Way to Display! August three-fer UPDATED

WtD! has been fairly quiet lately, but it is back in a big way with three displays we are proud to say Yes, way! to.

Appropriate for August (and timed to cash in on a big summer movie adaptation) is this travel-themed Eat, Pray, Love display at Words Worth Books in Waterloo. That banner, by the way, was hand-made by a WWB staffer out of uncooked noodles, flowers, and beads. This is something we’d very much like to see more of: displays that employ methods used by kids making crafts at camp. Seriously. (Photo courtesy of Words Worth Books)

Meanwhile, the Forest Hill location of Toronto’s Type Books has a classy display for Pucci, Taschen’s book about Italian designer Emilio Pucci. The display is very stylish and colourful, and likely the exact thing for the store’s tony – nay, filthy rich – neighbourhood. Five bucks says more than one person came in looking to buy the dress*. (Photo courtesy of Hornblower Books)

After travel and fashion, we come to the real heart of the book trade: nerds. Or rather, Nerds, the new middle-grade novel from Michael Buckley, published by Amulet Books. Here we see a real corker of a display at Vancouver KidsBooks – this thing must work like a kid-magnet. Way to think outsi– er, inside the box, folks! (Photo courtesy of Canadian Manda Group)

*UPDATE: Type Books confirms:

Daily book biz round-up: Pearson still world’s biggest publisher; Penguin’s teachable moment; and more

• Pearson: leader of the pack
• Macmillan posts job for crime-fighting pirate who can travel back in time
• Saramago was a blogger
• Penguin: How to handle a sex scandal badly
• Kathryn Borel tells all about her tell-all
• The Guardian asks poetry to justify its future existence

$2 million reward for book-loving fugitive in B.C.

One of the FBI’s 10 most wanted fugitives is a book-loving octogenarian believed to be hiding in Victoria, B.C.  According to the FBI’s website, James J. “Whitey” Bulger has a record of 19 counts of murder, plus charges of money laundering, narcotics distribution, and extortion, among others. The bureau describes Bulger as “an avid reader with an interest in history,” who is known “to frequent libraries and historic sites.”

The Gazette reports that he is believed to have been the inspiration for Jack Nicholson’s character in the Oscar-winning film The Departed. And according to the Vancouver Sun, the owners of Victoria’s two biggest bookstores have already been visited by police, who are warning staff to look out for the dangerous fugitive:

“The FBI don’t have any definite answers that he’s in Victoria, but they’re on the lookout for him,” said Jim Munro, owner of Munro’s Books on Government Street.
[…]
The officers gave Munro and the management at Bolen’s Books posters bearing Bulger’s photo and a number to call.

Bulger is 80 years old, 5’7” to 5’9”, with blue eyes and white or silver hair. His FBI description, which says he likes animals, travelling, and walks on the beach, would almost sound like a personals ad, if not for the part about his violent temper and tendency to carry a knife at all times. The FBI is offering a $2 million reward for any information that leads directly to Bulger’s arrest.

Ontario’s literary and physical landscapes collide in new project

This summer, Ontario’s literary history will become a permanent part of the province’s physical landscape with a new project called Ontario: Read It Here.

A series of eight plaques will be installed across the province in the exact geographic location where Ontario-based literary scenes takes place. The project is an expansion of Project Bookmark Canada, which launched last April with a plaque featuring a passage from Michael Ondaatje’s novel In the Skin of a Lion. The novel is about the building of Toronto’s Bloor Street Viaduct; the plaque is situated at the east end of the architectural landmark. Ontario: Read It Here is a joint initiative between Open Book: Toronto, Project Bookmark Canada, and Humber College’s creative book publishing program, and will feature a corresponding online map. From the press release:

A sophisticated online mapping project, including travelogues and reading lists, will enhance the installations, driving Ontario book lovers and tourists from all over to visit the installations at cities and towns across the province, to read the featured books and authors and to further explore Ontario’s literary scene.

Each poster-sized plaque, called a “Bookmark,” will feature black text on a white ceramic background, with up to 500 words from the featured book or poem relating to the specific location. “This initiative will mark the places where Ontario’s real and imagined landscapes meet,” said Miranda Hill, founder and executive director of Project Bookmark Canada, in the release. “Reading about a place gives you an added appreciation for it.”

Organizers hope the project will “showcase Ontario as a vibrant literary setting,” and plan to announce the first locations in the coming weeks.

The book industry: this week in quotes

“We’ve had the ‘woe is me, alas’ memoir, the ‘feeling orgasmic over the touch of linen on my toes alone in bed in Italy on Tuesday’ memoir, the ‘Thank Christ she wasn’t my mother’ memoir, the ‘I got rid of my husband and everything makes sense’ memoir, and now, in the case of Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story, we arrive at the “nothing in particular, on me holidays with me mum, we might be having a crisis but you’ll need a magnifying glass to find it” memoir. Publishers trot this tripe out because of the chance it might be lifted by the winds of marketing and carried to every middle-class dinner table.” – Anakana Schofield, from The Globe and Mail‘s Daily Review for Jan. 12

“A new independent study, conducted by the online monitoring and enforcement service Attributor, found that ‘nine million illegal downloads of copyright-protected books were documented during the closing months of 2009,’ according to the [Association of American Publisher's] release….Indeed, those are staggering numbers – and something that must be contended with. And yet they’re kind of perversely encouraging in a way: That many people want to read that many books, and are willing to steal to do so…. At least that goes against the ‘nobody reads anymore’ and ‘it’s the death of publishing’ story we’ve been hearing so much of. And that glass of rare Chateau Lafite 1787 is half full.“  - Mobylives

“How surreally wonderful to discover that an entire exhibition devoted to the ‘works’ of David Foster Wallace’s fictional creation James Incandenza is set to open later this month. A cult filmmaker, Incandenza is the star of Wallace’s seminal novel Infinite Jest… As was his wont, Wallace included a footnote in the novel about the filmography of Incandenza, and now using the author’s ‘detailed list of over 70 industrial, documentary, conceptual, advertorial, technical, parodic, dramatic non-commercial, and non-dramatic commercial works’, Columbia University’s Neiman Centre has commissioned artists and filmmakers to make the movies.”- The Guardian

“Three weeks after Highsmith’s arrival, a new resident appeared at Yaddo: Flannery O’Connor. Does your imagination not crackle at the idea of Highsmith and O’Connor living under the same set of roofs? As Highsmith drafted Strangers on a Train, O’Connor worked on Wise Blood…. Highsmith did not think much of O’Connor, who was disinclined to join the other colonists on their treks to the taverns of Saratoga Springs” – The New Yorker

January is SUAWOYN month … according to Colson Whitehead.

“Canada’s literary scene does not financially support more than a handful of authors, so don’t limit your work to Canada if your goal is to make a living as a novelist. You will either starve or die of frustration. It’s hard enough trying to make it as a writer without adding obstacles in your path.” – author Jeffrey Round on Open Book Toronto

Bookmarks: New app from LibraryThing, voice acting by Stephen King, and more

A few bookish links from across the Web:

• Book-loving travellers, breathe a sigh of relief: Transport Canada explains that the whole “airplane book ban” was just a misunderstanding
• Hundreds of readers offer words of support after Marian Keyes reveals on her blog that “crippling depression” is keeping her from writing
• Toronto-based Scott Pilgrim series is one step closer to the silver screen – watch out, evil ex-boyfriends!
• Need to find the nearest bookstore or book events? There’s an app for that!
• Stephen King lends his voice to a new rock album as a doom-predicting radio host broadcasting his final show
• Does Google dream of Electric Sheep? The family of Philip K. Dick threatens to sue Google over new Nexus One phone

Ray Robertson on baiting the Giller

Writing in the National Post books blog, novelist Ray Robertson says that while Alice Munro may have to forcibly remove her work from Scotiabank Giller Prize consideration, he doesn’t even bother with the formality – he just writes the kind of gritty, contemporary novels that offend the priggish literary sensibilities of the established “culture industry.”

There’s inevitably been some point during the writing of every one of my six novels when I knew that I was unofficially but no less effectively disqualified for Giller Prize consideration.

Some point, in other words, when I knew that the tender sensibilities of that year’s distinguished arbiters of taste would no doubt be chafed by some damning reference of mine to either bodily functions (because we all know that people in works of literature don’t go to the bathroom) or popular culture (because we all know that people in works of literature spend the majority of their time occupied not with jobs and families and television and boredom, but with either travelling to remote countries looking for lost lovers or distant family members or else sitting in abandoned lighthouses alternately listening to the mournful sounds of the sea and brooding upon those timeless day-to-day concerns of time, loss, and memory) or for simply failing to set said novel in a sufficiently charmingly bucolic and/or fascinatingly exotic locale (because we all know that real literature doesn’t take place where most people actually live and work and go to the mall and die).

Certainly, there’s room to criticize and debate this year’s Giller shortlist, but Robertson’s embattled tone seems a little self-serving. Consider, for instance, that while historical novels are generally well-represented on the Giller shortlist, the odd gritty, urban novel does occasionally slip past the censors – think Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game or Cockroach. And never mind that Robertson’s latest novel, David, is in fact an historical novel set in the Elgin Settlement, near Chatham, Ontario. Presumably, there are enough references to bodily functions to have effectively disqualified it from consideration.

Canadian Connections

Sponsored Blog Post: Canadian connections found in The Time Traveler’s Wife include actors Rachel McAdams as Claire Tabshire and actress Fiona Reid as Lucille Abshire; film locations in Toronto, Hamilton and Scugog Township; and one of the soundtrack songs is ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, recorded by Canadian band Broken Social Scene.

Currently The Time Traveler’s Wife is number one in Amazon.ca’s ranking of literature and fiction, number two in Amazon.ca’s ranking of science fiction and fantasy and is the number nine bestseller overall on Amazon.ca as well as one the Globe and Mail’s top 10 trade paperback bestsellers in Canada.

About Author Audrey Niffenegger

Sponsored Blog Post: Audrey Niffenegger resides in Chicago, where she is a visual artist and professor in the MFA program at the Columbia College Chicago Centre for Book and Paper Arts. At the end of four and half years of writing The Time Traveler’s Wife, Niffenegger dyed her hair red, as a tribute and a way to say goodbye to lead character Claire Tabshire.  She has published The Three Incestuous Sisters: An Illustrated Novel ( Harry N. Abrams Publishers, 2005) a fairytale about the lives of three sisters who live by the sea, and The Adventuress (Harry N. Abrams, 2006) a dreamy tale of an alchemist’s daughter and her discovery of love. Both books featured illustrations done by Niffenegger. This September, Audrey Niffenegger will publish Her Fearful Symmetry: A Novel (Scribner), about the lives of twin girls who inherit a home near Highgate cemetery in London. According to the NY Times, she received an advance of US$5 million. Currently the trade paperback edition of The Time Traveler’s Wife is one of the top five bestsellers on the New York Times Bestseller list.

Optioning The Time Traveler’s Wife

Sponsored Blog Post: New Line Cinema optioned The Time Traveler’s Wife soon after its publication in Fall 2003, before it became an international bestseller. New Line Cinema partnered with Plan B Production, at the time owned by husband and wife Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston and partner Brad Grey. Pitt became the sole owner of Plan B in 2006 and is one of the executive producers of The Time Traveler’s Wife. Plan B has been the producer of Troy (which starred Eric Bana, who plays Henry deTamble in The Time Traveler’s Wife), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (based on the book by Roald Dahl), The Departed (a remake of a Hong Kong film) and Running with Scissors (based on the memoir by Augusten Burroughs).