Publishers Weekly December 20, 2021

Bloomsbury Publishing, which is based in the U.K., has expanded its U.S. presence with the acquisition of academic and reference publisher ABC-CLIO for $22.9 million. Headquartered in Santa Barbara, Calif., ABC-CLIO had sales of $14.7 million in 2020 and has more than 23,000 titles in its catalog. October bookstore sales jumped 53.4% over October 2020, to $698 million, according to preliminary estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Sales in the first 10 months of the year were up 39.6% from the same period in 2020. Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo has been ordered by state ethics officials to return roughly $5.1 million in earnings from his 2020 pandemic memoir American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic. Brendan Curry was appointed to the newly created role of director of Norton’s trade group.…

Penguin Random House’s attorneys filed their response on December 13 to the U.S. Department of Justice’s efforts to block the company’s acquisition of Simon & Schuster. The brief attacked the government’s main complaint: that the purchase would “likely result in substantial harm to authors of anticipated top-selling books and ultimately, consumers.” In a lawsuit to stop the $2.18 billion deal filed on November 2, the DOJ said that a combined PRH-S&S, along with HarperCollins, “would collectively control more than two-thirds of this market, leaving hundreds of authors with fewer alternatives and less leverage.” PRH refuted the DOJ’s charge on several levels and began by calling the assertion that a “top-selling” author category exists a “fiction,” noting that the government doesn’t even identify what size of an advance would characterize such authors.…

With only the adult fiction category posting an increase, unit sales of print books fell 12.2% in the week ended Dec. 11, 2021, from the comparable week in 2020, at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. Sales in adult nonfiction dropped 15.4% from the week ended Dec. 12, 2020, when Barack Obama’s A Promised Land sold more than 325,000 copies. The #1 adult nonfiction title in the most recent week was Amanda Gorman’s Call Us What We Carry: Poems, which debuted on the list with almost 175,000 copies sold. In second place was Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown, which sold almost 95,000 copies, followed by The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which sold more than 60,000 copies. In fourth place was Kayleigh McEnany’s For Such…

It was a brisk and sunny Saturday in November, roughly a year from when Leigh Altshuler first opened the doors of her shop, Sweet Pickle Books, the newest (and only) used book and jarred pickle store on New York City’s Lower East Side. The party started at 11 a.m., and after five hours the anniversary celebration was still going strong. The block was buzzing, a crowded vintage clothing pop-up was doing its thing outside the store, and new merchandise—designed by Altshuler’s boyfriend, a graphic designer, who was tending the donation-based bar—decked the walls. “So far, we’ve gone through two bottles of whiskey and I don’t know how many beers,” Altshuler said. “We’ve done a lot of picklebacks. Pickle jars we’ve gone through? We’re definitely pushing five or six right now.” Altshuler is…

This year, a fresh wave of Beatlemania is sweeping the nation, thanks in part to the November release of Peter Jackson’s acclaimed docu-series The Beatles: Get Back. A renewed appetite among readers for Beatles books has shot two titles—The Beatles: Get Back and Paul McCartney’s The Lyrics—onto the bestseller list. We took a look at both titles and spoke to the minds behind them. The Beatles: Get Back by the Beatles (Callaway Arts & Entertainment) Pub date: October 12 Page count: 240 Price: $60 YTD sales (per BookScan): 61,300 The backstory: “Eighteen months ago, Callaway devised a global launch plan to support Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back film trilogy in collaboration with Apple Corps, the Walt Disney Company, Universal Music Group, WingNut Films, the Wylie Agency—which assembled a 10-language simultaneous co-edition—and our distributors: Ingram in the U.S.,…

DEAL OF THE WEEK Celadon Buys War Correspondent Bio World English rights to a currently untitled biography of Anthony Shadid were acquired by Celadon’s Bill Hamilton. Shadid was a celebrated war correspondent who worked for both the New York Times and the Washington Post and won two Pulitzers before his death in Syria in 2012; the book is being written by two of his former Washington Post colleagues, correspondent Steve Fainaru and editor Philip Bennett. Celadon called Shadid one of “the greatest foreign correspondents of his generation” and said the book will explore “some of the region’s darkest corners with courage and compassion.” It will also examine its subject’s “relentless personal journey marked by discovery, triumph, loss, and redemption” as an Arab American. Raphael Sagalyn at ICM Partners brokered the deal.…