For the past month the top news story dominating book industry email newsletters like PWDaily, Publishers Lunch, and Shelf Awareness has been the December 29 bankruptcy filing of San Diego book wholesaler Advance Marketing Systems (AMS), parent company of Publishers Group West (PGW). Unless you’re an acquisitions librarian, you are probably a bit like me and pay little attention to the intricacies of book distribution. (I don’t care how the book gets there as long as it is in my favorite bookstore, library, grocery store, airport bookstore, and my local Costco’s when I want it.) The main things I knew about PGW is that it distributed some interesting and unique small presses (Seal Press, McSweeney’s Books, Berrett-Koehler) and threw the hippest, coolest parties at BookExpo—Indie rocker Michelle Shocked was the star attraction at the first PGW party I attended.

But a Jan. 27 San Franciso Chronicle report, “A Financial Thriller in the Publishing World” offers an excellent, clear-eyed overview of the financial crisis that threatens the existence of 130 independent publishers. At stake are the three months of sales revenues prior to Christmas (the most profitable time of the year for many publishers) collected by PGW for its clients. The bankruptcy filing suspended all payments by AMS and its subsidiaries, including PGW. Thus the $600,000 in profits (much from the sale of Dave Eggers’s new novel What is the What) McSweeney’s had expected to receive has been frozen, and the publisher is unable to make its planned donations of the novel’s profits to a charity helping Sudanese refugees. Although an offer by Perseus Books Group to pay the publishers 70 cents for every dollar owed them by PGS in exchange for a four-year distribution contract looks promising, the article concludes that “for better or worse, the bankruptcy may have ended an era in independent book distribution.”  For an insider’s look at the AMS bankruptcy, check out Radio Free PGW , a blog started by affected PGW publishers.

Paging all heat-seeking singles and couples: LJ’s February 1 issue is bursting at the seams with our annual pre–Valentine’s Day roundup, “Hot and Heavy Harmony,” among other tantalizing Book Review specials. This double-paged spread boasts a few how-tos (e.g., Joel D. Block’s The Art of the Quickie) as well as more cerebral, even meditative material (e.g., Homo Domesticus: Notes from a Same-Sex Marriage). LJ’s sex book reviewer supreme, Martha Cornog, returns with the assistance of former LJ intern Amanda Glasbrenner and Book Review Assistant Anna Katterjohn.

Of course, I couldn’t assign everything sex- and love-themed that publishes in February. There were some earlier pubs and late arrivals that looked like contenders. So if the roundup isn’t big and bad enough for your patrons, here is a brief addendum:

• William Cane’s Kiss Like a Star: Smooching Secrets from the Silver Screen (Griffin: ISBN 0-312-35993-4) is a charming, though not an explicitly demonstrative, sequel to the best-selling The Art of Kissing (Martha reviewed the 2nd edition). Stills from classic and modern flicks illustrate “The Almost Kiss” (La Dolce Vita) and “Kissing in the Snow” (Bridget Jones’ Diary). Both romantics and movie buffs will go for this.
• In Naked on the Page (Viking), Jane Ganahl recounts a year in her middle-aged dating life. Her columns from the San Francisco Chronicle were a big hit locally and could very well be nationally—Ganahl is funny-cynical and a single mother of a twentysomething. Plenty of other women can relate. (For more on sex and women of a certain age, see “The Go-Go Golden Libido,” the 2006 roundup.)
• Single Mom Seeking (Seal Press) is also a collection of columns (from www.literarymama.com), though Rachel Sarah is 28 with a nine-month-old living in New York City when the book opens. Sarah, too, got tremendous reader response, and her book will no doubt strike a chord with other young single moms in big cities.
• And finally, some steamy how-to from the house of steamy how-to, Quiver. The full-color erotic photos in Susan Crain Bakos’s The Sex Bible don’t make it the most library-friendly book depending on the population served, but it deserves consideration for its informed, in-depth, tartly written text. Bakos is an expert on the female orgasm, and she clearly knows a lot about everything else, from flirting to stripping.

In my December blog You: On a Diet Now, I previewed the 2007 edition of LJ’s annual diet and fitness roundup, and I’m back to flog it now that it’s live on the web. “‘Tis the Season To Move Your Body” is the perfect accompaniment to all those gym membership drives going on right now (according to the International Health, Racquet & Sportclub Association, January remains the most popular time to join up, followed by February). This year’s starred titles impressed me with their spin. Tricia Cunningham and Heidi Skolnik’s The Reverse Diet argues for eating dinner for breakfast and breakfast for dinner, while Steven Gurgevich and Joy Gurgevich’s The Self-Hypnosis Diet stresses meditation to keep a strong body-mind connection. I don’t fancy myself a fitness guru, but I do promise librarians this: order a healthy portion of these books, and watch your circulation go through the ceiling. 

I assign political science titles for review in LJ. For the past many months, this classification has overflowed with books relating to the war in Iraq and the “War on Terror,” but another kind of book is coming in quite often now: the presidential candidate’s biography or autobiography. 

Bill Richardson was ahead of the game. He only just declared that he is exploring a 2008 run, but he put his autobiography, Between Worlds: The Making of an American Life, out in 11/05. I hope it doesn’t set the standard for all of these books. Our reviewer called  it “revealing — to a fault,” e.g., Richardson writes of loading up his Alfa Romeo to move to New Mexico in 1978. This tugged at how many readers’ heartstrings as they remembered their own trials with getting luggage into their Italian sports car?

John Edwards took a different approach in 11/06 and put his name, as editor, behind Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives, celebrating the value that each of us places upon the homes in which we grew up. The nostalgia (literally) was enough to give me neuralgia, but many have understandably, if predictably, admired the collection of memories and photographs from a spectrum of famous and ordinary individuals. Memories of souped-up tranportation were of living room Lionel train sets rather than Alfa Romeos.

To balance his coffee-table entry with wonkier stuff, Edwards is one of three editors of a volume due out in May from the New Press, Ending Poverty in America: How To Restore the American Dream. Will he gain readers? Will they turn into voters? If so, will they vote for him?

Is Nader planning another run? His most recent book publishes in a couple of weeks: The Seventeen Traditions, from HarperCollins. This is billed as Nader’s most personal book because he professes the importance of parents in raising children “of virtue and talent” (he quotes Jefferson on that). Is he trying to win some “family values” types who need to replace their worn-out volumes of Bill Bennett? Should libraries adjust their collections accordingly?

John McCain took a cue from Bill Bennett with his Character is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember, written with Mark Salter. Later this year, the two will  be bringing out Hard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them, which may not seek to include the younger readership of the previous title because he too is now honing in on votership. 

As for McLain, there have already been a few biographies of Hillary Clinton. Most of the McLain studies are sympathetic to him, while perhaps one of the few balanced studies of Clinton is  Gil Troy’s Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady, worth keeping in mind as the campaigns heat up.

Barack Obama published his second autobiography The Audacity of Hope, last October, following his Dreams from My Father. Now Black Dog & Leventhal is promoting the “first biographical portrait ever” of Obama, by People magazine’s Steve Dougherty. They distinguish it from Obama’s own books by titling it Hopes and Dreams. It’s due in about a month.

Last year at ALA in Chicago, both Mayor Daley and Senator Obama spoke to the convention. It was a fascinating juxtaposition: Mayor Daley was fire and brimstone, punching his fist into his hand, speaking with astonishing passion and flare. Obama was the relaxed and conversational communicator. There seemed no question that Mayor Daley’s speech was written specifically for America’s librarians, and that made his speech have a certain magic to us. He boasted, deservedly, of all the work he has done on behalf of Chicago’s public libraries, and he spoke of the values of reading in highly personal and meaningful ways. Senator Obama’s speech was the generic one that ALA members often hear from the visiting politician, all about how he loved libraries as a kid, how much it mattered to go there. As a librarian, maybe I was disappointed, but as a voter, my own hopes and dreams are newly alive.  

We’ve all at one point or another wished for a new brain because our old one seems a bit sluggish or downright petty. The real, open-minded you, for instance, doesn’t want to be judgemental about the children of famous authors who also become authors. “Can Rebecca Walker really write?” you wonder while editing the review of her upcoming Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence (Riverhead, March). “Or did she land a contract based on the fact that her mom’s Alice Walker?”

Cue neuroplasticity (”the idea that the adult brain is capable of positive change,” to quote my reviewer Mary Ann Hughes), a hot topic in the Bookroom right now. Although it seems to apply to stroke sufferers and people grappling with moderate to severe mental disorders, I couldn’t help but imagine neuroplasticity as a more routine medicine for semi-burned-out corporate cogs like myself. In my ninth year in publishing, I admit I can be overly cynical and want to get better.

Luckily, two books on the topic are coming out in March: Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (Viking) and Sharon Begley’s Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential To Transform Ourselves (Ballantine).

Whether they’ll help me is unclear; what is clear, is that I’m still thinking about celebrity and publishing. Methinks another blog is forming…

The popularity of mystery books never ceases to amaze this peripheral admirer of the genre (read last year’s Book Buying Survey and catch the latest coming in the Feb. 15 issue). I say “peripheral admirer” because I quite literally have never read a contemporary mystery—unless I can count the several volumes in the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series I devoured in the mid- to late 1980s—and yet I love the idea of murder as formula. Oh, the gruesome possibilites! Oh, the intrigue!

Strangely enough, my reading habits aren’t so unique. Yesterday, I ate pizza with two co-workers who are avid readers yet have never consumed a modern mystery to their knowledge either (!!). When we tried to get to the bottom of why, no one cited poor literary breeding. Mysteries, we well know from reading LJ’s Mystery Column, can be very accomplished and intellectually stimulating. Check P.D. James and Walter Mosley, favorites of our own Francine Fialkoff and Michael Rogers, respectively.

One of us did, however, make the point that mysteries can seem almost demanding. There’s quite literally a case to crack, and her brain balks at that kind of a challenge. I can relate to that point, but I would augment it by saying mystery readers seem like a slightly scary gang. What if I don’t fit in? Will I get a pair of cement shoes if I don’t lap up the gory details? What if I don’t “get” the mystery even at the end (this happens to me with mystery movies all the time)? I hate feeling stupid after having indebted myself to Uncle Sam for tens of thousands of dollars for grad school.

For the record, I don’t want to remain a nonmystery reader forever. My brain could use a good stretching and blood splattering, and I might as well start with the best of last year as determined by LJ’s Jo Ann Vicarel. 

Like Spanish dictator Francisco Franco’s excruciatingly prolonged death in 1975 (”Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!), the Judith Regan soap opera continues apparently with no end in sight. PW reports today that HarperCollins announced the closure of the Los Angeles office of the fired publisher’s ReganMedia imprint. While the company expects to publish most of the titles Regan acquired, it has canceled the publication of 7, Peter Golenbock’s controversial novel about MIckey Mantle. Ooops! Unfortunately we have just closed our February 1 issue in which our review of this steamy book is running. Too late for us to pull. Oh well, at least my reviewer has the consolation of owning a now-valuable galley. And I don’t doubt that Golenbock will find another publisher, despite the tawdry nature of his novel. It definitely lacks the radioactive toxicity of O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It.    

In my seventh year of handling self-help books, I’ve turned a corner that I didn’t know existed in publishing. Back before my eyes turned into computer-singed black holes, I couldn’t help but slam some of the genre’s offerings. “Who in her right mind,” I wanted to know, “dubs herself a ‘Tantric sex guru, motorcycle enthusiast, and life coach’?” Self-help, to an outsider, often seems like a pathetic and ridiculous alternate reality where people are incapable of figuring out anything for themselves. I kept waiting for a self-help guide to surviving self-help books.

Thankfully, I’m older, wiser, and blinder. Perverse self-marketing and shoddy writing suddenly don’t irk or amuse me in this new year. Self-help is what is, a formula that is often repeated with zero original twists. I’ve finally accepted that—only to have to readjust my view thanks to some singular surprises.

Take these starred books from the January 15th Self-Help Column by Deborah Bigelow: Melissa Kirsch’s The Girl’s Guide to Absolutely Everything, Steven Solomon & Lori Teagno’s Intimacy After Infidelity, and H. Norman Wright & Sheryl Wright Macauley’s Making Peace with Your Mom. There are even more goodies in the February 15th installment: Jane Isay’s Walking on Eggshells, Varla Ventura’s Wild Women Talk About Love, and Kenneth Adams’s When He’s Married to Mom.

What’s it all mean? Can self-help actually serve a meaningful, practical purpose and not just gaze into its shallow navel? Having just taken my first successful dip into the genre (see This Girl’s Guide to Absolutely Everything), I’d have to say yes, but I don’t kid myself. A self-help golden age this probably ain’t (though 2005 had its moments, too—see the best of the genre here). There’s a tidal wave of crap coming any second now, and I’ll be there to soak it up with my new, improved Zen-like attitude.

So I take it all back (see Staying alive a la biography). Elvis fans have a King-sized new publication to look forward to in August (which will mark the 30th anniversary of his death): Adam Victor’s Elvis Encyclopedia (Overlook Press). For $60, you get 420 pages of A-to-Z entries, complete with 250 full-color and 150 black-and-white images. The blad I have offers a sneak peak of the A’s, including info on former Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, whom Elvis met in 1970 and gave ”a gold-inlaid .357 Magnum revolver.” And under “Aging,” we learn that Elvis “became more openly interested in spirituality” as he neared 30.

Victor’s book represents what I think will become a trend in reference publishing: semischolarly (i.e., often opinionated, “voice”-heavy) studies of popular music icons. Last year, Michael Gray gave us the excellent Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (Continuum), and tomes on the Beatles and Rolling Stones can’t be far behind.

Those bands and more will no doubt warrant coverage in the fourth edition of Oxford’s The Encyclopedia of Popular Music (its 1998 incarnation earned a star). Colin Larkin returns as editor of some 27,000 entries that span the gamut. Hellbent for leather? The EOPM doesn’t just delve into heavy metal, but its wimpier, pale-faced stepbrother, emo. For a complete review, check out the March 1 issue.

He’s dead, but, man, does he keep the pulp press pumping! I couldn’t be talking about anyone else but Elvis Presley, who would’ve been 72 today. Last year, print was very kind to the King, turning out Jerry Schilling’s excellent Me and a Guy Named Elvis (see our interview with the author) and Ken Burke and Dan Griffin’s satisfying The Blue Moon Boys: The Story of Elvis Presley’s Band. Thus far into 2007, all is strangely quiet on the Elvis front, and an Amazon search indicates that we can expect only paperback editions of hardcover releases this spring (e.g., Charles L. Ponce de Leon’s Fortunate Son: The Life of Elvis Presley and Bobbie Ann Mason’s Elvis Presley).

That said, we can start salivating for a big, long-delayed posthumous biography of a man many consider the King of the Conscious Punks, that is, Joe Strummer. I first heard about Chris Salewicz’s Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer (Faber & Faber, May) in mid-2003, shortly after Strummer’s shocking cardiac death in December 2002. For a good year, I stalked, via e-mail, a game (and fittingly mohawk-wearing) publicity director, who kindly told me the author needed more time. Now it seems that a galley is on the way, and I can’t wait to report on a book I’ve long pined for, as have myriad other fans who want to see Strummer up there with the best in the rock pantheon. With some luck, it will stand up to Pat Gilbert’s definitive treatment of Strummer’s band, Passion Is a Fashion: The Real Story of the Clash.