Tag Archives: books

Spiritual comfort and Harry Potter were highlights of the year: The search for spiritual sustenance after last year’s September 11 attacks has boosted the profits of religious publishers while children have demonstrated an insatiable appetite for the exploits of a boy wizard. With the industry hit by the current global …

PW reports: Sales in both the adult and children’s segments declined in August, and sales fell in seven of the 11 categories tracked by the AAP. According to the association’s monthly sales estimates, adult hardcover sales were down 8% in the month, while trade paperback sales were off 2.5%. Children’s …

John Mutter and Edward Nawotka report for PW Daily for Booksellers on cautious optimism among booksellers for the holiday season: The sagging stock market, rising unemployment, bellicose talk in Washington and a dragging economy continue to make many Wall Street analysts and general retailers pessimistic about the holiday season. Booksellers …

For you serious “bookie” types (reading not wagering), there is Book TV all weekend long (Saturday at 8 a.m. to Monday at 8a.m.) on C-SPAN2. The schedule this weekend: Saturday, October 5 (All times Eastern) 8 a.m. Children’s Books. From Tillicum Middle School in Bellevue, Wash., Helen Szablya and Peggy …

Ringmaster Tolkien has been discussed much in these pages of late. Now, Publishers Weekly Daily newsletter has an interview today with Tolkien scholar Douglas Anderson, author of The Annotated Hobbit: PW Daily spoke with Anderson about juggling the roles of bookseller and author, and why reading an annotated Hobbit is …

The NY Times reviews Brazilian singer/songwriter Caetano Veloso’s new biography: Imagine a singer-songwriter having emerged in the 60’s who combined the poetical and political allusiveness of Bob Dylan, the melodic seductiveness of Burt Bacharach, the good looks of a French New Wave actor, the hip thinkiness of Susan Sontag in …

The covers of Evan Dorkin’s Dork #10 (Slave Labor Graphics) pretty much encapsulate this pitch dark humor comic: the front shows an isolated comic book shop in flames and attacked by a mob; the back has a childishly rendered cartoon cat, brandishing a knife and telling us, “We all die …

It’s one of those places that I’d driven past more than once and had always promised myself I would visit. So when my day job took me to Metropolis, Illinois, last spring I was probably more excited than I should’ve been. Metropolis! Though I knew intellectually I was just visiting …

Mark Prendergrast’s The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Trance – The Evolution of Sound In the Electronic Age is an enthusiastic and exhaustive tour through a century’s worth of biography of the music’s creators and disseminators. Included are early-twentieth century fathers Mahler, Satie, Debussy, Ravel; mid-century pioneering electronic composers Varese, …

Eric Nuzum is the author of the fascinating Parental Advisory: Music Censorship in America: What we commonly refer to as “music censorship” (and what will be examined in this book) is actually implicit censorship: community, institutional, and corporate attempts to regulate society according to their personal standards of decency and …