Lemuria Books – Page 170

Page 170 of 257

The Grimm Legacy by Polly Shulman

On February 19, 2011

A high school student named Elizabeth takes a job at the New York Circulating Materials Repository in hopes of making a little money and perhaps new friends. This is no ordinary library, it lends out objects rather than books. The basement of the Repository houses a very magical collection—the Grimm Collection.

Not long after Elizabeth begins working here she realizes that items from the Grimm’s Collection are disappearing. She quickly realizes that she and her new friends must find the thief before the authorities lay the blame on them. Come along for an intriguing and magical world of romance and adventure.

The Grim Legacy: Borrow the Magic . . . If You Dare!

by Polly Shulman (Putnam, 2010)

Ages 10-13

Bookstore Keys: The Future Price of Physical Books

By John

On February 18, 2011

In Newsworthy

“I think that there will be a 50% reduction in bricks-and-mortar shelf space for books within five years, and 90% within 10 years. Bookstores are going away.” (Mike Shatzkin, Ideal Logical Co., The Wall Street Journal)

Obviously with Borders bankruptcy, much shelf space will be eliminated quickly. Now when you go into B & N you see book shelf space already vanishing into other non-book products. The new kid on the block, the e-book, seems to be growing up fast.

It’s tough to contemplate the price point of the physical book in the future. Lemuria, being a small bookstore, has little control over the list prices we can charge. Instead, our mission is to add value however and whenever we can by offering first editions, signed copies, and author appearances, etc. When price is discussed, I have very little control if I want to stay in business. Regarding Lemuria’s participation in the discount wars between big box bookstores and Amazon, I cannot even consider entering that competition.

Lemuria introduces the not-so-well known but award-winning author Mark Richard on February 22nd. To complement his new memoir, Lemuria has collected first editions of his early short stories, compared to Flannery O’Connor yet not widely read.

With the present climate change, Barnes & Noble, the T-Rex of the brick-and-mortar war, and the virtual Amazon, thriving in its own dimension selling an endless variety of products, are now in a Dino Dawg fight. (In the main ring, ladies and gentleman, the Nook vs. the Kindle!) I ask why should physical books continue to be discounted?

Can and will the retail price of physical books come down? Will the publisher begin to determine real value retail pricing on the books they present to be sold?

If retail prices come down and our book product can be valued properly, could we as an industry reinstate a more legitimate physical book value point? Can the price wars now be fought over the e-book? As real book selling space shrinks, we can offer more product legitimacy with more real value marketing for physical books. With cheaper retail list prices, can we create more customer confidence, causing more physical books to be sold?

Amazon is selling Kevin Brockmeier’s Illumination at 48% off the list price. Building on a years-long relationship, Lemuria hosts Kevin Brockmeier on February 23, supporting one of the most original voices of contemporary Southern literature.

When the discounting of retail list prices increased, many local community bookstores were squeezed out of the market and forced to close. For 18 years, I’ve been across the road from a box store which is erasing the value of the physical book. (I was told by mutual sales reps that the box was located across the street “to put me out of business.”)

Revaluing retail book prices could level the playing field again. Less discount influence from the big box bookstores would open the door for Lemuria to grow faster out of the “Great Recession” and our customers would see Lemuria improve more quickly in terms of becoming a more solid “reader” bookstore.

Lovers of Southern literature can buy Swampandia at Ridgeland’s Barnes & Noble for $19.96 or they can buy a signed first edition at Lemuria for the list price of $24.95 and meet one of the hottest new voices in Southern Literature, Karen Russell.

Projection: Suggested e-book prices may level off between 7 and 10 bucks. With e-book values so cheap, will book publishers begin to lower retail prices of the physical book so readers of the physical book won’t feel ripped off? By lowering retail prices, the marketing strength of the word “discount” will be lessened. Publishers please remember what too-high CD prices did to our community music stores.

Also, what about net pricing, where bookstores would get to mark up like most retailers? Our existent antiquated mark down from the retail price structure, helped caused our industry to get into this Amazon “loss leader” mess in the first place.

John Grisham books are a typical “loss leader” choice for big box book stores and Amazon. One use of a loss leader is to draw customers into a store where they are likely to buy other products. The vendor expects that the typical customer will purchase other products at the same time as the loss leader book and that the profit made on these items will be such that an overall profit is generated for the vendor, prostituting the book.

Such complexity won’t be solved soon. I believe that with retail price adjustment and fair valuing for retail pricing within our industry, Mr. Shatzkin’s forecast can be proven wrong. For the present, Lemuria will continue to add value to our books we sell, providing our community with the best services we can offer. I believe that with more legitimate retail pricing from the publishers, our bookstore can exist indefinitely.

The Bookstore Key Series on Changes in the Book Industry

Finding “Deep Time” in a Bookstore (March 8th) Reading The New Rules of Retail by Lewis & Dart (March 3) The Future Price of the Physical Book (Feb 18) Borders Declares Bankruptcy (Feb 16) How Great Things Happen at Lemuria (Feb 8th) The Jackson Area Book Market (Jan 25) What’s in Store for Local Bookselling Markets? (Jan 18) Selling Books Is a People Business (Jan 14) A Shift in Southern Bookselling? (Jan 13) The Changing Book Industry (Jan 11)

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One more Madeline memory

By Former Lemurians

On February 17, 2011

In Oz: Children's Books

Even the mention of the Madeline series brings a smile to my face —for in our family these books have happily spanned three generations—My mother read the first book about Madeline to me when I was a child. Then I, of course, couldn’t wait to read them all to my own daughter. And since I still had a copy of the very first in the series (carefully saving it along with other favorites of my children) it was I who first introduced my grandchildren to the delightful Madeline. Though my daughter has subsequently collected the other books in the series for them, I keep my copy on hand for when they come to Jackson, and it’s become something of a tradition to re-read it each time they come. -Billie

John Bemelmans Marciano was here on Friday, February 18th at 4:30 to sign his new book, Madeline at the White House, and his other Madeline stories.

Lemuria…out and about!

By Former Lemurians

On February 16, 2011

In Newsworthy

One of the best perks of working at Lemuria is being able to meet the authors that come through the store promoting their books. Now, with my new position as community liaison I am able go out in the community and meet the speakers that are coming to town. This past Saturday, Ellen and I had the pleasure of going to the annual meeting of the Mississippi Cattleman’s Association.

Let me tell you, all I know about cattle farming is that I like what it produces! I do enjoy a good steak and hamburger from time to time, but I really had no idea what all it takes to produce good quality cuts of meat. From time to time, you hear about abuse of livestock and the terrible conditions that these animals live in, but I will say that I think the majority of these people that we met on Saturday really do care for their animals. Especially since I saw how interested they were in listening to the keynote speaker of the day, Temple Grandin.

Dr. Grandin, as many of you know, is a doctor of animal science and a professor at Colorado State University, a best-selling author and a consultant to the livestock industry on animal behavior. Her humane livestock facility designs are in use all over the world and she serves as an adviser on animal welfare to several segments of the fast food industry. As a person with ‘high functioning autism’ she is also well known for her work in autism advocacy and for inventing the hug machine, designed to calm hypersensitive persons.

Dr. Grandin’s theory seemed pretty simple to me: Safer Handling–Better Meat. If you follow her methods then you will “improve the day-to-day operation as well as the profitability of your farm by raising healthier, more contented animals. Your benefits are great–for you and your livestock.”

I would like to thank the Mississippi Cattlemen’s Association for inviting Lemuria to take part in their annual meeting. We really enjoyed meeting your members and hope to see some of you in the bookstore soon.

Humane Livestock Handling by Temple Grandin (Storey, 2008)

Bookstore Keys: Borders Declares Bankruptcy

By John

On February 16, 2011

In Newsworthy

Today Borders officially filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy citing a debt of $1.25 billion and supposed assets of $1.275 billion. Publishers and distributors are owed some $230 million. Over the next few weeks, Borders will be closing 30% of its stores or about 200. No news yet that Flowood’s Borders will be one of those. (Scroll down for full list of publisher creditors.)

At the present time, interpreting future landscape of book selling is difficult.

My first question, asking myself, is where will all the books go that are now on Borders’ book shelves. As stores close, will inventory be shared to the remaining existing stores? A logical guess. Will an extensive amount of inventory be returned to the publishers to pay outstanding bills? How much of Borders’ unpaid bills will be written off by the publishers, thus causing more pressure to booksellers who pay their bills. Will huge closing sales take place across America increasing the already exorbitant discount of my product?

My big question is why the publishers let Borders escape from paying their bills on time? I cannot fathom the size of the bath the publishers will take. I ask why? It doesn’t seem that Borders’ continual deep discounting of books they aren’t paying for has helped our book selling cause. I feel this publisher tolerance has erased value on all levels of legitimate book selling.

Just this November, I made an envelope addressing mistake on a publisher’s address. My check was lost in the mail, my slight error could have been caught by an astute postman, but it wasn’t. My favorite publisher, the one I try to pay first and foremost on time, threatened to cut off my account. I was beginning to run 30 days past due. When hassled, I knew I wrote the check and mailed it as soon as I could. Stopped shipments from this company would have been disastrous for Lemuria’s Christmas season. Fortunately, intervention from inside company aids kept my account temporarily open, until my check was returned, address error corrected and check then resent, thus clearing up my problem. I must add, I still was not 60 days past due.

My point is why a small bookstore paying its bills regularly is hassled and threatened while Borders owes and refuses to pay such a huge amount. Why didn’t the publishers demand results from Borders sooner? They were sure quick to pull the trigger on me. It will be interesting to see how the publishers answer this question about their tolerance over the next few weeks.

As Borders falls, I hope the publishers learn from their mistakes. Maybe their philosophy will become one of supporting real book selling with team work, and local community book selling will be enhanced.

Publishers helping the bookstores that pay their bills to make more money could be a starting foundation to rebuild our industry.

Here is the full list of publisher creditors:

Penguin $41.1 million

Hachette Book Group $36.9 million

Simon & Schuster $33.75 million

Random House $33.5 million

HarperCollins $25.8 million

Macmillan $11.4 million

Wiley $11.2 million

Perseus $7.8 million

F+W Media $4.6 million

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt $4.4 million

Workman $4 million

McGraw-Hill $3.1 million

Pearson Education $2.8 million

NBN $2 million

Norton $2 million

Zondervan $1.9 million

Hay House $1.7 million

Elsevier Science $1.6 million

Publications Intl. $1.1 million

The Bookstore Key Series on Changes in the Book Industry

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An Introduction to Ghost Light by Joseph O’Connor

By Lemuria

On February 16, 2011

In Foreign Fiction

On a Saturday night, when I was a teenager in 1970s Ireland, my pals and I would go to the school-kids’ disco at the Presentation College, Glasthule. ‘Prez’, as it was known, was fairly grimy at the time, but fantastically exciting, too. Deep Purple were in vogue. The girls wore cheesecloth and denim. When Status Quo were played, the air would be filled with swirling dandruff as we head-banged and thrashed air guitars. The climax of the evening was always Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’, and if you hadn’t persuaded someone to slow-dance with you before that song sped up, the consensus was that you were going home alone. And most Saturday nights, that’s what happened to me. Tongue-tied, nervous, I faced the long road home. But still, there was a love story in Glasthule.

My walk home would take me past the old Victorian house where the great writer John Synge and his widowed mother had endured their last years, a house that appears several times in Ghost Light. As a child, I passed it often, was faintly afraid of it, often wondered about the stories it had seen. On a wintry night it could be forbidding as the Bates Motel, or as Wuthering Heights in a rainstorm. But on a moonlit summer evening in that coast-town of seagulls and steeples, a strange beauty seemed to glitter from its windows.

Molly Allgood by John B. Yeats

My late mother, a great reader, had often told me the strangest story of all: how in the last years of Synge’s life, this reticent, broken genius, the son of a Protestant land-owning family, had fallen tempestuously in love with a Catholic girl from the inner city of Dublin, a young actress called Molly Allgood. Molly had been an apprentice dressmaker at one point in her teens. My mother, too, had trained as a dress-designer. Molly’s stage name was ‘Maire O’Neill’, my grandmother’s surname. These tiny connections, and other ones, kept the story burning long in my mind. But the main thing that fuelled it was the memory of lonely Saturday nights, when I’d walk past that house and feel its ghosts gazing out at me, every bit as friendless as I was.

A couple of years ago, I began writing this novel inspired by Molly Allgood and Synge. I started with the uncertainty most novelists have at the outset. You don’t know if your story is going to work at all. What tense should it be written in? Who should be the narrator? Every book needs to have a style, its own unique voice, and to find it can be gruelingly frustrating. But somehow, over time, through dozens of drafts, I came to see that this story needed to be simple, focused closely on Molly. She began to loom up at me from the phantoms of dead drafts, as funny and flirtatious as I had imagined her in my teens. I suppose I learnt to stand out of her way, to let her lead me into the story of Ghost Light. I follow her through a day in the 1950s in London, when the past comes back to an elderly Irish actress who was once the beautiful muse of a genius.

William Butler Yeats

To write fiction based on real people and those they loved is a morally ambiguous enterprise, to say the least. Ghost Light is a work of the imagination, frequently taking immense liberties with fact. The experiences and personalities of the real Molly and Synge differed from those of my characters in numerous ways. Yeats and Lady Gregory and Sean O’Casey appear in the book too, no doubt in forms some biographers won’t like. Then again, these giants often said they had fanned their fictions from the sparks of real life, renaming the people who had inspired their stories. The practice was sometimes a camouflage, sometimes a claim of authenticity. It was an option I considered carefully but decided against in the end, and so I dare to ask the forgiveness of these noble ghosts of world literature for not changing the names of the innocent.

To finish a book is an ambiguous feeling too. You have worked so long and hard on it, you know its every line and comma. In the final stages of editing, you dream about it. And then suddenly, the day is coming when it must go out into the world. You won’t be there to hold its hand, to reason away its deficiencies, to explain it to those who will encounter it. There is a kind of joy in finishing, but there is fear and apprehensiveness too. You want the book to find friends who will meet it halfway. Perhaps it’s similar to what a parent feels when a child leaves the house. This day was always coming; it’s what everything was building towards; but there is anxiety in the mix, a sense of encroaching realities, and if I am honest, there is even a touch of sadness. You come to know your characters so well; everything about them. Things you’ll never know about your spouse or your closest friend, you know about a person you have created. To see her walk away, into the great, wide world, is to watch a little piece of your self take its chances. But that’s what a novel is for: to offer itself to the reader. I hope you find something in it that speaks to you.

This essay first appeared on Joseph O’Connor’s official website. There you can find material for book clubs, reviews, video, book tour information, and much more.

Lemuria is one of nine stops on Joseph O’Connor’s U.S. tour for Ghost Light. He will be signing at 5:00 and reading at 5:30 on Friday, February 18th.

The signing and reading will take place at our Dot Com events building.

Ya’lls Blues will start playing music at 5:00. Come on over for a beer and a relaxing evening on the deck.

Also see Nan’s blog on Ghost Light.

Ghost Light by Joseph O’Connor (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2011)

A new twist on the classics

By Former Lemurians

On February 15, 2011

In Art/Photography

by Kelly Pickerill

I love architecture and design books. From shabby chic to the gaudiest luxe, if the pictures are gorgeous and the text’s more than just a description of the picture, I’m in. Lemuria is featuring two of our design books now — a new book on Ken Tate’s houses in the South, including Mississippi and New Orleans, A Classical Journey, and Carolyn Roehm’s newest interior design book, A Passion for Interiors.

All of Carolyn Roehm’s books are amazing. We’ve got several of her entertaining books; in one, A Passion for Parties, Roehm’s memoir-like commentary runs alongside photographs of outdoor and indoor festivities for every occasion and season. A Passion for Interiors is her latest book, which invites the reader into three homes, two of which are hers, showcasing her incomparable style: classical architectural details softened by graceful fabrics.

And Tricia Guild’s new book is just fun. Her first book, Pattern, made up of full-page photos of fabric, was a textile-lover’s dream. Colors, Patterns, and Space is no less eye candy; her design style is bright and spunky, mixing up the classical and modern in playful yet incredibly elegant rooms.

Madeline Memories

By Former Lemurians

On February 15, 2011

In Oz: Children's Books

I remember the first time I found out about Madeline. My mama and daddy went to London to visit my aunt and uncle and they came home with Madeline in London for me. Being a red-headed little girl, I was over the moon to have a book about another red-headed girl. I had a major complex about being red-headed because I was the only one in my class. So along with Pippi, Madeline was added to my list of “reasons it is okay to be red-headed.”

Every so often mama would come home with a new Madeline book from OZ books. A big treat was when she came home with a Madeline doll for me! I still have that doll and she is still just as special to me at 25 as she was at 9-years-old.

John Bemelmans Marciano was here on Friday, February 18th at 4:30 to sign his new book and his other Madeline stories.

the art of the cover

By Former Lemurians

On February 12, 2011

In Newsworthy, Staff Blog

i quite often judge books by their covers. regularly this results in me reading a damn fine book. it is difficult for me to resist a book that has an amazing cover, even if i know nothing about the book or the author.

penguin has two series which feature new cover art that i am all but drooling over. the series i’m most in awe of is what penguin is calling the ink series.

“For seventy-five years, Penguin has united the best in literature with the best in graphic design, creating some of the world’s most recognizable books. To help celebrate our anniversary, we’ve chosen six of our favorite books and are presenting them with new covers specially designed by some of the world’s best artists working in the world of tattoos and illustration. These striking new covers, perfectly reflecting the timeless stories within, document Penguin’s efforts to bring new readers to great books.” –penguin

the other new series they have is apart of their penguin classics deluxe editions.

enjoy the eye candy.

by Zita

All you need to know about Jackson’s Tim Keller event

By admin

On February 12, 2011

In Newsworthy

John Evans has always a very clear business plan, to make Lemuria the best bookstore he can for our community, the best bookstore for Jackson, MS. For us that has been a lot of different things – a great environment, a well chosen selection, first editions for the collector, and in recent years a dynamic website and blog. John’s goal to give Jackson a great bookstore is also why we have all of theses book signings and readings you’re always hearing about. The chance to meet and hear a great literary writer read from his or her book is a wonderful experience – we often have prize winning authors, but we also have lesser known authors who are up and coming or who have written great books and of course we have a lot of non-fiction book signings as well, history, philosophy, etc.

All of this to say that we are thrilled to be able to bring Dr. Timothy Keller to Jackson. It seems that everywhere I go someone asks me about this event, but for those of you who don’t know Tim Keller’s work he is the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York – a church that has more than 5000 in attendance each Sunday. He has also published 5 books in the last four years all with Penguin Putnam – the first, The Reason for God, reached number seven on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list.

Lemuria has teamed up with R.U.F. (Reformed University Fellowship) and Belhaven University to bring Keller to Jackson. We set up the event with Keller’s Publisher, R.U.F. is helping with coordination and marketing, and Belhaven is hosting the event at their Center for the Arts. (click the here if you don’t know where that is) We will have copies of all of Keller’s books for sale and he will sign after his talk until everyone is happy. We are taking advance orders if you can’t make it or wish to place larger orders for signed books. The new book is King’s Cross and you can read all about it on our website right here.

Who: Dr. Timothy Keller

What: Speaking and Signing

When: Thurs., February 24 at 7:00 (doors will open at 6:00)

Where: Belhaven University’s Center for the Arts

Page 170 of 257

The Grimm Legacy by Polly Shulman

Bookstore Keys: The Future Price of Physical Books

One more Madeline memory

Lemuria…out and about!

Bookstore Keys: Borders Declares Bankruptcy

An Introduction to Ghost Light by Joseph O’Connor

A new twist on the classics

Madeline Memories

the art of the cover

All you need to know about Jackson’s Tim Keller event

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