COMPANY NEWS
2004-05 New Book Price and Output Review
By Bob Nardini is the Senior Vice President & Head Bibliographer at YBP Library Services
Lindsay & Howes combines forces with Croft House to form Lindsay & Croft
Newly acquired library services business adds strength and depth to Lindsay & Howes in the UK
The Lindsay & Howes / YBP Adult Awards Program
Keep up to date with the World's best prize winning books
New Zealand's CONZULAC account confirmed
Lindsay and Howes win major contract to supply seven major libraries
Lindsay & Howes combines forces with Croft House to form Lindsay & Croft
Newly acquired library services business adds strength and depth to Lindsay & Howes in the UK (December 2004)
Baker and Taylor, Lindsay & Howes’ parent company in the US, has acquired Delta International Book Wholesalers, Ltd, of Addlestone in the UK, a leading exporter of British books to retail, school, ELT and academic markets worldwide.
The business is made up of three parts; Croft House, which is a complimentary library services business, serving Europe, South America, Israel and South Afrca; Keltic which supplies direct to schools and Delta, a book wholesale business.
The combined library supply business will be known as Lindsay & Croft and will be led by joint managing directors Miriam Lindsay and Nick Boisseau.
Commenting on the newly combined business, Lindsay & Howes’ founder Miriam Lindsay commented; “2005 will be an exciting year for us all in the UK. The Croft House team will be joining us in Godalming, and naturally we will be combining systems and operations to ensure seamless services to customers around the world.
“However, for all our customers in the US and elsewhere, it is definitely a case of ‘business as usual’. With no overlap in our core geographic markets, we can only add value to one another without any issues arising so far as our customers are concerned.
“I am looking forward to welcoming Nick and his team to Godalming in 2005.”
For full YBP press release (PDF) >>
The Lindsay & Howes / YBP Adult Awards Program
Business news (February 2004)
The Lindsay & Howes / YBP Adult Awards Program is an efficient and automatic way for academic libraries to acquire award-winning books. This new program complements the Children's Awards Book Program, a service popular for many years with libraries who have relied upon it to acquire important children's books, such as Newbery and Caldecott winners.
Our Adult Awards Program covers prominent awards such as Whitbread, Booker, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
YBP — the US arm of the business — will cover Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and National Book Critics Circle Awards, as well as selected specialized awards including the Hugo Awards, for science fiction, and the Edgar Awards, for mysteries. YBP will also cover Canada's Giller Prize and Governor General's Award.
How the Program Works
A library may enroll in the Lindsay & Howes / YBP Adult Awards Program at any time with a completed Profile Specification form (see below for PDF) . Libraries may elect coverage for any or all Award categories, winners and nominees when available, and for each can choose to receive automatic shipment of books, or eSlips, which can be used to place orders.
We will monitor Awards shipments for duplication against Lindsay & Howes and YBP firm order, approval, and continuations shipments, and against other Lindsay & Howes / YBP Awards shipments (for titles winning multiple awards). Libraries can opt to receive multiple copies for any award category.
Libraries may choose to have Award books billed and shipped on an existing L&H/YBP sub-account, at normal discount, or may choose to have Award books billed and shipped on a new, separate sub-account. Libraries electing coverage for British or Irish awards will need to have a Lindsay & Howes account. U.S. and Canadian awards require a YBP account.
Please contact your Lindsay and Croft or YBP representative to discuss technical services, or for any other type of assistance.
Profle Specification Form (PDF) >>
New Zealand's CONZULAC account confirmed
Business news (February 2004)
A consortium led by the Council of New Zealand University Librarians — known as CONZULAC — has awarded the contract for the supply of monographs to Lindsay and Howes / YBP.
The company won the business over three other bidders, and CONZUL said that the company had offered substantially improved discounts and terms of service for the seven libraries involved.
The University of Otago's Mike Wooliscroft and Marylyn Fordyce, who led the project, said they were delighted with the result, which will extend the buying power of the seven participant sites.
Other key business in Australia has also recently been reconfirmed.
London Book Fair at Olympia in March
Event news (February 2004)
Miriam Lindsay and others from the Lindsay and Howes team will be attending the London Book Fair at Olympia in March.
The Fair runs over three days — 14th to 16th March — and the team are available for meetings with publishers and clients on Monday 15th March.
The show includes a number of useful free seminars and masterclasses.
To arrange a meeting on March 15th with Miriam Lindsay or a member of the Lindsay & Howes team, email us at landc@ybp.com
For further information about the London Book Fair >>
Mark haddon wins Whitbread Award
Awards news (January 2004)
Mark Haddon has won the 2003 Whitbread Book of the Year Award for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The announcement was made on Tuesday 27 January at an awards ceremony at The Brewery in Central London.
The bookmakers' overwhelming odds-on favourite and general public's 'Book of the Year' — as selected by the hundreds of votes cast via the Whitbread Book Awards website — won against one of the most acclaimed collections of finalists in the Whitbread Awards' 33-year history. Sir John Banham, Chairman of Whitbread PLC, presented the author with his award and £25,000 cheque.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which is published in both an adult and a children's version, is the sixth novel to win the Whitbread Book of the Year since 1985. It has already won numerous children's and teenage fiction awards and was initially entered for the Children's Book Award as well, but was withdrawn by the publishers in preference to the Novel Award. (Whitbread Book Awards rules stipulate that books may only be entered in one category.
Chair announced for 2004 Man-Booker Awards
Awards news (January 2004)
The Rt Hon. Chris Smith MP announced as the Chair of Judges for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2004. Chris Smith was Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport from 1997 to 2001, and is now Director of the Clore Programme for Cultural Leadership. He was first elected as Member of Parliament for Islington South & Finsbury in 1983, and has held this position ever since. He is the Labour Party's nominee on the Committee on Standards in Public Life; is Chairman of the Wordsworth Trust; Chairman of the Donmar Warehouse Theatre; and a Member of the Board of the National Theatre. He is also a Visiting Professor in Culture and the Creative Industries at the London Institute.
Chris Smith was educated at Cambridge, where he gained a double first in English, and at Harvard, where he was a Kennedy Scholar. He wrote his PhD thesis on the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. He has recently presented television programmes on the work of Auden, Eliot and Larkin, and on Emily Bronte. A lifelong hill walker and mountaineer, Chris has scaled the 284 mountains above 3,000 ft in Scotland.
Chris Smith MP comments: “Judging the Man Booker Prize is going to present a formidable challenge. Not only is there the sheer quantity of reading to be done, but the quality is going to be high, and some very difficult decisions are going to have to be made. But it’s a challenge that I relish, and I’m looking forward to ten months of reading with great anticipation.”
The remaining four members of the 2004 Man Booker Prize judging panel will be announced shortly. The shortlist will be announced in September, and the winner at an awards ceremony in October 2004.
World English Program launched
(December 2003)
Lindsay & Howes is pleased to announce the combined Lindsay & Howes / YBP World-English program. Beginning with 2004 imprints, L&H and YBP are offering greatly expanded coverage on approval and slip plans of titles from Australia, New Zealand, and Europe.
Our customers have said that many English-language titles of high academic quality from these parts of the world are difficult to identify, hard to collect helpful information about, and tricky to acquire. Similarly, publishers find such titles difficult to market outside of their regions. The L&H / YBP' World English will be an efficient program for learning about and acquiring excellent books from around the globe.
With some exceptions, libraries that have YBP and Lindsay & Howes approval or slip plans that allow Australia, New Zealand, and Europe as 'places of publication' need do nothing. Titles from the newly covered Australian and New Zealand publishers will begin to appear among the slips on your current YBP plans. English-language titles from Europe will appear among your L&H slips.
Naturally, whether the slip for any particular title comes to you will be based on the subject and non-subject decisions you have made. No automatic books will arrive from these publishers without specific instructions from you.
As to the coverage itself, Lindsay & Howes and YBP normally profiles all English-language monographs that come from the publishers on our approval list. For World-English presses, by contrast, we will offer selective coverage. That is, we will profile books that seem likely to fit the interests our customers, using our usual book-in-hand methods. In general, we will omit from coverage titles that are about issues solely of local concern.
If you have questions about YBP's World English, please get in touch with your sales representative or customer service bibliographer. If you should want to verify that your approval or slip plans will allow the World-English coverage, your sales or customer service representative can tell you.
Lindsay & Howes hopes that this program improves the collections of customers as it makes obtaining these books easier. If you have comments about or suggestions for the program, please let us know.
For more information, download this informative World English Information document (PDF) >>
Tales of frostbite in the Alps
Awards news (December 2003)
Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind was declared the winner of the Guardian First Book Prize for 2004, beating an exceptionally strong field which included Monica Ali's Brick Lane, Anna Funder's Stasiland and DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little (recent winner of the Booker Prize).
Mountains of the Mind tells the graphic tale of what happened after Macfarlane scaled the Lagginhorn Peak in the Alps in rock-ripped gloves, leading to frostbite.
Judge and novelist, Blake Morrison said, "Even people like me, too scared to climb higher than their front door step, will be riveted."
The luck of the Irish
Awards news (October 2003)
Belfast's own Ciaron Carson has scooped the £10,000 Forward Prize, the UK's biggest annual poetry award, for his collection Breaking News.
Carson's ninth collection, Breaking News was said by the judging panel — which included poet Connie Bensley, TV presenter Daisy Goodwin, former nominee Vona Groarke and singer Beth Orton — to "record the force of terror and beauty with surgical precision and lapidary skill".
Nobel Prize for Literature announced
Awards news (October 2003)
John Maxwell Coetzee, a white Afrikaner born in Cape Town and currently at the University of Chicago, has won the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature worth 10 million Swedish crown (£780,000).
Announced by the Swedish Academy on 2nd October, his novels "are characterised by their well-crafted composition, pregnant dialogue and analytical brilliance."
Works include the novels Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians, The Life and Times of Michael K (Booker Prize winner in 1983), The Master of Petersburg, Disgrace and his most recently published work, Elizabeth Costello, plus the autobiographical Boyhood and its sequel, Youth.
Special delivery (part 2)
Company news (August 2003)
We're delighted to announce another new arrival at Lindsay and Howes — this time for Operations Manager David Phillips and his wife Kate.
Lily Harriet arrived on 28th July weighing just 5lb 11oz and we're told both mother and baby are doing fine.
David tells us "Her sisters, Daisy (31/2) and Emily (21/2), are delighted with the new addition to the family and are looking forward to 'helping' wherever they can!"
Turn up for the books
Awards news (June 2003)
Orange Prize
US author Valerie Martin has beaten the odds to win this year's Orange Prize for Fiction with her book — Property — set in America's deep south, exploring the themes of power, ownership, resistance and freedom in the 19th Century US slave trade.
Valerie Martin, who grew up in New Orleans, was considered an outsider to win the £30,000 prize but her intensive study of relationships impressed the judges, which included Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif, model Sophie Dahl and journalists Nicolette Jones and Annalena McAfee.
Commeting on Martin's novel, Soueif said: "Property is the opposite of exuberance — but the real quality of this book is its fairness."
Samuel Johnson prize
Oxford don, TJ Binyon, has been awarded the £30,000 Samuel Johnson prize for his biography of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin.
Judges for the prize included journalist and broadcaster Rosie Boycott, Kensington and Chelsea MP Michael Portillo and historian Tim Radford.
Presenting the award, MP Michael Portillo said: "Binyon has undertaken a massive task to reveal (Pushkin's) genius to us and has written a gripping and intimate account of his life and death."
View the shortlists in our Book awards section.
OCLC PromptCat®
Company news (June 2003)
OCLC PromptCat automatically provides OCLC-MARC records and sets holdings in WorldCat for titles identified by booksellers. As part of a six-month trial, unique WorldCat records were identified for more than 95 percent of books shipped by Lindsay and Howes.
Commenting on the implementation of PromptCat, Miriam Lindsay said, "We are delighted to be able to offer our customers timely and cost-effective access to the world's largest cataloguing resource file of records for UK imprints."
For further information about PromptCat services through Lindsay and Howes, contact Customer Services or complete our Information Request.
Istanbul murder mystery lands Irish prize
Awards news (May 2003)
Turkish author Orhan Pamuk was announced the winner of The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2003 at Dublin Castle on May 19th.
Set in Istanbul in the late 1950s, this complex murder mystery was chosen from a shortlist of eight by the panel of judges, including Morgan Llywelyn, Deirdre Madden and Amritjit Singh.
My Name is Red was translated from the original Turkish by Erdag Goknar, who receives 25,000 euros of the total 100,000 euros prize. The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Councillor Dermot Lacey will present the prize at Dublin City Hall in June.
View the full list in our Book awards section.
Special delivery
Company news (May 2003)
We are delighted to announce the arrival of two new members of the Lindsay and Howes team.
Sarah Halloran (Head Bibliographer) had a daughter — Grace Isobel — on 19th April, followed 10 days later by a son — Hari — for Tim Fowler (Collection Development Manager) and wife Clare on 29th April.
Tim told us, "I'm ecstatic at becoming a Dad for the first time, but I'm really looking forward to this year's ALA in June so I can catch up on some much-needed sleep!"
