Today Oprah makes her first book club pick in a year. The title is a HarperCollins title available in hardcover, trade paperback, large print and audiobook editions.

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Effective July 12, HarperCollins will handle most sales and distribution for Hyperion Books and Disney Book Group to the trade book markets in North America and internationally. Hyperion's and Disney's national account sales teams will continue to cover national accounts. The companies are currently distributed by the Hachette Book Group.

All back office functions including customer service, warehousing, billing and credit will be performed by HarperCollins. The company has hired Mary Beth Thomas as v-p and director of client services (she formerly held a similar position at Simon & Schuster) to oversee the day-to-day relationship with Hyperion and Disney Book Group.

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Who'd have thought it? Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia, which has been running at Lincoln Center since late November, has created a run on Russian Thinkers, the 1978 collection of essays by Isaiah Berlin, today's New York Times reported. One of seven titles recommended in the show's playbill, until recently the book sold about 36 copies a month nationally. It's now unavailable at New York area stores and online. Penguin has done its first reprinting in 12 years and will have more copies available in days.

The other six books, which are also in some demand, are:

• The Romantic Exiles by E.H. Carr
• Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes
• My Past and Thoughts by Alexander Herzen
• Indiana by George Sand
• A Sportsman's Sketches by Ivan Turgenev
• Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

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NACS's Campus Marketplace has a roundup of state legislators' efforts to restrain textbook prices, which include programs to lend or rent them and exclude them from sales tax.

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Manuel Cunard, formerly director of auxiliary operations and campus services at Wesleyan University who has also worked at Wake Forest, Loyola and Colorado State universities, has become director of the Brown Bookstore, Providence, R.I., and will oversee some major changes at the store, which last year averted a move toward leasing. He replaces longtime director Larry Carr, who resigned.

The Brown Daily Herald reported that booksellers at the store are currently participating in focus groups at which they have suggested such things as an area for children's books and clothing and a "student cooperative" for sales of products made by students.

Cunard is considering moving the textbooks section downstairs, creating a café and upgrading lighting, carpeting and ceilings.

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Sounds like an opportunity.

The Monterey County Weekly laments that, following the closing of a 25-year-old Waldenbooks, B. Dalton Bookseller is the last new or used bookstore in Salinas, Calif. This is the same city, once home to John Steinbeck, that nearly closed its library system.

Apparently city officials and developers have tried to lure Borders and Barnes & Noble to the city, which has a population of 157,000. Its demographics apparently aren't appealing--just 12% of residents 25 or older have a bachelor's degree or higher. More than half of the city's residents speak Spanish at home, and about one third don't speak English competently.

Bookstore proponents say a large store would attract booklovers from around the county and that many Salinas residents now drive to a Borders in Sand City.

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The Pasadena Star-News settles in at Blue Chair Children's Books, Glendora, Calif., a "child-friendly shop [that] caters to kids, moms." The store was bought in December 2005 by Shaelyn Koops and Rachel Rustenburg. "We have it set up that when an employee gets sick, I can bring my kids in and they're not in the way," Koops told the paper. "We're trying to balance our families with our business, but our kids come first."

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The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian (Shaye Areheart Books/Crown, $25, 9781400047468/1400047463), which has a February 13 pub date, has been chosen as the second Barnes & Noble Recommends. In March, Bohjalian will lead a month-long book club conversation at Barnes & Noble.com.

B&N booksellers choose the selections. The first B&N Recommends was Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale in September 2006.

B&N called The Double Bind "haunting. . . . Set in Long Island and New England, this psychological thriller--the author's 10th novel--weaves connections to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby into the mystery at its center."

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You must be able to play "the game" to work in a bookshop, and here's the first rule: When a customer has a specific title request, assume (but never let the customer know you assume) that the information provided is flawed. In any three-word title, at least one word will be incorrect; sometimes two; sometimes all three. I've heard titles that were close (Snow on Shingles for Snow Falling on Cedars) and not so close (Peggy Sue and the House of Hair for Patty Jane's House of Curl).

Decoding misinformation is not, however, a problem for a frontline bookseller; it's one of the pleasures. I was reminded of this once more last weekend, when a customer asked me to help find a book her daughter needed for school. She showed me a slip of paper, on which the "title" was written: Robert Fagles. The solution, reached with relative ease after a few questions, turned out to be the Fagles translation of The Iliad.

That's one way the game is played, though she probably could have found the answer eventually using an online bookstore search option.

But what happens when the request defies intellectual and digital gravity? Shortly before Christmas, I fielded a question from a man frantically scanning his scribbled list of gift suggestions for relatives.

"Do you have any books about Osama Barick," he asked.

I knew, even if he didn't yet, that he must be looking for Barack Obama's bestseller The Audacity of Hope. It was an easy leap of logic for me, but would that answer have come as simply online? A lot of time and money is invested in some very powerful search engines, but even high tech logic often meets its match when confronted with the low tech intangibles of consumer bewilderment and impatience.

What if the gentleman had looked for an answer to his relatively simple, if opaque, request at bookstore Web sites? I conducted a quick experiment to find out.

"Osama Barick" yielded no results at Amazon, Borders, Politics & Prose Bookstore, Powell's Books or Tattered Cover's BookSense.com site. Books about Osama Bin Laden came up as hits at Barnes & Noble and the Northshire Bookstore. Even almighty Google was puzzled by this request.

Perhaps the game, an integral part of bricks-and-mortar bookstore customer interaction, has no equivalent online.

There's a wonderful description of the game in Sheridan Hay's The Secret of Lost Things, which will be published in March. In the bookstore where much of the novel's action occurs, the staff is adept at a game called "Who Knows," loudly pooling their varied and idiosyncratic skills to answer unfathomable requests, such as a customer whose "hands might move apart, as if to say 'it's about this thick.' " Hay writes that "the only reliable source of reference was the staff and their collective memory."  

Memory coupled with well-honed instincts. Often, niceties like author or title won't even be part of a demand. Booksellers must decode clues like "a book I heard about on NPR last month" or "a book that was on display last week over there" or "a book with a red cover my friend bought here."

The "red cover" is a classic. George Orwell wrote about it in his 1936 essay, Bookshop Memories: "For example, the dear old lady who 'wants a book for an invalid' (a very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Unfortunately she doesn't remember the title or the author's name or what the book was about, but she does remember that it had a red cover."

What booksellers really do, on our own or with colleagues, is play tag-team mnemonics. Customers enter the store with raw materials, garnered from conversations, misremembered ads and half-heard radio interviews. They deliver the clues and want rapid, even magical, revelation of the title. They scatter beads across the counter and ask us to hand them back a necklace . . . immediately.

Do they have the same expectations online? I suspect they give up more quickly there.

If the game is being played well virtually, I'd love to know where and how. I've seen little evidence of it in my bookstore Web siteseeing travels. E-mail, listservs and search engines are useful tools, but they are not really the game.

Imagine a bookstore Web site where the game could be played with the ease and frequency of the sales floor version.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)

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