Nancy Decaneas, co-founder and co-owner of Dragon Books, Weston, Mass., died last Tuesday at home of bone cancer. She was 61.
In 1991, she and her friend Patience Sandroff founded the store. Her son William told the
Boston Globe that
his mother "was always wise enough to tell us that there was a lot
going on [in the world], and if you could point your compass in any
direction and follow it to wherever, it would take you somewhere
worthwhile."
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The news from the Iqra'a Bookstore in Baghdad is not good, according to the latest AP update as reported in
New York Newsday.
Between the continuing violence, lack of basic services, the fear on
the part of many customers to travel far from
home and a security barricade that has made their street a deadend,
owners Mohammed Hanash Abbas and Attallah Zeidan say business is worse
than expected. Still, the store is "a sanctuary of sorts," and features
more books than in the past--many slowly having made their way from
U.S. bases, whether discarded or given to Iraqis. Students too poor to
buy books may
rent them for twenty cents apiece.
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Some children's booksellers have been annoyed that the photograph of illustrator Clement Hurd that graces
Goodnight Moon
has been changed on the latest edition of the classic and perennial
bestseller: a cigarette Hurd has held for 58 years has been
extinguished. One of the offended, the Reading Reptile: Books and Toys
for Young Mammals, Kansas City, Mo. (and this year's winner of the
Lucile Micheels Pannell Award for Excellence in Children's
Bookselling), has created a
Web site
showing the pictures side by side, allowing a vote and suggesting
protest e-mails to HarperCollins. So far, the smokers are winning.
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Apparently there's no fear of Google and Amazon in the People's Republic. What may be the largest bookstore in the
world is being built in Shenzhen in Guangdong Province in south China,
according to China Radio International, which quotes a
China Daily story. The bookstore will cost more than US$49 million and has 40,000 square meters (about 430,000 square feet) of space.
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Speaking of big bookstores, the travel section of yesterday's
New York Times had a feature on Portland, Ore., that included the following rather poetic description of the U.S.'s biggest bookstore:
"All that blather about the death of reading is laughable on Saturday
afternoons, when half of Portland seems to be inside Powell's Books. .
. . Sure, you can buy a book today over the Internet or at a chain
store, but on an autumn evening in Portland, when it's dark by 5 p.m.
and it's raining again and the neon is bleeding into the gutters,
Powell's is a warm, bright heaven for the word-hungry."
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And on the smaller side, Hyde Brothers Booksellers, Fort Wayne, Ind., has opened an 800-sq.-ft.
addition that took five years to build and contain some 40,000 books,
according to the
Journal Gazette. The 13-year-old store had been crammed with 125,000 volumes.
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