Safeway Becomes a Book Haven

Our literary spies in Northern California tell us that Safeway stores are pushing books, not carts. Sixteen Bay Area Safeway supermarkets, we hear, have decided to mark the Year of the Reader this summer by setting up “Read-Aloud” corners for kids ages 3 to 10. Veteran storytellers, including the likes of Cecil Williams, the flamboyant minister of San Francisco’s famed Glide Methodist Church, as well as San Jose Police Chief Joseph McNamara, have signed on to “read-along,” and librarians promised to stand at the ready, handing out library card applications and information on literacy. Here’s a promotional effort that could serve at least as much social purpose as free samples of new tofu products.

DON’T THROW AWAY THOSE OLD LOVE LETTERS: An unidentified European buyer has paid $605,000, a figure Sotheby’s says is a record, for 600 letters sent by Franz Kafka to his fiancee, Felice Bauer. The 1,600 pages of material, including postcards, were written between 1912 and 1917, when Kafka was in Berlin and Bauer was in Prague. The two never married. The previous top price for a lot of literary manuscripts sold at auction was $412,500 for a notebook belonging to William Butler Yeats and sold at Sotheby’s in London in 1985.

MAKE BOOKS, NOT WAR: B. Dalton is predicting that “techno-thrillers” and military history will be hot subjects in coming months. The success of Tom Clancy is one indicator, the bookseller maintains, along with a growing interest in books about Vietnam. The strong response may also trace to the fact that the United States has not been involved in a major war in 12 years and is toeing a conservative line on military matters.

LITERARY GLASNOST: In line with recent Kremlin reforms, Soviet authorities will publish a long-banned, anti-totalitarian novel that Western critics say served as a prototype for George Orwell’s “1984.” A leading member of the Soviet Writers’ Union, Feliks Kuznetsov, said Yevgeny Zamyatin’s anti-utopian novel of 1920, “We,” would probably appear in his country next year. Said Kuznetsov of “We,” “It was simply our fault that that we believed that this novel was something anti-socialist. In this novel of his, Zamyatin was challenging the old-fashioned, primitive notions of communism.” The book focuses on love in a depersonalized, totalitarian society of the future.

LEAPING LEXICONS!: Not that our native tongue is evolving, but more than 50,000 new entries have been added to the Random House Dictionary of the English Language: Second Edition--Unabridged. They include such terms as “yuppies,” “surrogate mothers,” “LSD,” “sun block,” “genetic engineering” and “soft contact lenses.”

MYSTERIOUS LIAISON: To satisfy the growing appetite for mystery and thriller books, the Book-of-the-Month Club and Mysterious Press will launch the Mysterious Book Club. Beginning in January, the club will be run under the editorial direction of Otto Penzlerblisher of the Mysterious Press and proprietor of New York’s Mysterious Bookshop. The club will choose about six new titles each month from among the 2,000 mystery titles published each year. Mystery fiction, by the way, is defined broadly by Penzler as “any story in which a crime, or the threat of a crime, is integral to the plot.” He adds that “a crime against the state, or espionage fiction, is as much a part of the genre as a crime against an individual.”

PETER RABBIT’S FACELIFT: Old bunnies, it seems, show the signs of aging just like the rest of us. So in issuing its latest edition of “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” publisher Frederick Warne (an imprint of Viking Penguin and Beatrix Potter’s publisher since 1902) decided to locate all of Potter’s original watercolors and fashion new plates from them. The reinvigorated volumes will be out in September, paperback and hardcover.

FIRST: Zebra Books, this spring, will publish a first novel, “Truk Lagoon,” by Los Angeles-based screenwriter Mitchell Sam Rossi, 1986 winner of USC’s Donald Davis Dramatic Writing Award.

TODAY’S CHEERY THOUGHT: “If you get on a plane at (London’s) Heathrow Airport and travel for three hours,” says David Munro, “you’ll hit a war.” Munro is author of “Four Horsemen” (Lyle Stuart).

DREISER REMEMBERED: UCLA English professor, Richard Lehan, is editor for the 1,150-page Theodore Dreiser collection issued in July by the Library of America.