Barnes & Noble chairman Len Riggio bought another 890,000 shares of company stock last week, according to an SEC filing. He paid an average price of $26.42 to $27.37 each, which amounts to at least $23.5 million.

Riggio, who has been buying B&N stock on the open market regularly during the past year as the stock price has slid, now owns about 14.3 million shares of B&N, worth some $390 million. Last summer, he owned 13 million shares, which, because of the company's higher stock price, were worth $500 million.

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"Eulogy for an Independent Bookstore" was the headline for Jessica Teich's essay in the Nation, which added another voice to the chorus of regrets over the closing of Dutton's Brentwood in Los Angeles.

"Like a lot of LA writers, I had a book-signing at Dutton's, a Sunday afternoon event flush with kids and cookies and good will," Teich wrote. "My 6-year-old daughter accompanied me, and as I signed copies of my book, she signed books too. Only they weren't my books she was signing. They were whatever books--Yeats or Bukowski or Sandra Boynton--happened to be lying nearby. To this day, there might be a copy of Dickens or Roth with my daughter's signature scrawled hopefully, mistakenly, on the title page. That was Dutton's too."

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Chauni Haslet, owner of All for Kids Books & Music, Seattle, Wash., will close her bookstore "on June 30 unless a buyer comes forward," according to the Post-Intelligencer.

"It's a lot of work for very little income," said Haslet, who is not actively trying to sell the bookshop. "If someone walks in with a check and they have the energy to put into it, I will consider it."

Haslet added that she "felt freer knowing that book buyer Rene Kirkpatrick, an icon in her own right, would land on her feet. Kirkpatrick, whose encyclopedic knowledge of children's books made her a go-to resource for parents, teachers and librarians, starts work May 5 at Third Place Books."

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A pair of literary film adaptations continue rack up awards, this time in the always prestigious catchphrase category. USA Today reported that the annual HollyWORD survey by the Global Language Monitor named "Call it, Friendo"--Javier Bardem's "coin-flipping catchphrase" from No Country for Old Men--the top catchphrase of the year, followed by Daniel Day-Lewis's "I drink your milkshake" in There Will Be Blood.

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Suggesting that "enlightenment in the U.S. has always come at a price," the Guardian's John Crace dares to question Oprah Winfrey's judgment in touting her latest book club pick, mega-seller The New Earth by Eckhart Tolle: "You can't help feeling, though, that the one person who will really benefit from Oprah's largesse is Tolle, as U.S. booksellers struggle to keep up with demand."