Monthly Archives: January 2009

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Award-Winning Author John Updike Dies at 76

Pulitzer prize recipient and prolific author John Updike passed away today at the age of 76. Updike died from lung cancer. He is famous for the Rabbit series, a quartet of novels written over a 30-year period which centers around the title character Harry “Rabbit”

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2009 Award-winning children’s books

The ALA (American Library Association) announced the winners this morning for three prestigious awards to childrens’ authors. John Newbery Medal The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman – “Neil Gaiman’s eagerly awaited middle-grade take on Rudyard Kipling’s THE JUNGLE BOOK features Nobody, a boy raised by

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Rare Book of the Day – Yoshida Hiroshi

Yoshida Hiroshi: Print Maker by Ben Bruce Blakeney I have a thing for Japanese art, and especially print-making and wood-block prints, because of the precision and complexity involved. Hiroshi was a talented artist and this particular item won’t burn a hole in my pocket if

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Statuettes in Sight for Movie Adaptations

Several of the 2009 Academy Award nominations include books that were adapted for the silver screen. To catch up on your winter reading before the Awards, check out these titles: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman: Best Art Direction & Costume The Reader by

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Selling Used Childrens’ Books Is Not a Crime!

Many of us in the US book selling community have been concerned about recent legislation that was intended to offer new safety standards for children’s products. The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) was created to address concerns about harmful substances, such as lead, found

Booksellers penalized by credit card industry

We’ve been receiving increasing reports from booksellers that they have been receiving somewhat menacing letters  regarding PCI compliance from credit card processors, listing all the potential penalities for non-compliance, such as the following excerpt from one such letter: Not terribly startling, except this is the

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Rare book of the day – Signed Albert Einstein

A gorgeous, signed copy of Einstein’s canonical book, Relativity! One of the more interesting books that passed through my wife and my hands when we owned a bookstore was a first edition of The Evolution of Physics by Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, signed by

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Blogging from beyond the grave

The Orwell Prize has taken blogging to a new place and time. The British prize annual British prize for excellence in political writing takes its name from writer George Orwell.  Beginning in August of 2008, the Orwell Prize has taken an innovative approach to presenting