Here is this week's regional bestseller roundup compiled from IndieBound-affiliated stores nationwide, broken down into eight specific areas. You can find the closest Indie store to you here.
Editorial content for The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
Kate Ayers
What do you really know about witches? Not the ones roaming the streets on Halloween, but the ones who cast spells, heal ailments, conjure up brews and curse enemies. Probably very little more than the citizens of Salem, Massachusetts, knew back in the panic of 1692. Read More
Teaser
Harvard graduate student Connie Goodwin needs to spend her summer doing research for her doctoral dissertation. But when her mother asks her to handle the sale of Connie's grandmother's abandoned home near Salem, she can't refuse. As she is drawn deeper into the mysteries of the family house, Connie discovers an ancient key secreted within a 17th-century Bible.
About the Book
Harvard graduate student Connie Goodwin needs to spend her summer doing research for her doctoral dissertation. But when her mother asks her to handle the sale of Connie's grandmother's abandoned home near Salem, she can't refuse. As she is drawn deeper into the mysteries of the family house, Connie discovers an ancient key secreted within a 17th-century Bible. The key contains a yellowing fragment of parchment with a name written upon it: Deliverance Dane. This discovery launches Connie on a quest to find out who this woman was, and to unearth a rare colonial artifact of singular power: a physick book, its pages a secret repository for lost knowledge of herbs and other, stranger things.
The week of April 5, 2010, marks the two-year anniversary of Toon Books, the little company that could. It’s the brainchild of Francoise Mouly, art editor for The New Yorker and the wife of comics legend Art Spiegelman. The past few months have seen a significant leap forward for the publisher, with their Benny and Penny in the Big No-No! winning the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award from the American Library Association this past January, and Jeff Smith’s Little Mouse Gets Ready earning an Honor mention.
The annual Texas Library Association conference will be held April 14–17 in San Antonio. This year also marks the first that the TLA has completed its Maverick (actually announced at the end of 2009). Given both events, we wanted to address how TLA is promoting comics and graphic novels. Three librarians associated with TLA’s Maverick committee banded together to answer our questions: Alicia Holston (Farmers Branch Manske Public Library), WyLaina Hildreth (Denton Public Library), and Tuan Nguyen (Mackin Library Media).
Action Comics #1 and Detective Comics #27 (the first appearances of Superman and Batman, respectively) have been in the news a lot the past few months. Both are rare comics, with only a relative handful still in existence and even fewer in close to pristine quality. And both have sold at auction for record prices. Last month, a copy of Action sold for $1 million. But an even better looking copy of the issue has just gone for $1.5 million on the auction site comicconnect.com. It goes without saying that it's a record.
I was sitting in a beautiful hotel conference room when I heard the news that comics legend Dick Giordano had passed away today at the age of 77. Dick was a wonderful artist, creator, and leader at DC Comics and elsewhere throughout the industry, and he was, by all accounts, a truly gracious and wonderful man. I’m in San Diego taking part in the Eisner Award judging process, along with some really amazing comics fans.
