TODAY'S NEWS

New Company Buys Gareth Stevens
By Jim Milliot
Reader’s Digest has found a buyer for its Gareth Stevens imprint, selling the publisher to a new company formed by Roger Rosen, owner and CEO of Rosen Publishing, and Gary Spears, a co-founder of Gareth Stevens in 1984. Under the agreement, the assets will be sold to Gareth Stevens Publishing, LLLP, and will operate under the name Gareth Stevens Publishing. RD will provide transition services through the end of September, continuing to manage order processing, fulfillment and customer service in Strongsville, Ohio, until that time.

The new company will not be affiliated with Rosen’s Rosen Publishing Group and will operate as a separate entity. “We are committed to the school and library space,” Rosen said in explaining why he and Spears went ahead with the acquisition. Spears has been named president of Stevens, and Rosen said he will look to keep as many of the old Gareth Stevens team in place as possible. After the transition period with RD expires, the same sales team will continue selling the Stevens titles, Rosen said. Ken Katula has been named manager of the field sales force and Jennifer Jenson manager of wholesaler sales. Read on »

Allen Letter Urges Industry to Support Google Deal

The day after Authors Guild president Roy Blount Jr. posted a piece on the Guild Web site in support of the Google Book Settlement, AAP president Tom Allen sent an open letter to “industry colleagues” touting the agreement’s benefits and noting that the deal “represents our best hope of remaining competitive and vibrant in the digital environment.” Read on »

Alexander Street and Arcadia Publishing Launch Online Local History Collection
By Lynn Andriani
Electronic publisher Alexander Street Press and local history book publisher Arcadia Publishing are collaborating on a research website that will collect images and text from every region and state in the U.S. and many areas of Canada. The site will eventually contain more than one million searchable images, including photos, postcards and maps. Local and Regional History Online: A History of American Life in Images and Texts can be browsed for free at lrho.alexanderstreet.com, and is available to libraries via subscription or purchase of perpetual rights. Read on »

Gotham Buys Achatz Memoir
By Lynn Andriani
Gotham Books has acquired rights to chef Grant Achatz’s memoir, Life, On the Line. The deal was for North American rights and was brokered by Pilar Queen and David McCormick of McCormick & Williams. Rachel Holtzman will edit.

Achatz, who cooks at Alinea in Chicago and wrote the cookbook Alinea (Ten Speed Press), which was a big seller last holiday season, began shopping the memoir earlier this month. The proposal made its way to a few food writers, with the New York Times’s Pete Wells calling it “the world’s first gastronomical-oncological coffee table book.” Read on »

PubWest Awards Rittenhouse to Chuck Hutchinson
By Lynn Andriani
Charles “Chuck” S. Hutchinson Jr. has won the 2009 Jack D. Rittenhouse Award. The award, which honors people who have made outstanding contributions to the book community in the West, is given by the Publishers Association of the West. Read on »

Blogs

MORE STORIES

Dowd, Rayner Win Carnegie and Greenaway Medals
The 2009 CILIP Carnegie Medal was awarded posthumously to Siobhan Dowd for Bog Child (David Fickling Books) at a ceremony in London on Thursday. Dowd finished writing Bog Child in 2007, just before her death from cancer. Set in Northern Ireland in 1981 at the height of the Troubles, it tells a story of growing up against a background of sectarian violence. Read on »

Monday's Reviews Today: Gregory's Latest & Gupta's Cheating Death
Philippa Gregory's series-launching The White Queen focuses on the woman who helped start the famous War of the Roses, Elizabeth Woodville Grey. Gregory, who wrote The Other Boleyn Girl and is the "queen of British historical fiction," adds "intimate relationships, political maneuvering and battlefield conflicts as well as some well-drawn supernatural elements" to Grey's life story. And in Sanjay Gupta's Cheating Death, Barack Obama's initial pick for surgeon general "rolls out extraordinarily harrowing and inspiring tales from the annals of they-ought-to-be-dead." Read on »

The PW Morning Report
Michael Jackson Books; Farrah Fawcett Books; Waits Biographer Sued; McNally Jackson To House First Espresso Book Machine. Read on »

AUTHORS ON THE AIR

Authors on the Air: My Sister’s Keeper; Werner Herzog; Fordlandia
Movies opening today include My Sister’s Keeper, directed by Nick Cassavetes and starring Abigail Breslin, Alec Baldwin, Cameron Diaz and Jason Patrick (no relation), based on Jodi Picoult’s 11th novel My Sister’s Keeper (Washington Square Press MTI, 978-1439157381, $16; Recorded Books CD, $29.99). Read on »

PICTURE OF THE DAY

Turning the Page in DC
On Wednesday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan read Clifford the Big Red Dog to a group of kids in Washington, D.C., at the Department of Education plaza to kick off the Read to the Top! summer reading initiative. (Duncan’s son, Ryan, is sitting on his lap.) Scholastic donated more than 1,700 books to the summer-long campaign. Submit your pictures here »

JOB OF THE DAY

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