Simon & Schuster Canada toasted Jack Romanos, the retiring president of its U.S. parent company, with an event at Toronto’s Spoke Club on Dec. 10. (Photos courtesy of Simon & Schuster Canada.)

Romanos, left, with Simon & Schuster Canada president Kevin Hanson and publicity director Amy Cormier.

Agent Bruce Westwood (middle) welcomes Carolyn Reidy, Simon & Schuster’s incoming president and CEO, while Alun Davies of S&S International looks on.

North 49 owner Peter Waldock, with Michael Selleck (S&S’s executive vice-president of sales and marketing) and David Millar (vice-president of sales, S&S Canada).

International Readings at Harbourfront director Geoffrey Taylor with Felicia Quon, director of marketing for S&S Canada.

Reidy, centre, with Larry and Brenda Sisnett of Georgetown Terminal Warehouses.

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Reidy has the floor while Romanos and Hanson look on.

The Hollywood Reporter has announced the 13 projects chosen for the Sundance Film Festival’s highly competitive January Screenwriters Lab, and among the lucky winners is Vancouver author Ryan Knighton. Knighton has fashioned his 2006 memoir Cockeyed – about his gradual descent into blindness during his teen years – into a screenplay, and now he’ll be spending Jan. 11 to 16 at the Sundance Resort in Utah, being tutored by big-name Hollywood screenwriters like Scott Frank (Get Shorty, The Lookout), Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects), Paul Attanasio (Donnie Brasco, The Good German), and Doug Wright (Quills).

Many scripts that get put through the Screenwriters Lab go on to be made into actual films, so here’s hoping that Knighton’s turns out to be one of them.

A handwritten book of fairy tales by J.K. Rowling was auctioned off for more than $4-million (Cdn) yesterday, and U.K. newspapers were full of speculation this morning as to who the deep-pocketed buyer was.

As The Times Online reported:

An anonymous collector, bidding through a dealer who usually specialises in Old Masters, paid £1.95 million for The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a 160-page Potter spin-off of five “wizarding fairytales” that relate to his final adventure. The proceeds will go to the charity Children’s Voice. [...] The Tales was estimated to go for between £30,000 and £50,000.

[...]

As the Sotheby’s auctioneer opened the bidding, a white-gloved porter held up the book at the front of the room. There were five or six players, all concealing their identity by bidding through someone in the room or through a member of Sotheby’s staff on the phone. At £1 million, there was applause from the room, and murmurings of astonishment as six-figure increases were tossed around the rooms.

A few children in the saleroom jumped with excitement as the hammer came down on the final bid, but the man at the back who bought it could not have looked more miserable as he scurried off into the street muttering “no comment”.

After most of the U.K. papers went to press, however, the buyer was revealed as none other than Amazon.com. As the CBC reports:

Amazon revealed later on Thursday that it had crossed over from the sales side to become buyer for the rare tome, with a spokesman saying the company is planning to take The Tales of Beedle the Bard on tour through libraries and schools.

The company has also posted on its website a host of large, close-up photos of and from the book — for which Rowling also created the illustrations — as well as staff reviews of the tales inside. Staffers will also answer questions fans have about the book via an online discussion board.

You can see the Amazon reviews here, but if you think they’re going to have anything remotely critical to say, you’ve got another thing coming. Just a sample:

So how do you review one of the most remarkable tomes you’ve ever had the pleasure of opening? You just turn each page and allow yourself to be swept away by each story. You soak up the simple tales that read like Aesop’s fables and echo the themes of the series; you follow every dip and curve of Rowling’s handwriting and revel in every detail that makes the book unique – a slight darkening of a letter here, a place where the writing nearly runs off the page there. You take all that and you try and bring it to life, knowing that you will never be able to do it justice.

A few weeks after the most recent Toronto Small Press Book Fair, a public battle is raging between fair organizers and disgruntled constituents – mostly in the arena of Facebook.

It began last month when author Stuart Ross, a co-founder and perennial supporter of the fair, posted some complaints about this fall’s event on his blog. Ross charges that organizers Halli Villegas and Myna Wallin did little to promote the fair – no posters, no free listings in local weeklies, no mass e-mails. He also notes that the two organizers

didn’t show up at the venue until 10:51 and 10:53 respectively, when they hastened to set up the tables for their own presses. Volunteers were already at the venue an hour earlier, putting up tables and chairs, and most of the presses were already there and waiting for the public to arrive when the doors opened at 11 a.m.

Villegas, who took over management of the fair this year with Wallin, took exception. From her note on the fair’s Facebook page:

We had over 300 flyers passed out at readings and events around town, we were featured on the Quill and Quire Omni Blog [true], the fair was announced at more then a few reading series, the fair was announced several times on CKLN on various shows. As always when you exhibitors received your forms you were asked to please spread the news to all your friends and reading public. In addition for the first time this fair we had a Facebook site. Myna did send in free listings for Now and Eye, but they were obviously missed in the shuffle at those papers.

And:

Myna and I are always happy to talk, or receive personal e-mails with suggestions that are constructive. We really don’t like being backed into corners on blogs or public forums before we have been approached privately. I suspect no one would.

If you think this sounds like it’s getting personal, well, you’re probably right. Angry wall posts have been flying on the Facebook page, and Ross says Villegas and Wallin have been censoring his comments. Now another Facebook page, “Friends of the Toronto Small Press Book Fair,” has been created, and comments are flying there, too.

And Ross has even taken his grievances to his personal Facebook page’s “status update,” which as of this writing reads, “Stuart Ross thinks the Toronto Small Press Book Fair coordinators are using the tactics of dictators and repressive regimes. Censorship, exclusion, disinformation.”