Mystery Lovers Bookshop for sale

Interested in owning a book store?  A mystery lover's bookstore?  Here's your opportunity to take over an existing, well-known store:  Mystery Lovers Bookshop.

"Since it opened to big fanfare on Halloween of 1990 Mystery Lovers Bookshop has put Western Pennsylvania on the book world’s map as the target destination for book tours with hundreds of imaginative and packed author events.

The store has sponsored the area’s only Book Festival now in its 17th year with 45 authors and 400 readers attending. For over 15 years, Mystery Lovers has been a reporting store to the New York Times bestseller lists."

If I lived in Western Pennsylvania, I just might really think about it.  But, sadly, I don't.

reading and your brain

A recent study published online January 23 in the journal Archives of Neurology stated that " doing puzzles and reading books have been linked with a decreased risk of Alzheimer's disease, and a new study may explain why — it reduces the accumulation of harmful proteins in the brain."

Terrific news!  Now when I sit in my comfy chair and read instead of doing housework or other chores, I can say I am mentally stimulating my brain!   love it!

For more information on this study go to Vitals on MSNBC.

Mystery visits to Poe grave end

According to The Washington Post:

By Associated Press, Published: January 19

"Edgar Allan Poe fans waited long past a midnight dreary, but it appears annual visits to the writer’s grave in Baltimore by a mysterious figure called the “Poe Toaster” shall occur nevermore.

Poe House and Museum Curator Jeff Jerome said early Thursday that die-hard fans waited hours past when the tribute bearer normally arrives. But the “Poe Toaster” was a no-show for a third year in a row, leaving another unanswered question in a mystery worthy of the writer’s legacy. Poe fans had said they would hold one last vigil this year before calling an end to the tradition....

It is thought that the tributes of an anonymous man wearing black clothes with a white scarf and a wide-brimmed hat, who leaves three roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac at Poe’s original grave on the writer’s birthday, date to at least the 1940s."

Goodreads and Amazon parting ways

Effective January 30, Goodreads and Amazon will no longer be partners.  paid.Content.org has a pretty good explanation of the split.

"Book-centered social networking site Goodreads, which allows users to keep records of the books they read and share the information with others, has long sourced most of its basic book data from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN). Now, saying Amazon’s API terms have become “more and more restrictive,” Goodreads is switching data providers and entering an agreement with book wholesaler Ingram—alarming some users who fear their reading records will be lost.


The changes take place January 30. Goodreads’ new data source is book wholesaler Ingram. Goodreads will pay to license data from Ingram, and will supplement it with book records from the Library of Congress and other sources."


Click here for the entire article.

Best Mysteries of 2011

I love these list of 'best' books.  There are so many books I have not read and then a lot I haven't even heard of.  My To Read List gets longer every day!!

Anyhow, here's a list from GalleyCat and a bit from the list:


Best Novel
The Ranger by Ace Atkins (Penguin Group USA – G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
Gone by Mo Hayder (Grove/Atlantic – Atlantic Monthly Press)
The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino (Minotaur Books)
1222 by Anne Holt (Simon & Schuster – Scribner)
Field Gray by Philip Kerr Penguin Group USA – G.P. Putnam’s Sons – Marion Wood Books)

World Book Night

Just heard about this event:

"We need book-loving volunteers to fan out across America on April 23, 2012! Just take 20 free copies of a book to a location in your community, and you just might change someone's life. Please sign up by Feb. 1.
The goal is to give books to new readers, to encourage reading, to share your passion for a great book. The entire publishing, bookstore, library, author, printing, and paper community is behind this effort with donated services and time.
The first World Book Night was held in the UK last year, and it was such a big success that it's spreading around the world! Please volunteer to be a book giver in the U.S. Sign up now to be a book giver."

Be sure to sign up by Feb. 1

10 most expensive books in the world

Flavorwire posted an article on the 10 Most Expensive Books in the World.   One of the books was auctioned at Christie's on January 20th.

"It could be a record-breaking afternoon in the book world. Today, Christie’s New York will auction off a copy of John James Audubon’s Birds of America, which already holds the title of most valuable printed book in the world, having sold for about $11.5 million in 2010. In fact, according to The Economist, a true list of the ten most valuable single books ever sold would have to include five copies of The Birds of America. Though Christie’s is playing their cards close to the vest and estimating a $7 to $10 million sale, today could see a new record for the book. After all, the copy that sold for $11.5 million was estimated at less than the copy on auction today."

The book sold for $7.9 million!!  The Huffington Report gave some details of the book:  "The 3 1/2-foot-tall books feature hand-colored prints of all the species known to Audubon in early 19th-century North America. Audubon insisted on the book's large format – printed on the largest handmade sheets available at the time – because of his desire to portray the birds in their actual size and natural habitat."