The Santa Cruz Sentinel recounts help that Santa Cruz resident Terry Cavanah, a real estate agent, has given longtime friend Otis Fennell, owner of New Orleans's Faubourg Marigny Art & Books store, which at 25 is one of the oldest gay and lesbian bookstores in the South. Cavanagh has found an apartment and work for Fennell. Although he enjoys Santa Cruz because of its familiar laidback air, Fennel wants to return to the Big Easy soon. "What I want to do is help rebuild New Orleans," he told the paper. "I want to help breathe life back into it."

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This week's Time magazine's story about the new Cody's Books in San Francisco predicts that Andy Ross's $3.7 million bet that growth is better than slowly cutting back on his two Berkeley stores might pay off. "Just as a small wine bar can thrive by pouring drinks available more cheaply at a liquor store or sports bar, so can a bookstore trade on its cachet of cool," Time wrote.

Stanford business school professor William Barnett told the magazine: "This sounds like a very smart identity play. In these kinds of businesses, we see not just an appeal to quality but an appeal to identity and authenticity. My guess is that the market does value the combination of being there, touching, feeling, browsing the books, along with the feeling of being in a cool social situation, with a sideways glance at the next table."

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Karen Huddler has been promoted to director of customer and client services for Diamond Book Distributors.  Hired as a customer service rep in 1997, Huddler has held several jobs in customer service, most recently manager of customer and client services.

An unexpected twist to the Koen Book Distributors bankruptcy this summer is adding to the frustration of some creditors who have already suffered sizable losses: several small- and medium-sized publishers have complained to Shelf Awareness that Baker & Taylor, which bought Koen's inventory under the auspices of the bankruptcy court, is trying to return for full credit some of that inventory. In several cases, the books are being returned in Koen boxes or the publishers' original packaging with labels to Koen still on the boxes. Sometimes the number of books being returned is many times the number of copies of the title that B&T has ever ordered.

Asked for comment, B&T chairman, president and CEO Richard Willis told Shelf Awareness, "Because of legal proceedings with the bankruptcy, I can't talk about that."

Several complaining publishers preferred to remain anonymous or not give details for fear of upsetting a major trading partner. One of these small houses said that B&T had bought fewer than 10 copies of one title and wanted to return "more than 200." The publisher, who refused to accept the books, said simply, "I don't think a publisher should take back books they haven't sold."

But two publishers spoke on the record and in detail about the problem.

'Insult to Injury'

When Koen went bankrupt this summer, John F. Blair, Publisher, Winston-Salem, N.C., was "left holding $42,000 in accounts receivable, a considerable amount," president Carolyn Sakowski told Shelf Awareness. Blair tried to buy back its inventory from Koen, which it used as vendor of record for Barnes & Noble, but the bankruptcy court was selling all of Koen's inventory in one lot. "That was $4.4 million we didn't have," Sakowski said.

(When Koen Book Distributors filed for bankruptcy and dissolved, it lost control of its assets. Besides selling the book inventory to B&T, the bankruptcy court sold some physical non-book assets to Levy Home Entertainment. Former Koen Book owner Bob Koen is now general manager of Koen-Levy Book Distributors, which has no connection to Koen Book Distributors or B&T.)

Two weeks ago, Blair received 75 cartons of returns from B&T, "about $23,000 worth of books," and "really excessive compared to normal [B&T returns]," she noted. "To add insult to injury, it was very obvious what they had done. They didn't bother to repackage the books. Our labels to Koen are still on some of the cartons."

In many cases, "B&T was returning more books than they had ordered," Sakowski continued. "B&T purchased 66 copies of one April title and returned 81."

Blair has begun a complaint procedure, following its lawyer's recommendation to "pursue a solution aggressively." The house has talked to several people, starting with the buyer. It's also photographed the boxes with the B&T labels over the original Blair labels for Koen and notified B&T that B&T will need to receive return authorization before shipping a return.

"We'll survive," Sakowski said, "but some publishers might not."

'Can This Be Ethical?'

Like John F. Blair, Camino Books, Philadelphia, Pa., used Koen as VOR for Barnes & Noble and had proportionally higher sales at Koen because of its regional emphasis.

B&T has returned a significant amount of inventory that Camino had sent Koen. "We have a list of the inventory at Koen at the time of bankruptcy and it matched perfectly the list of returns from B&T," publisher Edward Jutkowitz said. For example, in the case of Provider of Last Resort: The Story of the Closure of the Philadelphia General Hospital by Donna Gentile O'Donnell, a May title, B&T "bought three copies and wanted to return 165," Jutkowitz said. In another case, B&T returned 400 copies of an out-of-print title that it had bought one copy of in the past five years.

Jutkowitz has told B&T he won't accept any returns "unless they show proof of purchase." He predicted having a "protracted fight" and wished that he could have bought the books back from Koen. That aside, "My feeling is that they bought those books and should at least have tried to sell them," he said. "They're buying at remainder prices and trying to return for full credit. I don't see how that can be ethical."

Advanced Marketing Service, the wholesaler and owner of PGW, has issued long-awaited restatements of its earnings over the past five years that follow a review of its coop advertising practices and accounting. The company has been the subject of an ongoing Securities and Exchange Commission investigation that has resulted in civil and criminal settlements and a shakeup in the executive ranks.

Altogether the cumulative after-tax effect of the full restatements is a reduction in earnings of about $9.7 million as of March 31, 2003. The company had earlier said that the advertising portion of the restatement was about $11 million.

The company's revised estimates show that earnings per share for the four fiscal years ended March 31, 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003 came in down four cents, 22 cents, 16 cents and 23 cents, respectively, from previous reported estimates. For the fiscal year ended March 31, 2004, earnings per share were 12 cents a share. AMS estimates that its net loss for fiscal year 2005 is between 96 cents and $1.06 per share rather than the previous estimate of 73 cents-83 cents per share.

The restatements also include new corrections to AMS's liability for differences between publishers' and AMS's shipping and receiving records. The company said this liability was overstated by about $7 million as of March 31, 1999 and about $500,000 as of March 31, 2003.

AMS added that most of the fiscal year 2005 loss is attributable to government investigations and lawsuits as well as the costs of consolidation of the distribution and returns centers. These costs have declined during the current fiscal year.

All the restatements must yet be audited independently. AMS hopes to submit its long delayed 10-K and 10-Q filings with the SEC soon.

On Veterans Day, this coming Friday, November 11, the History Channel will air a new documentary based on The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Finest Hour by James D. Hornfischer (Bantam, $14, 0553381482). This book is an account of the battle off Samar, a part of the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, when a small U.S. Navy task force held off a far superior Japanese force. The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors won the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature last year. The documentary airs at 12 p.m. and 6 p.m. on Friday.

Today's Early Show hails former chief Jimmy Carter, whose latest book is Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (S&S, $25, 0743284577).

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This morning Imus in the Morning talks with Kurt Vonnegut, whose new book is A Man Without a Country (Seven Stories Press, distributed by Consortium, $23.95, 158322713X).

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Today on Ellen: Martha Stewart, whose most recent books are The Martha Rules: 10 Essentials for Achieving Success as You Start, Grow, or Manage a Business (Rodale, $24.95, 1594864705) and Martha Stewart Baking Handbook (Clarkson Potter, $40, 0307236722).

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Move over thin French women: today the Today Show features Naomi Moriyama, author of Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat: Secrets of My Mother's Tokyo Kitchen (Delacorte, $22, 0385339976).

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Today on WAMU's Diane Rehm Show: Blair Underwood, author of Before I Got Here: The Wondrous Things We Hear When We Listen to the Souls of Our Children (Atria, $18.95, 0743271491).

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WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show talks with Tony Judt, author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Penguin Press, $39.95, 1594200653).

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Her appearance today on Oprah may not sell many books, but Terry McMillan, author of How Stella Got Her Groove Back (NAL, $14, 0451209141), should provide some entertainment as she confronts her gay ex-husband, the model for Stella's younger heartthrob.

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Yesterday on Fresh Air:

• Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (S&S, $35, 0684824906).
• Mike Wallace, author of Between You and Me (Hyperion, $26.95, 1401300294).

David Bergen, whose The Time in Between is the story of a haunted Vietnam War veteran who returns to Vietnam nearly 30 years later and disappears, has won the Giller Prize for excellence in Canadian fiction, which was announced last night. Bergen received C$40,000 (about US$33,700).

Bergen has also written A Year of Lesser, See the Child and The Case of Lena S. He won the Canadian Literary Award in 2000.

The Time in Between is scheduled to be published (Random House, $23.95, 1400062403) here next month.

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The Mystery Writers of America has named author Stuart Kaminsky a Grand Master, the association's highest honor. The presentation will be made at the Edgar Awards dinner next April 27 in New York City.

A former MWA president, Kaminsky has written 50 novels, five biographies, four textbooks and many short stories. He won an Edgar in 1989 for A Cold Red Sunrise.