BTW News Briefs

Haights Cross Communications, Inc. Sells Chelsea House to Facts on File

On August 11, White Plains, NY-based Haights Cross Communications, Inc., announced that it had sold its Chelsea House business, effective August 9, 2005, to Facts on File, Inc. Chelsea House will be reported as a discontinued operation beginning in the third quarter ended September 30, 2005. According to Publisher's Weekly, Haights decided to sell due to weakness in the library market. The deal was worth about $9 million, PW reported.

Ingram Book Group Names Mark Piasecki Field Sales Representative

On August 16, Ingram Book Group Inc. announced that it had named Mark Piasecki as Field Sales Representative serving Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. Piasecki is joining Ingram as part of an expanded Trade Sales team dedicated to growing sales on behalf of Ingram Publisher Services Inc. client publishers and providing Ingram wholesale services to current and prospective customers. He will be responsible for establishing and maintaining relationships with booksellers to promote new-title releases and backlists of Ingram's client publishers, as well as Ingram's wholesale services.

Bookseller Finds First Edition Gatsby in His Store

It's not often that a bookseller lets $50,000 sit around unnoticed for two months, but, according to a recent Associated Press article, that's exactly what Thomas Baldwin of Baldwin's Book Barn in West Chester, Pennsylvania, did. According to AP, a first-edition of The Great Gatsby "sat in a box of unsorted books ... before its discovery -- a find that could be worth more than $50,000."

Baldwin told AP he knew it was a first edition because of a typographical error on the dust jacket, where the name "Jay Gatsby" is printed with a lower-case "j." The dust jacket, which is water damaged, is worth more than the book itself due to the typo, as reported by West Chester's Daily Local News, which noted that Baldwin plans to give the man who dropped off the edition a good percentage from the sale of the book.