretty much done (although I hope to be asked back for future vacation fill-in opining and analyzing). Thanks for reading and commenting.

I’ll leave you with a final thought: Do you think Keir enlisted three guest bloggers in his absence to indicate that he does the work of three people here at Booklist? Whatever the reason, it’s been a pleasure to share this space with two fun and compelling voices. These two weeks have flown by too fast.

Now to get caught up on all those reviews I owe Bill…

Two books to consider:

Rengen by Patricia Martin

Natural Born Charmer by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Besides having a flat-out fantastic name, Patricia Martin’s book explores a very interesting idea about a cultural shift in America: the creation, rise, and influence of a cultural consumer.

… individuals who are hungry for innovative ideas and ways to express them… a cultural movement that is being created by the confluence of art, science, education, popular entertainment, and business.

You can see her theory echoing on college campuses, in libraries and bookstores, and on public TV and public radio. You can see it in practice with Apple products and Google’s ever expanding suite of applications. It is fascinating reading.

In Natural Born Charmer, Susan Elizabeth Phillips has written a near perfect romance novel. Fans of the genre will be enchanted with the story of Blue Bailey and Dean Robillard and their sweetly sexy courtship. Filled with strong secondary characters who grow more appealing on every page, nice details about restoring and decorating a house, and a plot that simmers along with huge doses of humor and tenderness, the novel is simply delightful. Readers who want to try romance should look no further for a contemporary novel to try. Chick-lit fans should discover Ms. Phillips (as well as Jennifer Crusie - start with Bet Me) and those romance fans who have somehow missed her, should head out the library and put on hold the other books in this loosely connected series: It Had to be You, Heaven, Texas, Nobody’s Baby but Mine, Dream a Little Dream, This Heart of Mine, and Match Me if You Can.

I don’t have a lot of patience for those crepe-hangers who like to bemoan the fate of the book. Faced with the looming onslaught of technical devices with which to read, they wring their hands and clutch their beloved copies of Great Expectations to their heaving bosoms, vowing never to let ear buds invade their ear drums. They are annoyingly certain that only their imagination is the perfect conduit for an author’s words, not some narrator and they don’t want any gadgetry getting in the way of their printed pleasure.

Today I’m here to tell those folks to keep their dust jackets on, the printed book isn’t going anywhere. My experience this morning while out for a run is proof.

Armed with a bottle of water and my CD player, I slipped the latest disc of the audio book I’m reviewing (and enjoying) into the player, set the volume, adjusted the ear pieces and kicked up my heels on a dusty track.

Halfway through the thrilling and perfectly narrated disc, it started to hiccup like an annoying drunk imparting much needed driving directions. I ignored it. I wasn’t missing much of the story. It blipped, skipped, and hicc’d for the next half hour. So much so that my heart rate is unmeasurable at the end of the run, it’s skipping and blipping along to the CD.

I cooled down (hardly) by walking and trying to hold the player to keep it from skittering. I was at a good part and I really wanted to hear what happened next. I held the player down by my side, over my head, stuffed it in my pocket. Nothing helped. I gave up and fumed the last quarter mile. "If I had a real book this wouldn’t happen. I could hold the book up in front of my face and turn pages. Of course, I’d have to stop at crosswalks. And it might be difficult to follow the words if I’m bouncing while I’m running. But at least I’d be able to read all the damn words!"

This isn’t the first time this player has sputtered its way through a workout. But I’d had it with technology by the time I got home. I left the CD player on the porch after I removed the disc and batteries. I got a cup of coffee and a hammer and went onto the porch for the upper body portion of the exercise hour.

You can’t imagine how great it is to beat the hell out of a worn out CD player. There are little pieces of plastic and metal artfully scattered on my porch. I’ll clean it up later.

Right now, I just had to share my firm belief that the printed book isn’t on its way out, so ya’ll eye-readers can just settle. And I need to order an mp3 player and sign up for Overdrive.

In my readers’ advisory (RA) class, I often include an assignment that asks students to visit any book store they wish and look around. What I hope they will see are examples of RA in action - in a different setting than their library. The Regulator Bookshop in Durham, N.C. offers some great RA moments for their readers - in ways that invite participation and in ways that create serendipitous discovery opportunities. Behold:

In addition to readings and author visits, The Regulator provides its reading community a chance to suggest books to both the staff and other readers. The comments are typed up and posted in a display called Book Love. Fans of Harry Potter got a chance to offer up odds on what might happen in the last book and the staff posted the list of ideas right over the checkout counter. Readers can match their interests against those of the community by tracking The Regulator bestseller display - which includes both expected titles and many surprises. While none of this is necessarily new, all of it is well done (and I will say that I have not heard of the Harry Potter prediction list as of yet appearing in any library), and it shows that a place that makes money off of its ability to invite and engage readers, thinks in terms of RA all the time - even if they would not call it that. So if you are ever in Durham, N.C. check out The Regulator on Ninth street and the next time you visit your local library or bookstore - see what RA features surround you.

The Financial Times examines how the estates of late authors pump out new ghostwritten works and otherwise keep their brands alive. I found this quote particularly telling:

“Often an author already has an extensive literary canon to exploit. Dahl and Dahl Ltd, which handles the estate of the children’s author Roald Dahl, has refused to create new books, unlike the estate of Dr Seuss for example.

“Dominic Gregory of DDL explains: ‘It’s not part of our plan because his existing books continue to sell very well.’”

Notice that he didn’t say it’s not part of the plan because it’d be nice to let Dahl rest in peace.

Also of note:

“For dead authors who are still in copyright, trademarking may help estates keep control after the term ends, says intellectual property lawyer Laurence Kaye. ‘If you intend to republish a book that has gone out of copyright, you would have to do it in a way that did not infringe any trademarks.’

“IFP has registered everything from Ian Fleming to James Bond and Miss Moneypenny, so any attempt to reproduce the books without permission after they go out of copyright would meet difficulties.

“Mr Kaye says: ‘You would have to manipulate the book so that there was nothing in it that infringed the registered trademarks.’”

So are we looking at a future in which those who wish to publish such out-of-copyright books must go through the pages and rename characters Bames Jond and, heaven forbid, Gussy Palore?

Publishers and authors’ estates have a keen interest in making money, and that’s fine. But wasn’t copyright law supposed to act as a counterbalance to encourage creative use of such works after the protected terms? This legal end run seems likely to further impoverish a creative culture that once was free to re-imagine works from earlier eras and use them as building blocks for new art.

In one of those small-world coincidences that so often crop up in the lives of voracious consumers of media, I watched Hud for the first time last weekend courtesy of my digital video recorder. A few months ago, I similarly caught up with A Face in the Crowd. The common denominator: Patricia Neal, who turns in extraordinary, electric performances in both films. I was so taken by her that I went online to read about her career. That’s when I discovered she was married to Roald Dahl for 30 years. And now the FT fills us in on how the Dahl estate manages his works.

One takeaway: It’s just those kinds of strange connections that can lead writers to use out-of-copyright works in fascinating new ways. Another: Don’t pass up an opportunity to watch a Patricia Neal movie.

That’s the sense one gets from reading this Seattle Weekly piece on the trouble inmates have getting books from the outside unless they come from “approved vendors”:

“While Washington state isn’t alone in only allowing new books (Oregon also only allows books from publishers and major national distributors like Amazon.com), its adherence to the approved vendor policy has made it, according to [Books to Prisoners volunteer Andy Chan], ‘a pretty tough nut’ compared to other states. [Risa Klemme, public information officer at Airway Heights Corrections Center west of Spokane] says this is a moot point, as prisoners still have access to all the reading material they’d want. ‘We have a library,’ she explains. ‘It’s not like they don’t have access to any books.’

“Indeed, Airway Heights’ library is open 20 hours a week, but how long a library is open for and how much access inmates have aren’t the same thing. ‘I worked at the jail library briefly, and I know they just throw stuff on a cart and everyone [clamors for] it…it’s kind of sad,’ says [Carla McLean, a librarian and volunteer for Books to Prisoners]. ‘Their access to the library is very limited; both of my pen pals have complained about that. One can get access to the wood shop, or he can try to run with 30 or 50 people to the library for a half an hour. So he usually forgoes it because he hates [literally sprinting to the library] and doing that. So he just stays in the wood shop.’”

The story helped fulfill my constant search for nifty little mystery plot twists with this:

“Theoretically, the concept of approved vendors is to provide offenders with their books in a more timely fashion. ‘This is good for the offenders,’ says [Klemme], adding that books no longer have to go through the second step of the package room, where items were catalogued before being distributed.”

Two possible twists there for a mystery novel or screenplay:

1. Someone who wants to ship contraband to a prisoner gets a job at one of the approved vendors (which can be small businesses) and inserts the items in a hollowed-out “new” book that will now bypass the package room.

2. Some whacked-out employee of an approved vendor, hearing about this policy, puts a gun into a prison shipment just to see what might happen.

If any authors out there use said twists, I expect a thank you in the acknowledgements and a signed copy of the published work…

That’s the question I had after reading the New York Observer article on James Wood’s move from the New Republic to the New Yorker, in which the critic states:

“In recent years… I had felt that I was repeating myself, that the pieces were becoming a bit automatic, a bit inevitable.”

If the beat stays the same, how does a change of scenery affect that feeling of inevitability? The Observer reports that Wood didn’t tell his New Republic editor about the move until after the deal with the New Yorker was done. So if the refreshing nature of the change has to do with the fact Wood will write more short pieces at his new gig, why didn’t he first run that possibility by TNR’s Leon Wieseltier?

Putting myself in Wood’s fancy shoes for a moment, I can easily imagine making the same move. What’s not to like about stepping onto the august stage of the New Yorker and getting paid, almost certainly, a lot more money to write about a dozen pieces a year?

But doesn’t his explanation for jumping ship seem just a wee bit disingenuous?

Wieseltier offers something of a be-careful-what-you-wish-for warning to his former critic: 

“It would be hard to comment on the difference between The New Republic’s audience and The New Yorker’s audience without sounding vain and snobbish. The pieces we publish, they’re more argumentative. They’re more agitated and more agitating. They make more fights. They’re more scholarly. We allow a touch of wildness. They’re certainly less polite. David believes that civility is a primary intellectual virtue. I believe it’s a secondary intellectual virtue, or no intellectual virtue at all.”

Remnick and Wood insist the critic won’t have to trim his claws. It’ll be interesting to see how this one plays out.

The O.J. Simpson book that proved too hot for tabloid titan Rupert Murdoch has been picked up by New York-based Beaufort, a publisher that’s served as a vanity press in the past. As Publishers Lunch reports today:

“…as of recently Beaufort described themselves this way: ‘Beaufort offers an intriguing alternative to the traditional publishing model. We guide the publishing process, share in the risk, and offer the expertise and experience that are necessary to make any book a success.’”

But a Bloomberg story indicates Beaufort stepped up to offer a traditional publishing deal for If I Did It:

“Beaufort spokesman Michael Wright said the company had reached a traditional publishing agreement and costs would not be shared. He wouldn’t disclose whether or how much money was paid to the Goldmans for the rights. …

“Denise Brown, Nicole Brown’s sister, issued a statement yesterday that derided the book as a step-by-step manual on how Nicole and her friend Ron were murdered, and she called for a boycott. Denise Brown is scheduled to debate Beaufort President Eric Kampmann today on NBC’s ‘Today’ show.

“For his part, Kampmann said in a statement that the company ‘will be working diligently to not only publish this book well, but to honor the memory of the victims of this terrible crime: Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.’

“The statement said Beaufort, the Goldmans and Martin will contribute an unspecified portion of the proceeds to the Ron Goldman Foundation for Justice.”

Now this is just a guess, but it seems likely that this deal includes a small advance, which means the sellers are counting on royalties for their payday. I certainly don’t begrudge the Goldman family a shot at making O.J.’s life miserable, but at the same time they’re also causing pain to the Brown family by publishing what sounds like a repellent memoir of murder. In other words, there’s got to be a better way for the Goldmans to honor Ron’s memory. And anyone thinking of purchasing this book can’t say, “Well, they already got a big advance so I’m not really participating in the process.” The only way this gruesome gambit pays off is if people pony up. It’s worth thinking about.

On a happier note, it’s nice to see Bloomberg running fiction reviews. I was pleased to stumble across this review of the Aurelio Zen mystery End Games while researching this item.

Here’s more on the Simpson deal from PW Daily.

I was looking over all the reality television offerings and realized that aside from C-SPAN’s BookTV (a televised book report), there are no “real” shows that appeal to the bards and scribblers among us. Every other art form has secured its own small screen showcase, how about one for writers? Here are my pitches for this fall’s TV slate.

Writing with the Stars:  Ghost writers will partner with barely literate celebrities and construct a chapter from a forthcoming tell-all memoir. In the judging round, writers will read from each chapter. Winning entries will have the most outrageous content couched in the most literate prose. Only the celebrity will get credit for the win.

Top Scribe: Every week an unnamed publisher will provide a setting, two characters, a catch phrase, and a genre. Each writer-contestant will construct a proposal for a bankable bestseller that employs all elements. The winning proposal gets film rights. This week’s challenge: In 24 hours, write a Hugo Award-winning book that includes the Korean War, one actuary, one librarian, and the phrase, "This one time, at band camp…?" Use of a thesaurus or Redbull will result in disqualification.

The Amazing Travelogue: Travel around the world to the secret destination provided in the itinerary that arrives at 12:01 in your email. You must use the method of travel specified (sedan chair, log raft, camel, coach-and-four). Once you have arrived at your destination you have $20 less than the going rate to secure accommodations at a clean and safe motel within walking distance of hot spots. You will have $10 less than the average meal with which to dine like a gourmet. You must find five no-cost/low-cost AND romantic activities to do. Frequent flyer points if one of the activities is family-friendly. Write up your experiences in 25 words or less and email back to editor by 5 pm the next day.

Flip this Manuscript: Submit your Great American Novel to 50 publishers. Collect all 50 rejection slips. Paper your bathroom walls with rejection slips. Bonus points for mosaics. Sell house.

Real World Author: Set alarm for 7 am. Punch until 8:30 am. Get up, pour coffee, turn on computer screen. Reread yesterday’s efforts. Wonder why you didn’t take mom’s advice and become a history teacher. Drink more coffee. Reevaluate yesterday’s efforts. Smugly realize that you are glad you didn’t take mom’s advice. Bang out three sparkling sentences that do not need editing. Get stuck. Stare at computer screen for 45 minutes. Clean bathroom. Stare at computer screen. Do laundry. Stare at computer screen. Mow lawn. Stare at computer screen. Kids come home from school. Find inspiration and write frantically until 2 am. Write. Read. Repeat. Get dropped from publisher next season for low Nielsen ratings.

I am so going to Hollywood.