Event photos: farewell bash for Random rep

Roni Walker, a Random House of Canada sales rep based in Vancouver, retired at the beginning of this month, and colleagues threw her a surprise party at Vancouver’s Sandbar Restaurant. Bookseller Laurie Greenwood flew in from Edmonton to make the shindig, and Bolen Books’ Samantha Holmes came over from Victoria.

Guest of honour Roni Walker (with tiara) with three of her fellow Random reps: from left, Trish Kells, Carol Greenwood, and Cheryl Norberg. (Photo by Kate Saunders)

Walker reminisces with former Duthie Books manager David Kerfoot. (Photo by Richard Nadeau)

Walker with Whitecap Books founder Michael Burch; Walker worked at Whitecap before joining Random House. (Photo by Kate Saunders)

Engel’s Benny Cooperman gets a new look

Author Howard Engel’s novels starring private investigator Benny Cooperman have been given an updated look and will be revisiting bookstore shelves, Robert Fulford reports in the National Post.

Penguin has re-launched the first 11 Cooperman books in paperback with a lively new design and a number emblazoned on the spine of each volume, so that obsessive Cooperman fans can shelve them in order of their creation, from No. 1, The Suicide Murders (1980), to No. 11, Memory Book (2005). This is an exceptional publishing event, something the French might do while promoting someone for a shot at the Nobel. Nobody has done it before, on this scale, for a Canadian.

Engel himself suffered great tragedy – a stroke left him unable to read and struggling with memory problems, as happens to his main character in Memory Book.

By now Engel’s own story has been well told. In 2001, he had a stroke in his sleep and awoke to discover he couldn’t read anything, even The Globe and Mail. He had a rare condition: Aside from the loss of literacy, his memory was damaged, but he could still write and talk. Ever since he’s been re-learning to read while maintaining his literary career. It seemed natural to give Benny his own disabilities, though Benny had to acquire them through violence because no PI, even Benny, has anything so boring as a stroke.

Atwood and Rowling write postcards for charity

The next works from Margaret Atwood and J.K. Rowling won’t be page-turners – they’ll be printed on postcards and sold by a major British bookseller named Waterstone’s to help raise money as part of the What’s Your Story? charity auction in London this June.

Thirteen well-loved authors will be participating in the event, and the complete set of their original storycards will later be reproduced and sold to the general public, with proceeds also going to charity.

Gerry Johnson, the managing director at Waterstone’s, says:

“It’s impossible to say how much this charity auction will raise, but with the calibre of authors involved then really the sky is the limit. Owning an original piece of work by a favourite writer is the ultimate limited edition for fans, so with the names we have involved in What’s Your Story? I think we could see some very large sums being bid – all the better for English PEN and Dyslexia Action!”