Soft First Quarter for Barnes & Noble First quarter same-stores sales fell slightly at Barnes & Noble’s superstores, down 0.3 percent, and the company expects a bigger comparable drop of 4.3 percent for the second quarter given comparisons to last year’s release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. (Potter had powered a gain of 4.3 percent a year ago.) Overall, Barnes & Noble stores had sales of $980 million, as BN.com sales were flat at $91 million, and B. Dalton continued its decline to $23 million (down 1.8 percent on a same-store basis). Net earnings of $10 million for […]

New Head for New Press; Veterans to Inkwell; and More Personnel News Following the resignation of Colin Robinson last December, the New Press has now named a new publisher: deputy director since 2003 Ellen Mastromonaco Adler has been promoted to fill the post. Marc Favreau has been promoted to editorial director, from senior editor, and Ina Howard has been hired as director of communications. She was previously publicity director at Nation Books and senior publicist at Avalon. Elsewhere, Ali Bothwell Mancini to has been promoted from associate editor to editor at Penguin and Plume. She started at the house in […]

Schedule Note I’m traveling to DC in the morning and speaking at the Writers Conference at BEA, so Lunch won’t be served until after mealtime tomorrow. From Thursday through Saturday, we will publish at least once a day though the timing is never clear — last thing or first thing are your two best bets. As before, we’ll post regularly to the PublishersMarketplace.com home page and our related special BEA pages there as frequently as we can during the show. Personnel News Former Dorling Kindersley publisher Christopher Davis is joining Weldon Owen as publisher-at-large, charged with helping to “grow its […]

Oxford Combines Divisions, AMS’s Hire, and More Personnel News In an announcement made to staff on Friday, Oxford University Press is combining the trade and academic divisions in the US, with trade publisher Ellen Chadosh, evp and COO Barbara Wasserman, and director of sales Michael Burken all leaving the company as a result. The newly combined unit will be under the direction of publisher Niko Pfund. PFund comments, “The new structure and the new investment in publishing announced today are intended to increase our effectiveness as a publisher in both the trade and academic markets. It is a plan for […]

Monday, May 14 Our Usual Reminder If for some reason this has reached you even though you are not a paying member of PublishersMarketplace, please visit the link below to join us all the time for complete deal reports and more. Click to register http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/register.shtml Deal Reports Just e-mail to deals@PublishersMarketplace if you aren’t using the online form linked below. Report a deal using the online form The Key As usual, the handy key to our Lunch deal categories. While all reports are always welcome, those that include a category will generally receive a higher listing when it comes time […]

B&T Passes from One Private Equity Group to Another Willis Stein announced that they are selling Baker & Taylor to yet another private equity group, Castle Harlan, for $455 million. Castle Harlan vice chairman Gary Appel says in the announcement, “The experienced management team led by Richard Willis, president and chief executive officer, that has directed its growth will continue to manage the business as our partners, and senior management will continue to retain an ownership stake in the company.” When Willis Stein bought the company just under three years ago, they paid $255 million, and B&T was bringing in […]