It was a year of enormous upheaval in the world of newspaper book reviewing, and yet in many respects everything stayed exactly the same. As monitored by our Book Review Index, tracking full-length reviews in the nation’s most widely circulated newspapers, total reviews declined approximately 7.5 percent during the year, with 7,855 reviews tabulated in all. With the same astonishing regularity that we have statistically demonstrated in the past, book editors across the country worked very hard to come to the same conclusions as always. One out of every twelve full-length reviews (or 8.5 percent) went to books by Knopf. […]
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Disputes Credit Rating Downgrade
Moody’s downgraded Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s substantial debt in late December, concluding that “shortfalls in HMH’s business plan” and cutbacks in US education budgets would keep the company from bringing its debt down to their target of 9 times ebitda. The agency “estimated that HMH’s debt stood at 10.5 times ebitda at the end of September, and warned of liquidity pressures and ‘a likely default’ under its senior secured loan covenants unless these were amended,” the FT reports. Additionally, HMH’s parent company Education Media & Publishing “was named as one of the European companies at highest risk of default by Standard […]
Stacey's of San Francisco to Close
SFist reports that “Stacey’s finally told its employees today that they will close shop sometime in March. A source in Stacey’s corporate sales tells us: ‘Venerable Stacey’s Books, after celebrating 85 years in business this last fall, announced to staff today that the store will close sometime in late March.'” The SF Chronicle follows with its own story. “The store’s general manager, Tom Allen, said sales had dropped 50 percent since March 2001. But the final blow was the crumbling economy, which hit hard during the holidays. Stacey’s sales in the fourth quarter of 2008 plummeted 15 percent from the […]
Richard Seaver Dies
Richard W. Seaver, founder and president of Arcade Publishing, passed away unexpectedly on January 5 after a heart attack. A memorial service will be announced in a few days. In lieu of flowers, Arcade reports they would be enormously grateful for any contributions to the PEN American Center. The NYT has an obituary today, calling him “an editor, translator and publisher who defied censorship, societal prudishness and conventional literary standards to bring works by rabble-rousing authors like Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, William Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade to American readers.” In other personnel news, Lerner Publishing Group has hired […]
Neale Donald Walsch Admits Lifting Essay, Withdraws Blog
Author of the best-selling series Conversations with God Neale Donald Walsch notes in a blog post that a Christmas essay he posted on Beliefnet.com was in fact the almost verbatim work of Candy Shand. Her ten-year-old article had been widely circulated electronically, reprinted in Chicken Soup for the Christian Family Soul and then formed the basis of an illustrated gift book, CHRISTMAS LOVE, published last summer by Gibbs Smith. Walsch says the essay had been “in my computer file for at least seven years” and “was written in the first person, describing an experience that occurred with my son 20 […]
More Cuts at McGraw-Hill Education
McGraw-Hill announced “it restructured a limited number of business operations and corporate functions in the fourth quarter of 2008 to serve its markets more efficiently in the current economic environment while positioning the company for future growth.” Included in those cuts they shed another 215 jobs in the McGraw-Hill Education division, the hardest-hit of the four areas that were restructured. Those reductions came on top of 240 positions eliminated at the Education division earlier in the year.Announcement