NEW YORK TIMES
March 31, 2003
Two Identities, but One Compulsion
By JONATHAN KELLERMAN


In the fall of 1959 Rosalie Silver, a teacher at the Yeshiva of Central Queens in Jamaica, informed her fourth-grade class that poetry didn't have to rhyme. Mrs. Silver encouraged her students to experiment with words and drilled them in the fundamentals of grammar. I sat in that class and began writing fiction. I've continued to do so, compulsively, since that autumn.

That same year I found a volume of short stories by the great social realist James T. Farrell on my parents' bookshelves. Farrell's take upon urban life was raw, morose, assertively sexual. The book was completely inappropriate for a 9-year-old. I read it under the covers by flashlight and was astonished by the author's forging of a brutal yet strangely sanctified world. A fantasy seeded: it would be great to do this.

Still, I saw writing as release, not a career possibility. I loved to paint, too, but the notion of art as a job was remote. I decided I was going to become some sort of scientist.

In 1966 I entered U.C.L.A., having graduated from a private high school with a senior class of 21. Now I was sitting in lecture halls with 600 fellow freshmen. My niche was the student newspaper where for four years I drew five editorial cartoons a week, wrote arts reviews, tried straight reporting and ended up as an editor.

In my senior year I was co-writer of an allegedly comic novel that won a Samuel Goldwyn Creative Writing Award. Film agents called me into their offices and barked, "Well, kid, what do you wanna do?" I had no desire to write movies and told them I was planning to get a Ph.D. in psychology. They stared at me as if I were psychotic and shooed me out. What I did want to do was write books, and when a New York literary agent agreed to take me on as a client, I wondered if I could make a living fooling with words. A prize, an agent: I was hot stuff at 21.

That was 1971. My first novel, "When the Bough Breaks," was published in 1985.

For 14 years I was a failed writer with a really good day job. I married, had kids, earned that Ph.D., got a medical school professorship and a job at a pediatric hospital. I specialized in childhood trauma and augmented my academician's salary by treating private patients after hours.

For 14 years I typed away from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. in a spider-infested garage, churning out a slew of novels that earned me enough rejection slips to paper my house.

During that time, creating fiction remained catharsis rather than profession. I wrote but didn't rewrite, assiduously neglecting the basics of story structure.

More damaging, I segregated my identity as a psychologist from my writing, partly out of concerns about patient confidentiality but mostly due to cowardice: I was afraid of revealing anything about myself and conjured tales that bore no semblance to my reality or anyone else's.

Stripped of the life I lived as a psychologist, I had nothing to say.

By day I treated thousands of children afflicted by tragedy, deformity, disease. Rather than finding all of this depressing, I got hooked on adrenaline and was buoyed by what I learned about the resilience of the human spirit.

During the 1970's I happened to be the psychologist who treated several children who were sexually molested by a day-care operator. As I helped my patients deal with the emotional fallout, I found myself, atypically, shocked. Knowledge about sexual crimes against children was so skimpy back then that when a colleague attended a seminar on incest, the rest of us were puzzled why she'd want to learn about something so arcane.

The children who'd been molested responded well to treatment, but their ordeal continued to resonate. This was a betrayal of innocence so profound that even I, who thought I'd seen everything, couldn't put it out of my mind.

I quit my hospital job and expanded my private practice to full time, determined to attempt yet another novel. My practice booked up quickly, and I continued to type away from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. in the spider-infested garage.

This time I outlined meticulously, dreamed about my characters, gave myself headaches nailing down the twists and turns of my story. Confidentiality remained sacrosanct, and I took pains to avoid exploiting real patients. Instead I stretched the "what if?" and concocted a tale of perversity, deceit and multiple murder set in the third world colony where I live — Los Angeles.

I plunged in and created a psychologist protagonist who bore similarities to myself. Alex Delaware evolved as a troubled, restless man, overwhelmed by horror. He emerged braver, thinner and better looking than I was: a Walter Mitty fantasy sprung to literary life.

Though I was less concerned with solving mysterious puzzles than in exploring human behavior under extreme conditions, this was shaping up as a crime novel. I needed a cop.

I created a gay homicide detective because I wanted to avoid clichés, and a gay officer was a revolutionary concept. But Milo Sturgis's homosexuality would not be glossed over. Being an outsider in a paramilitary organization that one Los Angeles police detective had described to me as "devoted to destroying the individual" would provide great dramatic tension. Milo was created out of whole cloth, as are all the characters in my novels.

"Bough" was a hard sell. Publishers praised my style, but were repelled by the subject matter. Finally, three years after submission, the manuscript was accepted. Violating everyone's expectations, including my publisher's, the book won the Edgar and the Anthony awards and became a word-of-mouth best seller.

I said, "Well, as long as they've let me in the club, I'll try another." The dark tone and childhood cancer subplot of my second novel, "Blood Test," seemed to preclude fat sales. It, too, became a best seller.

Since 1985 I've published 18 novels, including 16 Delaware books, translated into a couple dozen languages. I'm not frustrated by writing a series. Alex Delaware is a terrific vehicle for telling a certain type of story, one that explores the unpredictability of human nature. A series imposes limits, and I do my best to test them. Delaware and Sturgis go through life changes, including the aging process, though their maturation occurs in mercifully slow time.

As a psychologist I attempted to construct rules about human behavior. As a novelist I'm obsessed by the exceptions.

I love my job, look forward to the blank computer screen every morning. Protracted periods of no writing leave me grumpy. I outline in fine detail; an editor who worked with me, a man with a background in literary fiction, told me our relationship gave him a new appreciation for "the architecture of writing," and I believe that to be a perfect description of skillful story construction.

I write for myself, never for an audience, but I do strive for entertainment as well as erudition. The crime novel employs an abhorrent act to catalyze the human chess game, but I believe all good fiction is mystery writing; the reader must be compelled to find out what happens next.

I have never combed my patient rolls for characters, and virtue has been much more than its own reward. Too much reliance upon reality stiffens and cripples fiction. The roman à clef is an inferior art form.

Professional ethics forced me to imagine, and that made me a better writer. The reading public has been very kind to me. I'm thrilled but puzzled because my tastes are not commercial: movies I admire usually bomb, the music I listen to rarely makes the charts. No complaints; this beats honest labor.

NEW YORK TIMES
March 25, 2003
Iraq: A Reading List

This list includes books about Iraq, the 1991 war and recent events in the Persian Gulf. The books are linked to their original New York Times reviews. The books are arranged in order of date, beginning with the most recent.

Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (2003)
By ANTHONY SWOFFORD
Out of the 1991 war against Iraq comes Anthony Swofford, a Marine sniper, to say in his book that he had a ball.

Saddam: King of Terror (2002)
By CON COUGHLIN
The journalist Con Coughlin's account of Saddam Hussein's career is a swift, grisly read, but it's light on analysis, especially about Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda.

The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (2002)
By KENNETH M. POLLACK
An experienced analyst sees no realistic alternative to removing Saddam Hussein, and not on the cheap either.

The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein (2002)
By SANDRA MACKEY
Sandra Mackey has written an accessible history of a country made by Britain, broken by nationalists, taken by a dictator, beaten in war, still rolling along.

Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein's War Against America (2001)
By LAURIE MYLROIE
Saddam Hussein, argues Laurie Mylroie, driven by a desire for revenge following the gulf war, is the single greatest terrorist threat to the United States.

Saddam's Bombmaker: The Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda (2000)
By KHIDHIR HAMZA with JEFF STEIN
A physicist who defected describes Saddam Hussein's quest for the bomb.

The Greatest Threat: Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Crisis of Global Security (2000)
By RICHARD BUTLER
The executive director of the Unscom mission describes its failure and the larger implications.

Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein (1999)
By ANDREW COCKBURN and PATRICK COCKBURN
This sober yet intrigue-filled book by Irish-born brothers and veteran Middle East journalists asks how Saddam Hussein has consistently defied predictions of demise.

Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem -- Once and for All (1999)
By SCOTT RITTER
A former arms inspector in Iraq reports on the mission's failure.

A World Transformed (1998)
By GEORGE BUSH and BRENT SCOWCROFT
This book by the first President Bush and his national security adviser deals with the four major foreign policy challenges that they confronted.

Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1998)
By SUSAN MEISELAS
A profusely illustrated book on the Kurds serves as the family album of a stateless people.

After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? My Encounters With Kurdistan (1997)
By JONATHAN C. RANDAL
A reporter has spent 30 years trying to understand one of the Middle East's most enigmatic minorities.

A Modern History of the Kurds (1996)
By DAVID McDOWALL
David McDowall tries to account for the extraordinary failure of the Kurds to build a national movement that succeeded in bringing them security.

My American Journey (1995)
By COLIN L. POWELL with JOSEPH E. PERSICO
Genial and moderate, Colin L. Powell remains, even after more than 600 pages, maddeningly elusive.

The Generals' War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (1995)
By MICHAEL R. GORDON and BERNARD E. TRAINOR
The chief Pentagon correspondent for The New York Times a retired Marine Corps general have joined forces to provide the "inside story" of the allied side of the first gulf war.

Live From the Battlefield. From Vietnam to Baghdad: 35 Years in the World's War Zones (1994)
By PETER ARNETT
Peter Arnett has constructed an engrossing memoir of reporters and war, lean and clear in its narrative, rich in anecdote, redolent in its description.

Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World (1993)
By KANAN MAKIYA
A prominent Iraqi dissident has written provocative book on the savagery of Saddam Hussein's regime and the wider failings of Arab political culture.

A Woman at War: Storming Kuwait With the U.S. Marines (1993)
By MOLLY MOORE
Anyone who ever wanted a front-row seat in a war theater will find it in Molly Moore's tense first-person chronology of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

It Doesn't Take a Hero (1992)
By Gen. H. NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF, written with PETER PETRE
A first draft of history, a serviceable but incomplete story of a complex coalition war by a professional soldier, a Patton with a conscience.

Live From Baghdad: Gathering News at Ground Zero (1992)
By ROBERT WIENER
CNN's former executive producer in Baghdad gives us a candid memoir, hammered out in picaresque detail, of the organized hysteria of television news coverage in Baghdad.

In the Eye of the Storm: The Life of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf (1991)
By ROGER COHEN and CLAUDIO GATTI
This book by two journalists aims to chronicle the life story of the world's most popular general and much else besides.

The Outlaw State: Saddam Hussein's Quest for Power and the Gulf Crisis (1991)
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
A reporter for The Times has written a popular history of the Iraqi state, the rise to power and methods of control of Saddam Hussein and the relations between the United States and Iraq.

The Commanders (1991)
By BOB WOODWARD
Bob Woodward provides some of the first tantalizing glimpses of the first President Bush's war councils.

Baghdad Without a Map: And Other Misadventures in Arabia (1991)
By TONY HORWITZ
Out of his wacky, often hair-raising, experiences as a Middle Eastern correspondent, Tony Horwitz has fashioned a very funny and frequently insightful look at the world's most combustible region.

Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf (1990)
By JUDITH MILLER and LAURIE MYLROIE
The authors document how Saddam Hussein used the state's instruments of repression to destroy utterly his internal rivals while imposing a reign of terror on the entire country.

Republic of Fear: The Inside Story of Saddam's Iraq (1990)
By SAMIR AL-KHALIL
Samir al-Khalil's study of Iraqi politics is definitely required reading for anyone with a serious interest in Iraq or in the political dynamics of dictatorship.

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GUEST REVIEW
THE BLACK BOOK by Ian Rankin: Labeled the "king of tartan noir" by James Ellroy, Rankin is the hottest British crime writer on the scene. He pounds out a slick plot and compelling and intense characters, and his dark and moody series with Inspector John Rebus has gained him solid reviews from the critics and a host of satisfied readers. Rankin's BLACK BOOK, published in 1993, continues the successful Rebus series. Rebus's girlfriend has kicked him out of her house and he can't go back to his place because he has rented it to a group of college students. He hates his job, his drug dealing brother is looking for a place to stay, and the tax people are hinting that he has undeclared income from renting his flat. Amidst the ruins of his personal life, he learns that his friend has been beaten into a coma. An investigation leads back to a mysterious fire that brought down a seedy Edinburgh hotel five years earlier and an unidentified body found in the ashes. And now, thrown from the force for using desperate measures, Rebus doggedly pursues a truth that nobody wants revealed. 

James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler are two of Rankin's favorite authors, and their influence is reflected in his writing. THE BLACK BOOK parallels much of Ellroy's work with an oppressive darkness cast by an all-consuming blanket of corruption, crime, and graft. There is a sense of the world gone terribly wrong. But whereas in Ellroy's work the degeneracy generally touches everyone and everything, Rebus is the unflinching and noble knight in tarnished armor, a modern day protégé to Chandler's Marlowe. Rankin has done a fine job of breathing new life into the old cliché of the lone crusader struggling against the world in order to expose the truth and invoke justice. 

Chandler was noted for his superb ability to use descriptive scenes from the city to complement the mood of the story, and Rankin's ability to evoke Edinburgh is strongly reminiscent of Chandler's portrayal of Los Angeles. A quote from the Sunday Telegraph notes this: "Rankin captures like no one else, that strangeness that is Scotland at the end of the twentieth century." Rankin spoke on the appropriateness of Edinburgh: 

"Edinburgh is the perfect setting for crime writing. It has a split personality - on the one hand it is the city of history and museums and royalty, but at the same time there is this feeling that behind the thick walls of those Georgian townhouses there are all sorts of terrible things happening." 

It is a testament to Rankin's writing skills that he can pull off the grim and dark atmosphere while avoiding graphic and gory descriptions. Rankin's comment on this is: "I don't think you need to be graphic. In fact, I feel graphic violence is both lazy and salacious. You can allude to horror without sticking people's noses in it." Although an aversion to graphic scenes is a common attitude with many authors, it is not universal. Other authors, such as Derek Raymond and Joe Gores, have no qualms about using explicit violence, blood, and gore. Some, seeing the dark and brooding world that Rebus inhabits, would perhaps sense irony in Rankin's hesitance to depict the ugly scenes that must necessarily be a part of the detective's daily life. 

Ian Rankin, born in the Scottish town of Cardenden in 1960, has been a dedicated writer since he was 12 years old and wrote his own comic books and lyrics for an imaginary rock band. The lyrics were later morphed into prize winning poetry. At the University of Edinburgh he turned to short stories and continued to win awards. After obtaining an MA in English Literature, specializing in U.S. Literature, and while supposedly working towards a doctorate on the modern Scottish Novel from 1983 to 1986, he churned out three novels. The first one remains unpublished, but the second one was published in 1986 as THE FLOOD. 

The third one, published in 1987, is KNOTS AND CROSSES, and is the first in the popular Inspector John Rebus series. It's interesting to note that he did not consider KNOTS AND CROSSES a crime novel until he found the book in the mystery section of a bookstore and the Crime Writers' Association asked him if he wanted to join. At the time he wrote the book he was heavily into the literary theory of semiotics and deconstruction and he saw literature as being a puzzle or game between the reader and the author, but not a mystery. The book was not well-received and Rankin abandoned Rebus to write THE WATCHMAN (1990), a spy novel. 

He married in 1986 and moved to London, where his wife worked as a civil servant and Ian worked his way up in the well-known magazine Hi-Fi Review. Ian continued to write in his spare time, shuffling through the various genres like a deck of cards. He moved to France for a while but has since moved back to Edinburgh. He eventually worked his way back to the Rebus character, and has now produced over ten in the series. 

In 1992 Rankin won the Chandler-Fulbright Award, a prestigious prize for detective fiction funded by Raymond Chandler's estate. He came to the United States to accept the award and travelled over 14,000 in an old Volkswagon bus, visiting Seattle, San Francisco, Las Vegas, New Orleans, and New York City. In 1997 he won the Gold Dagger for his highly-praised novel BLACK AND BLUE, and in 1999 eight of the top ten Scottish bestsellers were his.

This review contributed by Michael Robison, AKA miker zspider, who is a contributing member of the 4MA group on Yahoo. 

The esteemed Oxford English Dictionary has validated the world of Harry Potter by adding a new definition of the word Muggle to online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (www.OED.com) along with more than 2,200 new and revised entries. The definition reads:

Muggle, n. In the fiction of J. K. Rowling: a person who possesses no magical powers. Hence in allusive and extended uses: a person who lacks a particular skill or skills, or who is regarded as inferior in some way

Other definitions of muggle include those from the 12th Century ("A tail resembling that of a fish") through the 1930s ("a marijuana cigarette; a joint").

. . . And Lingo Was Their Game-O
To the Verbal Go the Spoils at Neologism Boot Camp

By J.J. McCoy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 13, 2003; Page C10

In a spartanly furnished classroom three stories below the National Mall, conspirators are hard at work.

They're conjuring up words. They'd like nothing better than to invent them, then sit back and listen to the rest of us use them. They want this so much that each has given up five hours of a Saturday and paid upward of $120 to hear Erin McKean, the 31-year-old senior editor for Oxford University Press's American English dictionaries, talk about the life and death of language. She discusses the birth of "bling-bling," "soccer moms" and "reality TV," just a few of the phrases that have slipped into American vernacular in recent years.

She talks about staying power and burnout -- take "cyberspace," for example, a word coined by author William Gibson in 1984 and now securely entrenched, compared with "information superhighway," which also has its place in the dictionary but seems to be slipping into obsolescence.

"The dictionary is not a dictator, it's a mirror of what people do," she tells the 27 academics, bureaucrats, lawyers, retirees and writers who've signed on as cadets in this Smithsonian-sponsored "Word-Lover's Boot Camp." The best dictionary, McKean continues, is merely a record of the written expressions of a culture and language. Hence Oxford's listing of "hopefully," Homer Simpson's "D'oh!" and the use of "fellowship" as a verb (a usage dating from at least 1374, more than 600 years before cinema-goers fellowshipped in watching "The Lord of the Rings").

And at risk of scrambling the sensibilities of Scrabble devotees, McKean gets even more subversive: "You don't have to be in the dictionary to be a word [any more than] you don't have to be a purebred to be a dog." It's a particularly antithetical notion coming from one whose employer ambitiously aspires to include every English word in general usage since 1700 (plus any leftovers among the complete works of Shakespeare, Milton and the King James Bible).

The 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary is considered the most comprehensive reference for the English language. The company's two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED), released last fall, saw fit to include 3,500 new words by using its "5 by 5 by 5" rule: five examples in five printed sources over five years.

By McKean's standards, the cadets' new constructions -- including "catagram" (a word without an anagram) and "homofication" (adoption of a gay lifestyle by someone who has recently come out of the closet) -- share the legitimacy of, say, an old word that seems to have renewed relevance, such as "woofits" (a gloomy mood, from the World War I era). Not yet in the dictionary but on Oxford's shortlist is "9/11," not soon to be forgotten, and "reality TV," which might best be.

Sometimes meaning is decided before orthography; we're still figuring out whether the word for online correspondence should be rendered as "E-mail," "e-mail" or "email."

At ages 76 and 73, respectively, Roy and Carol Thomas of Montgomery County share a mutual interest in language and opsimathy (from 1656, learning acquired late in life). A retired high school librarian who teaches English as a second language at Montgomery College, Carol is driven to bruxism (grinding of teeth) at the thought of the word "tasked," cited by Oxford back in 1828.

Conversely, allocthonous (non-native) poet and author Sheree Fitch, 46, transplanted to the District from Ottawa while her husband finishes a two-year work assignment, simply "loves words, the taste of them, the lip-slipperiness of them," and prefers poetic license to precision.

Philosophical differences are bound to arise where authoritarianism abuts artistry.

The dynamics in the room aren't anywhere near the scale of the war over words in, say, Bhutan, where the Dzongkha Development Commission of the Royal Government is finalizing a new grammar, and devising an entire new dictionary, in hopes of defending the Himalayan country's traditional language from outside influences. Tej K. Bhatia, a professor of languages and linguistics at Syracuse University, explains that the mountain folk are in for an uphill battle: Successes among state-mandated languages have been spotty.

As McKean has been impressing upon her class, Bhatia explains, "the most important thing is that the vocabulary you create must be accepted by its users. There are piles of created dictionaries that just sit on closet shelves. The users are going to select a word that has utility, that will give them some mileage."

That's the real key to a language's survival, finding a word with juice. When it comes to new words, as McKean notes, "there are more and more words all the time. . . . We're not slowing down at all, which I think is a great thing."

John Metcalfe came out on top at the boot camp. His "Gallogophasia" (the gratuitous insertion of French words into general conversation) was the favorite among his classmates and earned the 23-year-old editorial intern a copy of the SOED.

Gallogophasia may have won the prize, but the word of the day may actually have been "sinefine" -- defined by Polish immigrant-cum-West Virginia artist and boot-camp cadet Paul Wyszkoski as "an unending task," like language itself. For McKean and her fellow logophiles, that's -- to use English's most widely understood word -- okay.

The 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award Nominees

The finalists for the 2003 PEN/Faulkner award are:

The City of Your Final Destination by Peter Cameron (FSG)
Roscoe by William Kennedy (Viking)
The Ecstatic by Victor LaValle (Crown)
The Caprices by Sabina Murray (Mariner)
Little Casino by Gilbert Sorrentino (Coffee House Press)

America's Biggest Readers
An obsessively omnivorous polymath, a speed-reading insomniac, an incomparably prolific reviewer and just some regular folks—here are our favorite people who read more than you do.
by Jesse Oxfeld

Americans buy more than two and a half billion books per year—about nine each for every man, woman and child in the country. Most Book readers are bigger book readers than that, but what about those impressive few who read way, way more? They're the folks we sought out for our first list of America's Biggest Readers. We canvassed libraries and bookstores and publishing professionals and our friends, and we found ten people (well, eleven, really—you'll see) who plow through more books more quickly than just about anyone we know. It's a cross section of big-reading Americans, some of whom are absolutely the country's most voracious readers—we'd be nuts not to include them—while others are quirkier choices. Think you read more than than this crowd? Then maybe we'll see you here next time.
America's Biggest Readers: Jules Arens, James Billington, Timothy Dickinson, Elsa Engelhardt, Mary Alice Horne, John Jordan & Marianne Zerbe, Harriet Klausner - No. 1 Reader in America, Kristin Mueller, Albert Murray, Ronald Yanagihar

Jules Arens
Location: Monroe, Neb.
Age: 32
Books per week: 2
Claim to fame: Reading her library's entire fiction collection, from A to Z
The problem with reading a lot is that you're constantly trying to figure out what to read next. Jules Arens had been dealing with that all her life. "I would read instead of play at recess," she recalls. "And I had two little brothers I didn't like, so I read instead of being tormented."Eventually, she says, "I was tired of trying to pick stuff out, so I decided to start at the beginning." For the last five years, she's been reading her way alphabetically through the fiction department of the public library in Columbus, Nebraska, where she works as a veterinarian. It's slow going because she's often waylaid by other reading, like when she buys a box of used books. Her typical rate was three or four books per week, but it's slowed down since she and her husband adopted a baby girl. "Now, if I'm lucky, it's one or two," she says. She's working on building little Josie into a big reader, too. "We read together as often as she'll let me," Arens says. For her in-order project, she's up to the Bs— "I'm at B-o-v, actually," she says—and she realizes just how slow that is. "It's going to take me until I'm ninety," she acknowledges with a laugh, "but that's okay."

James Billington
Location: McLean, Va.
Age: 73
Books per week: 8
Claim to fame: Runs the Library of Congress, still finds time to devour books
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with more than eighteen million books. Its annual budget is more than $500 million, it has a staff of four thousand and the Librarian of Congress, essentially the CEO, oversees the entire operation. James Billington, a Russian-history scholar, is the current Librarian, and, despite all the administrative duties of running this behemoth, he still finds the time to read copiously. "That's what I really enjoy," he says. "I'd much rather be reading than watching television." There's no clear line between his work reading and his pleasure reading, because his job requires a good deal of pleasure-type reading. He picks the poet laureate each year, he selects fellows to study at the Library, and he will oversee a new major prize, a sort of Nobel for the humanities. "In order to choose the right people," he says, "I have to read a lot of books." He reads plays and poetry and religious writing and the occasional mystery. Plus lots of books on Russia—which brings it all full circle. "My first great reading project was War and Peace," he recalls. "That's what got me hooked."

Timothy Dickinson
Location: Washington, D.C.
Age: 60
Books per week: 12 completely, plus "a penumbra" of others skimmed, reread, glanced at
Claim to fame: Knows everything about everything
You might call Timothy Dickinson a consultant. When pressed, he says his job is "giving advice to people, on things from books to Japanese trade." He's likely the best-read, most-informed person you'll ever meet, and he makes his living putting that vast store of knowledge at the service of others. He's thanked in many books' acknowledgments for helping their authors with ideas; he advises international lawyers, providing them with analyses of the regions they're working on; at previous times, he allegedly supplied the occasional mot juste or historical quote to the famously erudite columnists Lewis Lapham and George F. Will; and he volunteers his time to fact-check The Washington Monthly. "I've never met anyone who knows more than he does about anything," says Nicholas Thompson, who worked with Dickinson at the Monthly. "And that comes from reading everything." Born in England, Dickinson has read omnivorously all his life; he read "a score or more a week" as a student at Oxford, he says. All those books add up. He keeps several thousand in storage and yet still has problems with landlords worried that the overflowing collection in his apartment might be a fire hazard. "There's a geometric problem," Dickinson notes wryly. "You can only get so much on a wall."

Elsa Engelhardt
Location: Los Alamos, N.M.
Age: 64
Books per week: 2
Claim to fame: Reads constantly, in at least three languages
Librarians and library regulars are of course some of the biggest readers around. But at the Mesa Public Library, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, librarian Elsa Engelhardt particularly stands out. "Elsa reads all the time, in all these different languages," says Bernadine Goldman, the reference manager. "She really hates to miss a book—I think she looks at every one that comes in." Engelhardt reads in three languages—English, French and Polish—and, though she won't cop to it, Goldman suggests she can get by in Hebrew, too. (When the library's book club read Amos Oz, Engelhardt, as Goldman recalls, was wistful for his untranslated text.) Engelhardt is generally modest, insisting that she's too busy these days to read as much as she used to. "For about two or three decades," Engelhardt says, "I read a lot—any leisure time that I had." She lived in Quebec for many years and makes an effort to seek out Canadian literature—Crow Lake by Mary Lawson is a recent favorite—but she credits her love of books to her childhood in Warsaw, Poland, where she first learned to read at age seven, after the war. "I was so deprived of books as a child that they're still special to me now," she says. "I've always felt, even if I were widowed, destitute, living in a room someplace, I could never be completely unhappy as long as I still had books to read."

Mary Alice Horne
Location: Warrensville Heights, Ohio
Age: 78
Books per week: 13
Claim to fame: Keeps a log of the 700-ish books she reads each year
Elderly or homebound patrons in the Cleveland, Ohio, suburbs can have books delivered to them by their local library. Mary Alice Horne loves the program, but there's just one problem: A person can take out only fifty books at a time. "There are times when I'll have fifty books in the house," says Horne, who last year read 675 books, "and my daughter will get some, too, so I'll have enough." For the last dozen years, Horne has kept a record of every book she borrows and reads, and in each one of those years she has read more than six hundred books —in every genre except romance ("I'm past that point in my life") and science fiction ("I never got into that"). The year 1999 was her best, with 729 volumes completed. "My mom read to me when I was small," Horne says, "so I've always enjoyed it." Then, in high school, she went through an experimental speed-reading program. "Some people don't like being alone," Horne says, "but I don't mind, because I like reading so much." And insomnia doesn't hurt either. "Quite often I can't sleep," she says, "so I just read all night."

John Jordan & Marianne Zerbe
Location: Houston, Minn.
Age: 54 & 54
Books per week: 3 each
Claim to fame: Read early in the morning or late at night, and farm all day in between
Organic farmer John Jordan has a congenital love of reading: He likes to repeat his father's story of hiding books around the farm as a kid "so he'd have stuff to read while he was mowing hay." And, fortunately, Jordan also found a wife who reads as much as he does, each about three books a week. But they don't necessarily read together. "I get up really early, so my M.O. is to read for a few hours in the morning" before heading out to work the farm, Jordan reports. But his wife, Marianne Zerbe, an artist, "is very much a nighttime person," he reports. "So we're opposites that way." And in other ways too. While Jordan gravitates toward history (he'd just finished Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time the morning he spoke to Book), biography (he's working on Jane Smiley's Charles Dickens bio from the Penguin Lives series) and science books, Zerbe confesses she reads "a lot of fluff." "I like to read junk books," she says. "They're my popcorn." But they do recommend books to each other, and their combination has been powerful: Together, they've accumulated nearly ten thousand books. "We have a library chock-full of books," Jordan says. "Plus there's some in every room. And we have a mobile home that works as the farm office—there's a thousand more in there."

No. 1 Reader in America
Harriet Klausner
Location: Morrow, Ga.
Age: 50
Books per week: 20
Claim to fame: Amazon.com's No. 1 reviewer
Faster than a speeding bullet—or at least faster than your average fast reader—Harriet Klausner calls herself a "super speed reader": "It's like some sort of freak talent," she says. She can plow through a book in just an hour or two—and she typically reads two or three a day—so when she worked at a Pennsylvania library in the '70s, she started writing brief reviews of all the new books for the library's newsletter. The habit stuck, and she's been writing brief book reviews ever since. A few years ago, Amazon.com started allowing people to submit reviews to the site, and suddenly Klausner found herself labeled the No. 1 reviewer. "It totally happened on its own," she says. "I didn't do it for the numbers." Rather, Klausner just wants to introduce people to lesser-known authors. She confesses her own favorite is Patricia Cornwell, but goes on to name Kathy Reichs and Jan Burke as smaller names she discovered and liked. "I figured if I could show there's good books out there by unknown authors, it's worthwhile," she says. Klausner has posted more than 4,100 book reviews on Amazon, and there's a guy who's trying hard to beat her. Which wouldn't trouble her at all. "Number one is nice," Klausner says. "But it's not that be-all and end-all of everything."

Kristin Mueller
Location: Portland, Ore.
Age: 25
Books per week: 5
Claim to fame: Was already a speed reader by the first grade
When Kristin Mueller was in first grade, the teacher informed her mother that she didn't read correctly. Of course not. Kristin, without really realizing it, had taught herself to be a speed reader. "I've always read like that," she says. "I think I read in chunks." She graduated from college in December 2001, and she's hoping to start a graduate program this fall in—what else?—literature, but for now she's working full time at a medical supply company, which cuts into her reading opportunities. "I get up really early in the morning now, to read, and then I read at lunch and on all my breaks," she explains. "You'd be surprised how much time you can find." At a book or so a day, she reads just about anything she can find—almost always fiction, but in lots of varieties, from trash to classics. "If I had my way," she says, "I'd just work part time, so then I could read for the rest of the day."

Albert Murray
Location: New York, N.Y.
Age: 86
Books per week: 1
Claim to fame: Among the best customers of the famous Strand Book Store
The Harlem apartment Albert Murray and his wife have shared for forty years boasts views of Riverside Church and the George Washington Bridge to the west, the Triborough Bridge to the east and nearly all of Manhattan to the south. Except for those windows, the apartment's walls are covered with the noted cultural critic, novelist, biographer and poet's enormous collection of books. He still writes full time—on jazz, on literature, on American identity—and that's why he's got so many books around. "You're constantly referring to these things," he says. There are new books and beautiful old first editions, novels and biographies and classics and reference works and art books. They're all carefully organized: poetry on an upper shelf along one wall, literary criticism outside the kitchen, friends' books in the bedroom. An octogenarian, Murray is a bit worn by age, but he's still an avid book shopper, regularly making the 120-block trip down to the Strand Book Store, with its famous eight miles of books. "I used to get down there two or three times every week," he says. "Now I'm lucky to get down there a few times a month." he says. And he's always going back through his big collection. "Some people collect books because they're studying something, or because they're getting a degree," he says. "My thing is, I have a constant and professional need for these, because I use them for everything I do."

Ronald Yanagihara
Location: Gilroy, Calif.
Age: 57
Books per week: 2+
Claim to fame: Fits his reading in with a full-time oncology practice
If we've learned anything from ER, it's that doctors are incredibly busy people. Dr. Ronald Yanagihara, an oncologist, is no exception, with a bustling practice treating cancer patients. But it's tough to imagine Noah Wyle's Dr. Carter doing what Yanagihara does: finish at least two books each week, often complicated, serious literary novels by authors like V.S. Naipaul and Rohinton Mistry. "I think of my nonmedical reading as a treat to look forward to," Yanagihara says, adding that he likes to read for a while each night before he goes to bed. And his nonfiction choices are weighty, too: He likes to read about the "history and personalities" of physics. "When the paragraph is well done, I feel like I can almost apprehend the inherent beauty of it all," he says. "But in the next instant I couldn't begin to explain it to someone else."

Biggest-Reading Writer
Nicholas Sparks
Six bestselling novels in six years—Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember and the new Nights in Rodanthe among them—make Nicholas Sparks an extremely prolific writer. Turns out he's an even more prolific reader, finishing about 125 books a year. "I love to relax with a good read," he says, and he focuses his attention on fiction—mostly commercial fiction—plus the occasional history or biography. Also, he says, "I love classic literature, whether it's a 'new' classic or an 'old' classic."

Fastest Reader in the World
Howard Stephen Berg
When Howard Berg appeared on Live With Regis and Kathie Lee years ago, the hosts gave him twenty minutes to read a 240-page book. They then brought out a surprise guest: the author, who quizzed Berg on what he'd just speed read. "I scored 100," Berg proudly reports. Guinness-certified in 1989 as the world's fastest reader (the category has since been dropped from the book), Berg can read eighty pages per minute. He doesn't read constantly, and he doesn't always speed read. "But when I want to learn about something," he says, "I learn it really quickly and really well."

Biggest Reader in the White House
Condoleezza Rice
Just imagine, to start with, all the briefing books and policy memos. The president's national security adviser is his gatekeeper on foreign policy issues, the person who mediates among the so-called "principals"—the secretaries of state and defense and so forth—and funnels their advice to the boss. So Condoleezza Rice must be bombarded with things to read, all day long. But in an administration not known for its appreciation of intellectualism—"conspicuous intelligence seemed actively unwelcome in the Bush White House," writes former presidential speechwriter David Frum in his new The Right Man, an ultimately hagiographic memoir of his time working for Bush—Rice, a tenure-track Stanford professor at age twenty-eight, stands out as a thinker. She's often spotted toting historical works around Washington, and her family has spoken of her childhood requirement to read a book a day. Before the September 11 attacks, she reportedly set aside an hour or two each day to read journal articles and the like. And as a classically trained pianist, she appreciates the music of fine literature. "I actually read War and Peace in the Russian," she told an interviewer. "It's really quite beautiful."

Know someone who puts these Big Readers to shame? E-mail your suggestions for our next list: bigreaders@bookmagazine.com

Elizabeth Sims was asked to write about “the bookstore wars from the point of view of the chains” by the American editor of LOGOS: The Journal of the World Book Community, a quarterly published in the UK by Colin Whurr. This is the piece she wrote. It was published as the lead article in LOGOS volume 13, issue 2, released in July, 2002. It was accompanied by a response written by Andy Ross, owner of Cody’s Books in Berkeley, California.

Note: This is long.

Store Wars: the Case for the Chains

by Elizabeth Sims

©Elizabeth Sims. All rights reserved.

During the winter of 1993-94, I managed a Borders Books & Music store in suburban Chicago. One day one of my assistants caught up with me on the sales floor. “You’re going to love this one,” she said. “A customer just told me that somebody somewhere went to a chain store and asked if they carried The Shipping News. Guess what the clerk said?”
“’Let’s check in periodicals’, right?” The book had come out two weeks ago.
“Right.”
Oh, boy, I thought, we’re going to be hearing that one for a long time.
And, in fact, if I’d had a jelly doughnut—and eaten it—for every time I heard that story since, I’d be sought after by every freak show in the nation.
It doesn’t matter whether the story is true; I’ve little doubt that it is, in spite of the fact that the particulars—which chain? which clerk?—instantly dissolved into apocrypha. What matters is that the story summarizes what many independent booksellers and their supporters believe: The superstore companies are loaded with philistines. Aren’t you glad we’re pure?
The story has been a touchstone for many, and, though by now quite stale, still is.

*****

Twenty years ago, the book business was virtually non-competitive. If you wanted to open a bookstore in America, you rented a space you liked, you bought some inventory, and you hung up your sign. Your shop was small, you drew customers from your neighborhood, and you made a modest living selling merchandise you liked very much.
You rarely advertised, except in the phone book. You never thought about competing with the store on the other side of the neighborhood or across town, never thought about being an aggressive marketer, because aggressive marketing wasn’t nice. You got into bookselling because you liked to read and talk about books, not because you wanted to exhaust yourself writing press releases and analyzing cash flow and pushing hot sellers and beating the other guy.
For customers in those days, shopping for books was a pretty sedate, and limiting, experience.
Tom and Louis Borders opened a small used book shop in 1971 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After a while they began to sell new books, moving to larger quarters. Seeing their sales rise every time they increased their inventory, they wondered just how big an inventory they could build, while keeping precise track of it, and making their buying more responsive to customer desires.
Louis, the mathematical one, came up with a computer program that helped them do this. It was clunky at first, but over time it became a powerful engine of efficiency.
Barnes & Noble emulated the Borders inventory system, ringing their own changes on it as they went along. These systems today are incredibly sophisticated, increasing by powers of ten the effectiveness of their human masters, the buyers.
It has never been recognized sufficiently that the highly customized inventory control system is what revolutionized bookselling, not pretty carpets and hanging plants. It is the most critical key to the success of the superstore chains. In the 1980s the typical bookstore carried 5,000-10,000 titles, about all the inventory a sole proprietor could keep in memory or a card file. Borders and Barnes & Noble, using their potent inventory systems, began opening stores with 75,000-100,000 titles. Customers went wild for the huge inventories, to say nothing of other services like special orders at no extra charge, free gift wrapping and washrooms.
As the superstores gradually expanded their operations, most independent booksellers simply watched. They watched, but did nothing. And most allowed themselves to be caught absolutely flat-footed by this new competition. Well, yes, I know that some small book shops in other parts of the country have closed, after the superstores came to town, but that won’t happen to me. My customers are loyal.
They somehow ignored that paramount axiom of retail: there is no such thing as a loyal customer. Customers will patronize you as long as you meet their needs, whatever those needs are. If someone else comes along and does what you do, only better, your customers become their customers.
I don’t know why so many independent booksellers take tremendous pride in being naive about the nuts and bolts of business. One independent bookseller protested to me, after a panel discussion, “I’m a book lover, not a businesswoman!”
A few years ago a publisher’s representative commented to me over dinner, “The problem nobody talks about is that most independent booksellers are crappy, crappy business-people.”
I had the unusual experience of working for a respected independent as it morphed into a large chain. Having been an avid customer of Tom and Louis Borders’s first store in Ann Arbor, I went to work for them 1987, starting as a floor clerk in the second Borders they opened, in Birmingham, Michigan. I built a career there, eventually becoming regional director for the West Coast. I left the company in 1997 to follow my dream of being a writer. Now my living is still tied directly to bookstores, and I like it that way.
As a Borders spokeswoman I gave interviews and participated in panel discussions and radio debates. I’ve been insulted and despised by some independent booksellers, and regarded as a curiosity by others.
When Borders was a small outfit, we conducted a simple survey asking customers to rate characteristics of book stores according to importance: price, selection, service, location, special events, ambiance, etc. Quite consistently, customers rated selection highest in importance.
Thus when I read an item in Publisher’s Weekly about an independent book shop owner in southern California who announced he was going to meet the competition of a new Borders by remodeling his store, I knew he had set the clock ticking on himself. He thought his inventory and services were fine the way they were, and he assumed the only difference between himself and Borders was customer comfort. After borrowing heavily to remodel, then seeing little or no increase in sales, he shut down, vociferously blaming Borders.
Is that really who was to blame?
I have a magazine article from 1995 in which an independent book shop owner was asked whether her sales were up or down since a Borders opened very nearby. She noted that sales were neither up nor down in her small store, but grumbled that she and her staff were “working three times harder, though.”
Working three times harder? What had they been doing before Borders showed up? Well, this: when I visited that store while the Borders was under construction, two of three staff members were seated, not doing much as far as I could tell. That was too much help to have on hand on a weekday afternoon in a store that size. I identified myself and spoke with the owner, a very nice woman who appeared to know her inventory well. She told me she was concerned about the new competition, but evidently had no plans to meet it. I wanted her to know that our staff would make a point of referring customers to her store in the event Borders didn’t have what they wanted.
Some months later, I was told that customers coming into her store carrying Borders bags were asked to leave. In addition, I was told by the Borders managers that they had approached her to try to do some special events cooperatively, and were turned down.
That store is closed now, and Borders was blamed by one and all.
So it was no surprise to me to be asked, during an interview for a television program, whether I felt guilty about being a Borders executive, guilty about what Borders had “done to the independents.” Perhaps not hiding my anger very well, I answered no, that I was proud of the fine stores we’d built, proud of the millions of customers we’d pleased over the years.
It is the independents who should feel guilty. Guilty of taking their customers thoroughly for granted. Guilty of not seeking to improve their stores until, for many, it was too late. Guilty of refusing to expand their services. Guilty of refusing to spend money to compete and to accept the temporarily lower profit margin such measures would bring. Guilty of refusing to carry books they didn’t like, whether such books were romance novels, computer how-tos, finance guides, or what have you.
Ask your favorite independent booksellers what percentage of their sales come from discounted titles on the bestseller lists. Ask them what their returns rate is. Ask them what their overall turn rate is, and turn rate by subject. Nine out of ten won’t know. It’s not hard to acquire these statistics, it just takes some effort and attention to detail. Numbers like those can help an owner make more intelligent decisions about inventory, can help a store exploit strength and bolster weakness.
Ask if they’ve ever read a book on economics. Ask when was the last time they cast a savage eye on overhead, from the cost of cleaning supplies to printer cartridges to cat food, to their lease itself, and challenged themselves to find cheaper ways to get good business done.
The best independents withstood the challenge of the chains by focusing on their inventory, their costs, and their space, just as the chains did. Some expanded their space to accommodate more inventory. Others chose to limit and customize their inventories to achieve greater depth than ever before, using newly available software that interfaced with digital cash registers. Others moved their stores to more favorable locations. Many began discounting books. Some focused, as well, on hosting more frequent author readings and other special events. All found ways to better control their expenses. And their customers are much the happier for it.

*****

For the independents the worst is certainly over: the growth spurt of the chains is now slowing in America. Superstores have coexisted with independents for going on two decades. But where America was ten years ago, more or less, Europe is now. Superstores are springing up in the U.K. and elsewhere, and the debate has begun.
Mind you, as far as customers are concerned there is no debate. More books, more choices, more services—that settles it, no matter who runs the store. The debate is not about whether superstores are inherently better or worse than independents. On the contrary, I’ve come to understand over the years that the debate is about nothing so much as ideology. It is difficult to find common ground in this argument about business, because most independent booksellers do not consider themselves capitalists. They do not consider themselves capitalists because they think capitalism is about power and greed. They think it is about the abuse of the weak by the strong.
It is about none of those things. Capitalism is about individual choice. Customer choice, merchant choice. Millions of individual choices are made every hour in the marketplace: choice is what makes it all work.
Some independent booksellers are uncomfortable with this. No wonder: millions of customers with the freedom to choose is a frightening thing, if you doubt your ability to convince them to buy from you.
So this ideological debate, such as it is, turns on independent owners making accusations against the chains, and the chains ignoring those accusations.
A wide palette of charges have been employed, endlessly voiced, massaged, tweaked, and voiced again. When a perceived adversary disregards your complaints and insinuations, you feel more certain and increasingly righteous. You begin to believe that you really are a victim. The role of victim has always offered a considerable level of comfort and sense of self-righteousness.
So much for a general approach to this matter. Let’s look at the specific charges leveled against the chains. The following is by no means an exhaustive list of the particular denunciations, but it includes all of the most common.

1. The chains only succeeded by copying the independents. If Borders and Barnes and Noble wished to copy independents, they would have opened vastly different stores than they did. They would have established a handful of stores with large inventories, a larger number with middle-sized inventories, but mostly small shops. Some of them would do special orders; others wouldn’t; yet others would do special orders if they were for a publisher they already had an account with; and lastly some that would do any special order anytime, as long as the guy who handled it wasn’t on vacation or off sick. Some that would take personal checks, ones that wouldn’t. Shops that wouldn’t carry books on hunting or guns, but would carry every word that Wittgenstein ever wrote. Staffs would range from the super-friendly to the surly and/or condescending.

2. The chains situate their stores to do maximum damage to the local independents. To believe this you must believe that independents are the center of the bookselling universe. You must believe that the indies were the obsession of the chains, subjects of intense scrutiny and fascination, and fit for imitation. By analogy, you must believe that Henry Ford created the assembly line in order to ruin the lives of harness makers. Never will independent booksellers believe the truth, which is that the big chains carefully appraise the sites selected by each other, while the location of independents is almost always irrelevant.
Borders contracted demographic surveys for each town in which they considered placing a store; Barnes & Noble undoubtedly did the same. There is no value in assuming that existing independents have placed their stores optimally. Chains seek to place their stores where the best concentration of potential customers is. Having located such a district, the trick is finding appropriate retail space.
Furthermore, when deciding to build a store that will have to do $5m to $12m of business per year to justify its investment, what sense could it possibly make to deliberately plop it next to an independent doing no more than $250,000 per year, using that as the only criterion?
But if an ideal space opens up in the desired area, and it happens to be near an independent, it is not the chain’s job to keep that shop in business.

3. The chains spied on independents. A distinct, and beloved, variation on the center-of-the-universe theory. So many independents believe they’ve been the subject of espionage that if all the corporate spies required to do such Herculean work were placed end to end, they’d reach coast to coast at least once.
One successful independent in northern California published a piece in its newsletter suggesting that it was spied on before the Borders store opened a few towns over. The piece described a cadre of men in suits looking around the store, making comments and studying things carefully, and suggested that the men were Borders operatives, clumsily revealing themselves to be the nasty corporate spies they were. As the ranking Borders executive on the West Coast at the time, I can tell you that not only did we not have any men in suits on the payroll, but the idea of spying on another store was out of the question. We took great pride in our stores, considered Borders to be the best in the business, and so expected others to be spying on us.

4. With the big chains, buying power gets concentrated into a few hands, and that’s dangerous for a free press. This is the one argument that, on the surface, appears to have some teeth. Of course, nobody wants the caprice of some cubicle-bound drone to dictate whether a writer will have a career, or be found beneath the dark waters of a lonely canal, a suicide whose frustrated death should be blamed on Borders.
The reality is that as long as there is a multitude of authors, publishers, readers, and sellers in the market, bookstore buying cannot lapse into sloppiness or be driven by corporate whim or ideology. If a chain were to lapse in some way, a significant hole would develop in its ability to serve a heterogeneous market, one into which its competitors will be more than happy to jump and scoop up that market share for themselves, be they other chains or a slew of sharp independents.

5. The chains use/used crooked business practices. Since the dawn of the chain bookstore era, the chains have been accused of thievery. This makes perfect sense if you share the Steinbeckian belief with many independent booksellers that any large corporation is, by definition, immoral. (See capitalism, above.)
In 1998 the American Booksellers Association (ABA) filed a lawsuit against Borders and Barnes & Noble, charging that the two companies had exacted special, and hence illegal, deals on prices of books and on cooperative reimbursement. This was supposed to be the capstone of a series of book business lawsuits, the one that would finally give the chains their comeuppance and show the world what kind of stuff the ABA was made of.
The ABA membership was eager to believe that the chains used tremendous leverage to strong-arm publishers into doing business their way. Curiously, at the same time, the ABA appeared to believe that publishers couldn’t wait to jump into bed with the chains, that everything was wink-wink and “let’s fleece the little guys.”
The basic question that was never asked is: What leverage?
When you run a chain of hardware stores, you buy nails by the boxcar-load from manufacturers. The fact that more than one company produces nails is something you can use to bargain with. “We need three boxcar-loads of galvanized roofing nails. The ABC company is giving us twelve for a penny; can you beat it? If you can, you get our business.” This is leverage.
But booksellers have no such bargaining power, no matter how big they are. If you want a book by a particular author you can only buy it from one publisher.
Which prompts the next question: Why would publishers be willing to give up profits? The obvious answer is, they weren’t. “If you want the latest Tom Clancy or P.D. James or Don DeLillo for cheap, go see if you can buy it from some other publisher.”
It was only after years of negotiating, years of building relationships with publishers, years of inventing ways to make it more economical for publishers to do business with them, that the chains began to receive better terms.
It is not illegal to negotiate for better terms, nor is it illegal to get them. And, on the publishers’ end, it is not illegal to sell the same merchandise to different customers on different terms. There are any number of tangibles that can justify charging different prices to different customers, largely based on publishers’ internal costs.

A few specifics on the lawsuit, which went to trial in 2001:

a) The ABA produced an expert witness who testified that the savings extended to the chains by publishers were not cost-justified. But the case was settled before the witness could be either cross-examined by defense counsel, or challenged by defense witnesses.
b) The ABA, whose members comprise 18 percent of the retail, or trade book market, pointed to many injuries allegedly suffered by them due to the competitive free market, but not one injury done to consumers.
c) The ABA spent three years and at least $18 million to press this suit, from which they received a cash settlement of $4.7m, reached after presenting about a third of their case, over six days of trial. The chains, which paid $2.35 million apiece, made no agreement to change their business practices. Aside from cross-examination of all but one of the plaintiffs’ witnesses, there is no record of the defense case, because there was no need to present it. $2.35 million is not paltry, but in plain fact it amounted to a nuisance settlement for each chain, paid simply to save further legal costs in defending against the suit. A Borders executive told me the suit had had no impact whatsoever on the way Borders does business.
d) Avin Domnitz, CEO of the ABA, told me, however, that the suit was “tremendously successful at leveling the playing field.” He meant that the ABA takes credit for the fact that a number of publishers, in the years after the suit was filed and before the trial, made terms and coop programs more appealing to independent booksellers.
Really? The ABA’s litigation was that influential? Mightn’t one reasonably suppose that the cause was the years of negotiation by the chains, now filtering down to the independents?
e) Some ABA dues-payers wondered whether their organization spent their $18 million wisely. So do I. How might the ABA have used that money in a more businesslike way? They might have issued low-interest loans to member stores that wished to expand. They might have organized collective buying and distribution arrangements for their members. They might have developed strategies to negotiate with publishers for coop funds for the collective benefit of the members. Tough work, to be sure.

6. Many chain stores aren’t profitable, but are kept open in order to crush the independents. This one lives on and on. I was in an independent book shop last fall to speak to the owner about my forthcoming novel. During our talk I mentioned that I once worked for Borders. She launched into a tutorial on the sins of my former employer. “The chains,” she told me, “have cash flow, but they’re not profitable. They keep stores open—many stores—in order to drive the independents out of business.”
I said, “Well, Borders stores are profitable. I saw the balance sheets for every store every month until I left the company.” I tried to explain that the chains do not have mountains of cash to hide ongoing failure. They’re expected by shareholders to turn a profit. It is true that Borders and Barnes & Noble regularly post losses. But that is because they are still expanding. If a chain has 200 stores and wants to build 40 more this year, it must show the bank that the 200 are making money, in order to qualify for the loans needed to build the 40 more. Businesses do not get additional funds if they can’t show they are making their business work. The overall financial picture becomes a loss because the expenses of opening 40 new stores outstrip the profits made by the 200 existing. That is why the chains’ stock is regarded by shareholders as a growth stock. If they someday stop growing, their shareholders will expect a continuing stream of dividends, as opposed to an increasing stock price.
I could tell this shop owner didn’t believe me, but she politely changed the subject to the rafts of crooked deals she’d heard the chains make with publishers. When I attempted to refute this assertion too, she reassured me comfortably, “Well, it didn’t happen at your level.” The ABA could, if it wished, have put an end to this rumor-mongering, since it had subpoenaed detailed profit-and-loss statements of both chains during the discovery phase of its case against them.

7. The chains steal/stole customers from the independents by offering discounts, and independents can’t really afford to discount. The Borders brothers began giving 10 percent off most hardcovers when they were a single store. In 1985, the year they opened their second store, they began giving 30 percent off New York Times hardcovers as well. They were able to do this and remain profitable because their business practices were sound.
The charge that the chains sold books cheaply to entice hordes of customers away from indies is yet another self-deception fabricated by the independents. The percentage of total sales represented by discounted books sold by the chains runs to about three percent bestsellers, and 10-11 percent discounted hardcovers. Thirteen to 14 percent of total book sales is hardly enough to have seduced book buyers into buying 86-87 percent of their purchases at full list price from the chains.

8. Remember, some chains stopped selling The Satanic Verses when the fatwa on Salman Rushdie was announced. They can’t be counted on to carry controversial books. This is an oft-repeated, half-baked factoid. Here is what happened. After the Ayatollah announced his fatwa against Salman Rushdie, some book chains were sent bomb threats for carrying the novel. Borders did not pull the book, though I know that the store I was working in at the time received at least one threat by telephone. Waldenbooks, at the time owned by Kmart, sent word to its managers in large urban areas that they could use their own discretion as to whether or not to pull the book from display, but not from inventory. The stores that chose to pull it from display returned it to the shelves after no more than two weeks.
How good are independents at carrying controversial titles? The biggest and arguably most controversial American book of 1995 was Newt Gingrich’s To Renew America. While it was on the bestseller lists, I was surprised to walk into a large Los Angeles independent and be greeted with a prominent sign announcing, “NO NEWTS!” Just to make sure, I asked whether the sign meant what it appeared to mean, and was told that yes, the store had decided not to carry the book.
It shouldn’t be surprising that independent book store owners tend to lean to the left politically. I’ve seen many more instances of independents using their stores as platforms for their political or ideological views, from the posting of slogans and advertisements and opinions, to the choices of front-of-store titles.
The Turner Diaries is by any standard a controversial book. A bizarre reactionary tract vaguely akin to Mein Kampf and portions of Ayn Rand and Swift, it was used as a notional guide by Timothy McVeigh in his preparation for the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma. It is reasonable to suppose that it is read and taken literally by other wackos. It is also purchased and read by people who are interested in it for other reasons.
I called stores around northern California, where I live, looking for the book, and found that of the three large general independents I called, none carried it as a regular item, though all would order it on request. But the three Borders stores closest to those independents do carry it as a standard in-stock item. Why? Because it sells, to the tune of a thousand copies per year in Borders stores.
Independent booksellers are not champions of controversial titles. They are champions of the correct controversial titles.

*****

The ABA leadership has spent enormous amounts of energy and money fostering in its membership—and anybody else who would listen—the belief that independent booksellers are victims. And the association has cast itself as the avenger, seeking to take away the benefits their competitors worked long and hard for instead of forging its own way.
Is this situation likely to change? After all, the victim role is extremely popular with independent booksellers. Not with all, but with dismayingly many. It makes them feel superior. It buys them sympathy. But the bind into which these independents have firmly strapped themselves, with the help of the ABA leadership, is this: how do they maintain the comfort of feeling blameless for their own troubles, yet gain the gumption for unflinching self-examination, which is the bedrock of being a strong competitor?
If the indies admit that the playing field has been level all along, then if they haven’t prospered, it’s their own fault. Such a conclusion is unbearable for those who have invested heavily in self-pity.
The chains, however, in their efforts to drive their stock prices ever higher, are compromising some of the essential practices that made their businesses great. They have become mammoth corporations, far larger than any of us envisioned in the early days. In organizations of such size, size itself takes on a life of its own, and it will sap the soul of the business if not attended to.
High standards of in-store presentation, which are expensive to maintain, are relaxed, even forgotten. Labor gets squeezed. Home-office departments turn into fiefdoms fighting for prominence. Leadership becomes averse to risk. It doesn’t have to be this way, but when leadership chooses to be driven by quarterly earnings instead of by customers, it does happen. And irresolute leadership will destroy a company—slowly, painfully, and thoroughly.
Yes, when the chains were new and dynamic, many of their weaker competitors fell by the wayside. But the wayside is also where surprises can hide, ready to ambush a competitor who has grown more ponderous than agile.
Both chains and independents have things to learn. It’s a great time to be selling books.

Borders Books & Music has chosen the winners for the 2002 annual Original Voices Awards. The awards were given in four categories:

Fiction: The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster (Holt)

Nonfiction: Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande (Metropolitan)

Children's Picture Books: Mrs. Biddlebox by Linda Smith, illustrated by Marla Frazee (HarperCollins)

Intermediate/Young Adult Books: Abarat by Clive Barker (HarperCollins)

Borders' Original Voices monthly program features the works of more than 200 contemporary authors and illustrators from around the world, both innovative and ambitious books from new and emerging talents as well as works that represent a new direction for established authors.

Madonna adds children's writer to her CV
Monday March 3, 2003
The Guardian

After Sophie Dahl's illustrated romance and Ethan Hawke's road novel, Madonna becomes the latest celebrity to turn her hand to fiction. The singer/actress has written a series of children's books to be published by Penguin, it was announced today.

The first of the five illustrated books, designed for ages six and upwards, is called The English Roses, and will be out in hardback in September. Each book will feature artwork from a different illustrator.

Penguin chairman John Makinson said: "Madonna is an artist with a universal appeal and these books will touch children of all backgrounds everywhere in the world."

Penguin has picked up the English language rights to the stories from New York-based Callaway Editions. The founder of Callaway Editions, Nicholas Callaway, said that Madonna had "drawn on a lifelong passion for, and deep familiarity with, literature and children's books," while Francesca Dow, managing director of Puffin, Penguin's children's list, promised a "colourful cast of characters and gentle humour".

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

The Ghost of Miss Truman
From the November 18, 2002 issue: Sometimes the real mystery is the author.
by Jon L. Breen
11/18/2002, Volume 008, Issue 10

Every Midget Has an Uncle Sam Costume
Writing for a Living
by Donald Bain
Barricade, 239 pp., $22.95

Murder at Ford's Theatre
by Margaret Truman
Ballantine, 326 pp., $24.95

A BIZARRE PHENOMENON first observed in the 1940s became a crime-fiction epidemic by the 1990s. Famous entertainers, athletes, and presidential relatives began sitting down at the typewriter to bang out mystery novels.

Or so they would have us believe. In truth, nearly every one of those celebrities made a deal through an agent or book packager, collected a nice advance for the use of the name, and left to a professional ghostwriter all the actual writing.

Ghostwriting is a time-honored practice, and most readers surely realize that movie stars and baseball players have help with their memoirs--just as all politicians these days have help with their speeches, campaign literature, and policy statements. But the dissemination of novels that are ghostwritten seems somehow more blatantly deceptive and ethically questionable.

Look, for example, at the new memoir by the veteran ghostwriter Donald Bain, who has written, under his name or others, some eighty books. In "Every Midget Has an Uncle Sam Costume," Bain entertainingly describes his experiences as an officer in charge of censoring American Armed Forces Television in Saudi Arabia, as a jazz musician, and as an airline public-relations flack in a happier and more free-wheeling era of air travel.

But the most intriguing topic in the book is ghostwriting. Bain's first major success, "Coffee, Tea, or Me?" (1967), presented the comical amatory adventures of two stewardesses who appeared in public as the authors, Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones. Three sequels followed, plus similar faux first-person accounts of nurses, office temps, teachers, and actresses, always with attractive young women recruited to front the books for publicity purposes. Bain also wrote the autobiography of actress Veronica Lake, crime fiction signed by the actor David Toma and the ex-cops Nick Vasile and Mike Lundy, and the "Murder, She Wrote" novels in ostensible collaboration with "Jessica Fletcher," the fictional character played on television by Angela Lansbury.

There's no doubt that readers can be extraordinarily naive. About the cover photos on the "Murder, She Wrote" books, Bain reports, one fan wrote in to say it was "amazing how much Angela Lansbury looked like Jessica Fletcher." But when the ostensible author is a real person--and the book itself is a novel--readers don't seem unreasonable in expecting that the person whose name appears on the cover actually wrote the book.

Employing a ghostwriter on a work of fiction is never more dubious than when the putative author really is a writer. Brett Halliday (creator of Mike Shayne), Leslie Charteris (creator of the Saint), and Ernest Tidyman (creator of Shaft) all turned to ghosts to carry on the exploits of their famous characters. The Ellery Queen team employed other writers to turn out paperbacks that were very different from the genuine Queen novels. One case of posthumous ghosting, "Chains of Command" (1999)--credited on the cover to William Caunitz, who died in 1996, but written almost entirely by Christopher Newman--precipitated a class-action suit by readers who believed they had been defrauded.

Celebrity mystery novels, like other ghostwritten books, differ in the way the actual writer is or is not credited. In the most honest method, arguably not ghostwriting at all, the celebrity makes the writing professional a full collaborator, as in the recent "Blue Moon," signed in equal-sized print by bandleader Peter Duchin and Edgar Award-winning novelist John Morgan Wilson.

The second method doesn't admit the ghostwriter's existence to the world at large but at least tips off others in the writing and publishing trade. Many of the novels attributed to "Star Trek"'s William Shatner credit in the acknowledgments the assistance of science-fiction humorist Ron Goulart. Actor George Kennedy's paperback mysteries offer thanks to Walter J. Sheldon. A more subtle variation is to dedicate the book to the real author, as actor George Sanders did for Craig Rice and Leigh Brackett, the authors of the two 1940s crime novels published under his name. (Bain used the same method to give himself credit on the "Coffee, Tea, or Me?" books.)

The third method is for the celebrity mystery to eschew the slightest hint of a ghostwriter's presence. Great pains were taken to suggest that the earliest successful example of a celebrity mystery novel, Gypsy Rose Lee's "The G-String Murders" (1941), was the stripper's own work, though it has long been attributed to Craig Rice. The opera singer Helen Traubel's "The Metropolitan Opera Murders" (1951) was actually the work of Harold Q. Masur. Though the television personality and show-business all-rounder Steve Allen had a legitimate track record as a writer, his mystery novels of the 1980s and 1990s were all ghostwritten, first by Walter J. Sheldon and then by Robert Westbrook.

PERHAPS THE MOST CURIOUS subgenre of recent decades is the mystery novel written by the children of presidents. You can see neatly represented in them the three methods of dealing with a ghostwriter. The most recent to enter the field, Susan Ford, credits a co-author, Laura Hayden, for this year's "Double Exposure: A First Daughter Mystery."

Elliott Roosevelt, whose first novel featuring his mother Eleanor as sleuth was "Murder and the First Lady" (1984), didn't offer a shared byline but gave his ghostwriter a nod via a note in his early books, crediting William Harrington as "my mentor in the craft of mystery writing [who] has given me invaluable assistance with the First Lady mysteries." After Elliott Roosevelt died in 1990, his publishers added to his jacket biography for "A First Class Murder" (1991) the claim: "A hard-working and prolific writer, he left behind a number of already-completed Eleanor Roosevelt mysteries."

By 1998's "Murder in the Map Room," they were still touting "a number of unpublished manuscripts to be enjoyed by readers in the years to come." (A Booklist reviewer dryly noted that Roosevelt had become "one of the mystery genre's most prolific dead authors.") Harrington, ironically, would finally be credited as the author of a Roosevelt book, "Murder at the President's Door" (2001), only after his own death.

Margaret Truman, the longest running and most commercially successful of the presidential offspring fronting mysteries, offers no hint in any of her books, beginning with "Murder in the White House" (1980), that she has a ghostwriter, a collaborator, or even a literary mentor. Her "Capital Crimes" novels, which usually use as background Washington, D.C., landmarks (the Kennedy Center, the National Cathedral, the Pentagon, the National Gallery, the Library of Congress, etc.), provide plenty of historical tidbits and tourist information. They are far from distinguished detective fiction, but they do rank as above-average celebrity mysteries.

The latest, "Murder at Ford's Theatre," is soundly crafted and professionally paced. The headline-inspired plot concerns the murder of a senatorial intern evocatively named Nadia Zarinski. The stock characterizations sound like casting notes, but at least it's easy to tell the people apart. The author employs familiar strategies to puff up the page count: potted biographies of characters and repetitious dialogue (as when the cops report to their superior investigative details that are still fresh in the reader's mind). Truman's amateur sleuthing team of law professor Mackensie Smith and his gallery-owner wife Annabel are sometimes likened by generous reviewers to Nick and Nora Charles. They share the stage with an odd-couple police team, a Jewish detective who's also a Lincoln buff and his African-American partner.

The writing is usually efficient but flavorless. Occasionally--in the deadly combination of authorial haste and editorial sloppiness typical these days of books considered to have a ready-made readership--it descends into clunky archaism ("Klayman had proved his mettle on more than one occasion, facing down dangerous situations with steely resolve and audacious fearlessness"), clumsy genre references ("The strange case of the murdering midget. Sounds like a Holmes novel"), ponderous banality ("Sunday, as everyone knows, is a day of rest, except for those in jobs demanding their presence"), and faulty syntax ("Seemingly social brunches offer both eggs Benedict as well as the scrambled eggs of negotiation").

ARBOR HOUSE'S Donald Fine, Truman's publisher at the time of her first mystery, swore she had no ghostwriter, but there was a clue from the beginning: Though widely and favorably reviewed, the novel was not nominated for the Edgar Award for best first novel by an American author, nor, according to Allen J. Hubin, a member of the committee, was it even submitted by the publisher.

Hubin's "Crime Fiction III: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1749-1995," the most authoritative source on mystery authorship, identifies Donald Bain as Margaret Truman's ghostwriter, based on intelligence from reliable publishing community sources. Bain has flatly denied it, both to Hubin and in an e-mail to me: "I do not ghostwrite Margaret Truman's murder mysteries."

But what does Bain's autobiography have to say? A note at the end of "Every Midget Has an Uncle Sam Costume" claims that "contractual obligations prohibit Donald Bain from publicly taking credit for an additional twenty novels." Elsewhere in the book, he partially contradicts this, writing that "some of my best work appears in an eighteen-book series ghostwritten over the past twenty years for a well-known person. It would be professionally inappropriate for me to take public credit for this series, although I'm not under contractual obligation to conceal my involvement." ("Murder at Ford's Theatre" brings the total of Truman's novels to nineteen.) Obligatory or not, Bain's denial fulfills his duty as an honorable ghostwriter. In the same chapter, he excoriates, for ghostwriting unprofessionalism, Lucianne Goldberg, who publicly claimed credit for the novel "Washington Wives" (1987) out of anger over putative author Maureen Dean's interviews.

IF BAIN IS Truman's ghost, he won't admit it, but he provides enough clues to support a strong circumstantial case. He states his involvement with the series "for a well-known person" began in 1980 and continues, "I've been writing novels in this series ever since, a book a year, most of them well reviewed and appearing on many bestseller lists throughout the country." How many other candidates for a frequently bestselling book-a-year mystery series beginning around 1980 are there?

Bain writes that he disagreed with a young editor over "a husband-and-wife team of characters [created] for a book in a series I was ghosting. My characters were in their fifties, erudite, physically fit, and madly in love." Though the editor thought them too old, "The characters stayed and went on to become particular favorites of critics and readers of the series." That sounds very much like Margaret Truman's Mackensie and Annabel Smith. In researching the coffee-table book "Caviar, Caviar, Caviar" (1981), Bain learned of the underground trade in Iranian caviar, smuggled into the United States via Copenhagen. He writes, "I later used what I'd learned as the basis for a crime novel I went on to ghost for a well-known person." The plot of Truman's "Murder on Embassy Row" (1984) involves caviar smuggling.

Recognizing that the ghosting of fiction presents a greater ethical dilemma than nonfiction, Bain asks, "Is a book buyer cheated when buying a novel not written by the person whose name appears on the cover? Is it fraud? I don't think so, though my bias is understandable." Perhaps his bias is, in fact, understandable--but he goes on to add: "In most cases, the consumer gets a lot better book than if the nonwriting collaborator had tried to do it solo." This will not do. The book is sold on the premise that a celebrity wrote it, and there is no excuse for such a pretense other than deceiving the consumer.

Still, one might ask, where's the harm? The journeymen writers doing the actual work undoubtedly realize more profit from being celebrity ghostwriters than they could from novels under their own names. The idea that the inflated money the celebrity and ghostwriter get would otherwise go to more deserving but less famous professional writers is clearly specious. The deceptiveness of attributing a book to a person who didn't write it is minor next to the credits for doing nothing that feature in many major motion pictures. And what does the deceived reader care, if the novel is a good read that appears to draw on the celebrity's area of expertise?


THE ANSWER IS that there are several harms. The books, more even than most commercial fiction driven by the marketplace rather than the artistic impulse, are rarely good mystery fiction. The celebrity publicity machine attracts readers that might otherwise be drawn to better books. While the big advance might not have gone elsewhere, some of the bookstore display space, public-library buying, and newspaper review attention certainly would. The public impression that anybody can write a book erodes the professional respect accorded to real writers. And finally, in the unlikely event a celebrity author actually writes a novel, no one in the cynical book world will believe it.

Bain writes, "I'm often asked when talking to groups about my career: 'How can you stand to see someone else's name on a book that you've written?'" He finds it easy to answer: He makes a good living writing for others, and he takes pride in doing the best work he can on every project. Most professional writers would agree. Writing is such a hard way to make a living, it's tough to blame the ghostwriter for going where the money is.

The parallel question for celebrity novelists is, "How can you stand to see your name on a book somebody else wrote?" That should be harder to answer, but, sadly, it probably isn't.

A frequent reviewer of mysteries for The Weekly Standard, Jon L. Breen is the winner of two Edgar awards.

© Copyright 2002, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

Novelist Sheldon Still Writing at 86
Wed Feb 26, 2:35 PM ET

By BOB THOMAS, Associated Press Writer

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. - He quit college after one semester, can barely hunt-and-peck on a typewriter and has never touched a computer keyboard. Yet 86-year-old Sidney Sheldon has written 16 novels and is spending most of his waking time writing three more books.

Well, "writing" is a misnomer. Sheldon talks books. He dictates to his secretary, Mary Langford, who happens to be a court reporter. She runs the machine's tape through a computer and it emerges as a portion of the manuscript.

"Isn't science amazing," Sheldon marvels.

The dictating technique stems from Sheldon's early struggle to gain a foothold in Hollywood, in the mid-1930s. As a young hopeful from the Midwest, he was unable to get inside the studios. At the time, studios employed young people to outline new books for busy executives to consider and Sheldon decided to try out for a job as a reader. He compressed John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" into a few pages and sent them to every studio.

The only reply came from David O. Selznick, who wanted a book synthesized for the screen by 6 p.m. Sheldon took two streetcars and a bus to get to the MGM studio, where a relative worked as a secretary. He persuaded her to take his dictation as he skimmed through the book. He delivered the manuscript to Selznick's office shortly before 6 and won his first movie job.

Today, Sheldon is working on three projects: a novel, "Are You Afraid of the Dark?"; a memoir, "The Other Side of Me"; and a collection of short stories, "Sidney Sheldon's Miracles and Other Mysteries."

"I've finished the first draft of the autobiography, and I'll be turning the novel in by June," he reports. "Then I'll go to work on a rewrite of the autobiography. Meanwhile, I'm doing research for the 'Miracles' book."

Sheldon holds up two folders half-filled with sheets of paper, the novel so far. "When I'm finished, I'll have seven of these folders totally filled," he says. The first draft will go through a dozen rewrites. Some writers hate rewrites, not Sheldon, "because every time I rewrite, the book gets better," he says.

He works all day, seven days a week. "I have no hobbies," he explains. "I could do two books a year easily. But I won't. I'd rather have (a book) as good as I can make it."

Sheldon lives in a white stucco compound with a red-tile roof beneath the rocky peaks behind Palm Springs. It started as a single house, then he added another house on one side of the original. When Kirk Douglas (news) decided to sell his house on the other side, Sheldon bought it.

The result is a cluster of houses, two swimming pools and several guest cottages, including one where Sheldon and his secretary work. The grounds are handsomely designed with palms, flowers and velvety lawns. There's a house where his wife, Alexandra, does her arts and crafts. The Sheldons also retain their West Los Angeles home, which they use for refuge from the punishing desert summer.

Sheldon didn't try novels until he was 52, but he's been writing words — and even some music — most of his life. His first sale came when he was a boy of 10 in Chicago: a poem to a children's magazine, Wee Wisdom. Emboldened, he sent short stories to other magazines but was rejected.

Awarded a one-year scholarship to Northwestern University, he had to drop out after a semester to help support his family during the Depression. He worked as a theater usher, shoe salesman and checkroom attendant at a night club. The club's band leader played one of the boy's songs, and he set off to find his music-writing fortune in New York's Tin Pan Alley.

No luck. But he found his calling when he ushered at a Manhattan movie house.

"Day after day I saw movies with glamorous sets and beautiful people, and I was living in one room at the YMCA and making less than $17 a week," he recalls. "Finally I said, `That's what I want to do: I want to write for Hollywood.'"

While reading at Universal Studios, he and another writing hopeful, Ben Roberts, sold several B-picture scripts to Republic Pictures.

The pair served together in the Army Air Corps during World War II, yet found time to turn out scripts for such Broadway shows as "The Merry Widow," "Jackpot" and "Dream With Music." Sheldon later won a Tony for the Gwen Verdon hit "Redhead."

After the war, he submitted a movie script to Selznick titled "Suddenly It's Spring." The producer bought it and gave it a new title, which Sheldon thought was terrible. "The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer" — starring Cary Grant, Myrna Loy (news) and Shirley Temple (news) — was a big hit and won Sheldon an Academy Award.

His other screenplays included the musicals "Annie Get Your Gun," "Easter Parade," "Anything Goes" and "Jumbo." Sheldon turned to television in 1963, producing and writing many of the scripts for "The Patty Duke (news) Show" (1963-1970) and "I Dream of Jeanie" (1965-1970).

"It never once occurred to me that I could write a novel," he says. "I was doing Broadway, screenplays, television. But a novel? No.

"I got an idea that was so introspective, it entered the character's mind. I didn't know how to do that in a dramatic form. So I gave up. But it was so strong in my mind that I came back to it. That was my first book, 'The Naked Face,' about a psychiatrist whom someone was going to murder."

"The Naked Face" wasn't a big seller, but it won an Edgar, the mystery writers' equivalent of the Oscar, and became a feature motion picture starring Roger Moore (news). The next book, "The Other Side of Midnight," went through the roof_ 52 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. It was made into a not-so-successful movie starring Susan Sarandon (news).

The string of best sellers continued. Because of Sheldon's background as a screenwriter, the books are fashioned in dramatic scenes, making them highly readable and easily converted to theatrical or TV movies (11 have been). The story lines vary, but a recurrent theme is the strong-willed woman who finds herself in jeopardy.

A major asset of Sheldon's novels is authenticity.

"I never write about any restaurant in the world unless I have had a cup of coffee in that restaurant," he declares. "I have been to 90 countries, and everywhere Alexandra and I go, we do research. I take notes and she takes photographs."

Sheldon, an imposing man with a round, ruddy face and slightly thinning white hair, seems to possess unlimited enthusiasm for his craft. "Writing novels is the most fun I've ever had," he insists.

"It gets harder. When you acquire a certain reputation, people expect to enjoy your books, and you don't want to disappoint them. Yes, I worry about repeating myself. But each character is so distinctive that I don't think that will happen."

Is it really only Thursday? Big news day for sure. Where to start...at the beginning, of course.

Last night ATONEMENT by Ian McEwan won the National Book Critics Circle award for best fiction of 2002.

Oprah Winfrey announced the rebirth of her bookclub. For now she's calling it, "Traveling with the Classics." Her plan is to read and discuss 3-5 classics a year, and to visit the location of each book. If anyone can put classics on the bestseller list, it's Ms. Oprah. Not that the NY Times would allow that anyway...should be interesting though.

The American Booksellers Association announced their shortlist for the 2003 Book Sense Book of the Year Awards. The nominees for adult books are -
Adult Fiction:
Atonement by Ian McEwan (Nan Talese/Doubleday)
The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (Harcourt)
Life of Pi by Yann Martel (Harcourt)
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (Little, Brown)
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (Viking)

Adult Nonfiction:
Blue Latitudes by Tony Horwitz (Holt)
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller (Random House)
My Losing Season by Pat Conroy (Doubleday)
Population, 485 by Michael Perry (HarperCollins)
Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs (St. Martin's)

Paperback:
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Sijie Dai (Anchor)
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (Perennial)
The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall (Vintage)
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith (Anchor)
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks (Penguin)

All I can say is I'm glad I don't have to vote. I couldn't even come up with a top ten for 2002, never mind choosing the one best book. On the other hand, I have read almost all of the fiction books nominated, which was really surprising for some reason.

On the road again: Ian Rankin and George Pellecanos are going on tour together. RESURRECTION MEN is my give-away this month, and keep an eye out for the next contest....

Finally, a very sad day with the passing of Fred Rogers. His legacy of love should live on for years to come. I'm posting this from John Lee of Suburban Tribe because he said what I feel and said it eloquently:

...and one Goodbye.
Posted on February 27, 2003

I'm sure that more than a few Internet message boards and office water coolers are brimming with jokes about the death of Fred Rogers today. However, I'm man enough to admit that it makes me a little sad to see this humanitarian leave us. Mr. Rogers never tried to sell children a new toy or distract them for half an hour with violent, mediocre animation. He spoke to children on an adult level, while imparting to them the importance of treating yourself and others with love and respect. He was a big advocate of introducing children to the arts, and he was also a masterful storyteller who encouraged the use of imagination.

I hope PBS continues to rerun Mr. Roger's Neighborhood for a very long time. Even better, I hope at some point someone sees fit to release Mr. Roger's Neighborhood in a DVD archive for a very low price so that Fred Roger's legacy can be passed on within and between families for as long as possible.

JK Rowling to feature in The Simpsons

JK Rowling is to make a one-off appearance in The Simpsons.

Homer and his family meet up with the Harry Potter author in a special episode set in London.

Lisa Simpson turns out to be a Potter fan and questions the millionaire.

Sir Ian McKellen also appears in the episode - and is first hit by falling scaffolding, then struck by lightning.

The Simpsons go to see him perform on stage in Macbeth, but bring him bad luck by saying the play's name aloud - a theatrical superstition.

A spokesman for the cult US cartoon told The Sun: "The Simpsons bump into JK Rowling outside a bookshop and they talk all about Harry Potter.

"We're very excited about the episode and rest assured every British cliche will be trotted out to get a laugh."

Read any good books lately?
By David Sexton, literary editor, Evening Standard

Book reviewers always have one question, at the point of accepting a commission: "How long is it?" They are not hoping, as buyers of mass-market fiction usually are, that it's a really good substantial read. They are praying that the book is not too long.

Reviewing books is not a particularly well-paid form of journalism and it takes time. A book of any more ambition than a thriller can't be read for review at a rate of more than 40, or at most 60, pages an hour. Some books are only 120-pages long and can comfortably be digested in a couple of hours. Others, though, are 400, or 600 pages, or, in some dreadful instances, even more, and they can easily take days to get through.

The reviewer's fee, however, usually remains the same. So, shocking as it may seem, the truth is that some reviewers skip some books. And there are a few who skip through all the books.

They have to be good to get away with it. The more conscientious reviewers enjoy a privileged position. They are able to see the book before anybody else. So they can perform a useful task by simply describing it to a readership which has not had that advantage. What's more, while it is not so easy as you may think to have complete and certain knowledge of a longish text, it's a doddle compared to acquiring complete and certain knowledge of the outside world, which most other journalists have to attempt. The whole thing is right there, on your desk. You can check your facts until you are sure. Some books even have an index.

Yet, believe it or not, there are reviewers who just throw away such a head start. In the States, one such has just come to grief. In the New York Times Book Review, a professor of creative writing, Beverly Lowry, reviewed a book by one of the people involved in the Whitewater affair, The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk by Susan McDougal. An Arkansas newspaper columnist, Gene Lyons, soon spotted that Lowry's review contained a basic error about whether or not the author eventually testified in court (she did).

"Yo, Beverly. Next time, read the damned book," he urged, arguing that "assuming minimal competence, Lowry simply cannot have done so".

Read the complete article at the London Evening Standard