ABA Presents Books to President for White House Library

On Thursday, January 20, the ABA Board of Directors met with President Obama in the Oval Office for the presentation of the ABA White House Library, a selection of current titles given to each presidential administration since 1929, for the reading pleasure of the First Family. The White House visit occurred in conjunction with Winter Institute 6 and the Board’s winter meeting.

The Board was accompanied to the White House by ABA CEO Oren Teicher and Barbara Meade, co-owner, with the late Carla Cohen, of Washington, D.C.’s iconic Politics and Prose.

Sarah Bagby, ABA President Michael Tucker, Ken White, ABA Vice President Becky Anderson, Barbara Meade, Beth Puffer, President Obama, Tom Campbell, Betsy Burton, Dan Chartrand, and ABA CEO Oren Teicher at the presentation of the White House Library.

Books presented to the President, including YA titles for his daughters, were:

• Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, by Simon Winchester (Harper); presented by ABA President Michael Tucker, Books Inc., San Francisco, California
• A Nest for Celeste: A Story About Art, Inspiration, and the Meaning of Home, by Henry Cole (Katherine Tegen Books); The Candymakers, by Wendy Mass (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers); and Out of My Mind, by Sharon Draper (Atheneum); presented by ABA Vice President Becky Anderson, Anderson’s Bookshops, Naperville, Illinois
• Colonel Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris (Random House): presented by Barbara Meade, Politics and Prose, Washington, D.C.
• Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese (Knopf); the winner of the 2010 Indies Choice Book Award for Fiction, presented on behalf of the entire group
• Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak: A new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Pantheon); presented by Sarah Bagby, Watermark Books and Cafe, Wichita, Kansas
• Foreign Bodies, by Cynthia Ozick (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); presented by Betsy Burton, The King’s English Bookshop, Salt Lake City, Utah
• Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America, by Matt Taibbi (Spiegel & Grau); presented by Tom Campbell, The Regulator Bookshop, Durham, North Carolina
• Song of Myself: And Other Poems by Walt Whitman, selected and introduced by Robert Hass (Counterpoint); presented by Ken White, San Francisco State University Bookstore, San Francisco, California
• Storyteller, by Patricia Reilly Giff (Wendy Lamb Books) and The Danger Box, by Blue Balliett (Scholastic Press); presented by Beth Puffer, Bank Street Bookstore, New York, New York
• Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand (Random House); presented by Dan Chartrand, Water Street Bookstore, Exeter, New Hampshire
• Washington: A Life, by Ron Chernow (Penguin Press); presented by ABA CEO Oren Teicher, Tarrytown, New York

The books presented to the President on January 20 are part of a larger library of books being donated to the White House by ABA. (Watch BTW in coming weeks for a list of the full collection.)

Following the Board’s visit, Teicher told booksellers at Wi6’s Thursday Luncheon that the President “asked that that I say ‘thank you’ to all of you.”