Top 10 June Best-Sellers...

Make Someone's Day with a Portable Travel Frame they'll Treasure!

Think of someone special. Now think of a special day or occasion or trip. Wouldn't it be nice if you could wrap up that day and give it to that special someone to carry with them anytime they wanted? With the Portable Travel Frame from Compendium, they can. Just insert one or two 4x6 photos into the beautifully fabric covered and silk-screened frame and they can take their memories with them wherever they go—home, office, on the road or around the world! Each frame carries a message such as "That was a good day", or "She makes the world a better place", "Dad, my hero", or "You are Loved"... Six messages in all.

What a perfect gift for someone you love or appreciate!

Click here to see and read more!

It's all so Kooky and Zany! It's Oodles of Fun! New Little MissMatched Stuff for Fall!

You'll anxiously await the cool weather with the new items we just received from Little MissMatched! Among the warm and woolies, we have Marvelous, Fabulous, and Kooky gloves galore! And the best part is, they're MissMatched! Haven't we all misplaced a glove before at some point? But these fun and colorful gloves come three to a set and they're already MissMatched! How fun is that? Just grab two and go!

Now, we haven't forgotten the wee little ones—we now have 100% cotton onesies and 100% cotton jersey bibs that are simply irresistible! With big bold stars, dots, strips or flowers... in typical MissMatched style, these are brightly colored and ready to go in temptingly sweet, candy-inspired packaging—making perfect baby gifts!

And then stop by the store and check out our Little MissMatched display. From socks to hats, we'll have you MissMatched and ready for fall in no time at all!

The Eleventh Man is being called Ivan Doig's most powerful novel to date.

We're offering a special ABFAS Internet Only 10% pre-purchase discount if you order before the scheduled release date of October 13th.

Ivan Doig has once again brought us a deeply American story with The Eleventh Man.
Driven by the memory of a fallen teammate, TSU's 1941 starting lineup went down as legend in Montana football history, charging through the season undefeated. Two years later, the "Supreme Team" is caught up in World War II. Ten of them are scattered around the globe in the war's various lonely and dangerous theaters. The eleventh man, Ben Reinking, has been plucked from pilot training by a military propaganda machine hungry for heroes. He is to chronicle the adventures of his teammates, man by man, for publication in small-town newspapers across the country like the one his father edits. Ready for action, he chafes at the assignment, not knowing that it will bring him love from an unexpected quarter and test the law of averages, which holds that all but one of his teammates should come through the conflict unscathed.

Order early to get your ABFAS Internet Only 10% Pre-purchase discount!

Pre-Purchase a copy of The Eleventh Man for $26.00 $23.40

This week - September 27th - October 4th - is Banned Books Week. Celebrate FREADOM and read a banned book today!

Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 to draw attention to the growing number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. It is sponsored by The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), The American Library Association (ALA), the Association of American Publishers, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the National Association of College Stores.

According to the ALA, there were more than 400 challenges to books in schools and libraries in 2007, though a majority of challenges go unreported. The ABFFE maintains a List of Banned and Challenged Books, many with links to reports from those affected by the challenges. You may be surprised that some of your favorites have found their way to the list!

Banned Books Week celebrates one of the most basic American rights - the freedom to choose. Pick up a banned book and celebrate your right to read it today

Local Book Club Picks

Flowing prose, dramatic fiction, non-fiction works, and thought provoking narratives are among our book clubs' selections for the month of October. You can't go wrong with any one of these picks!

Thinking about starting your own group? Contact us as ABFAS and maybe we can help you make some connections!

Wednesday Book Group —	Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
		– Eight stories that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they enter the lives of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers.
	Buy Unaccustomed Earth - $25.00
Girl's Night Out —	The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian
		– A tale that travels between the Roaring Twenties and the twenty-first century, between Jay Gatsby's Long Island and rural New England.
	Buy The Double Bind - $14.95
Moab —	Run by Ann Patchett
		– Privilege and poverty coexisting only blocks from each other, the lengths people will go to protect their children, and one 24 hour period...
	Buy Run - $14.95
Faith Lutheran Book Club —	Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises and a Revolution of Hope by Brian D. McLaren
		– What do the life and teaching of Jesus have to say about the most critical global problems in our world today?
	Buy Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises and a Revolution of Hope - $21.99
Enchantment Book Club —	The Shack by Jodi Picoult
		– A suspicious note to a grieving father brings a man to the wilderness where his daughter was brutally murdered. What he learns there is transforming readers around the world.
	Buy The Shack - $14.99
Beaver Valley Readers —	Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
		– One-man's mission to counteract extremism by building schools, especially for girls, throughout the breeding ground of the Taliban.
	Buy Three Cups of Tea - $15.00

Make a Connection and Join the new ABFAS Forum!
Connecting Readers and Authors!

We're eager, we're excited, and we're just plain happy about it...We've got something new on our website and we can't wait to get started! ABFAS has officially launched our new Forum! It's all about connections and with the ABFAS Forum we now have a common place to connect over this passion we have for the written word. Readers can connect with authors, authors can connect to readers, authors can connect to authors and readers can connect to other readers - we all can connect to books, books, and more books! Join us! Just click here, register to join, and start writing and reading!

We couldn't think of a better way to begin our forum than to have author Kay Kenyon kick it off and she's done so with an "Author's Pick" book recommendation.
Click here to go to the forum and find Kay's recommendation for The Terror by Dan Simmons, a novel about an ill-fated arctic expedition in the 1840's. Then tell us what you think, add your own topics, book recommendations and reviews...
Kay got us started, now ready... set... connect!

Buy a copy of The Terror - $14.99

About Kay Kenyon:

Kay Kenyon, nominated for the Philip K. Dick and the John W. Campbell awards, began her writing career in Duluth, Minnesota as a copywriter for radio and TV. She kept up her interest in writing through careers in marketing and urban planning, and published her first novel, The Seeds of Time, in 1997. She is the author of nine science fiction and fantasy novels, including Bright of the Sky and A World Too Near, the opening stories of the saga, The Entire and the Rose. The series is the story of a man's odyssey in search of his family through a tunnel universe with a river of fire for a sky. Book three of the series, City Without End, will be available in February, 2009.

Her novels and short stories have variously been anthologized, podcast, and translated into French, Russian, and Czech. Recent short stories appeared in Fast Forward 2 and the Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. Two. When not writing, she encourages newcomers to the field through workshops, a writing e-newsletter, and a conference in eastern Washington, Write on the River, of which she is president (www.writeontheriver.org.) She lives in Wenatchee, Washington with her husband, Tom Overcast, and her large orange cat Sumo. Visit Kay Kenyon online at www.kaykenyon.com.

Bright of the Sky - One of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of the Year 2007!

Buy Bright of the Sky- book one of the The Entire and the Rose saga - $15.00

A World Too Near - "Will keep readers on the edges of their seats." -STARRED Review, Publishers Weekly

Buy A World Too Near, book two of the The Entire and the Rose saga - $25.00

Less than a month away, NaNoWriMo is set to begin!

To refresh your memory, NaNoWriMo is the "National Novel Writing Month" program that takes place from Nov. 1 to Nov. 30 and the goal is for all participants to write a 175-page, 50,000 word novel in 30 days. A fun, wild challenge, this intense form of novel writing doesn't let you obsess over quality, but you will get a novel down on paper!

To prepare for the event, there's nothing better than the official NaNoWriMo handbook, which is available at ABFAS and is called No Plot? No Problem! - A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a novel in 30 Days. This book will move you through the process easily (and even if you decide not to be a "Wrimo" this time around, you'll find this book to be witty and an excellent reference).

So here's your chance... take a risk... Check out NaNoWriMo (http://www.nanowrimo.com) on the web! It will tell you the rules and all you need to know to become a novelist in 30 days!

Buy a copy of No Plot? No Problem! - $14.95

It's almost Halloween! That means a StoryTime with Pumpkins, Ghosts, and Bats... Oh My!

Halloween is around the corner and what preschooler wouldn't love a story about trying to catch a big giant pumpkin, or bats that sneak in the library (and play with the copy machine when it's time to read), or how about a book all in orange, black and white that tells about a resourceful heroine and spooky ghosts that's just perfect for these youngest of trick-or-treaters?

Jennifer Brown is our StoryTime storyteller and for the month of October, she is selecting fun books with a Halloween theme that will bring giggles and smiles to all. On the list so far are The Runaway Pumpkin by Kevin Lewis and S.D. Schindler, Bats at the Library by Brian Lies and Ghosts in the House by Kazuno Kohara.

Bring your preschooler to StoryTime once a week to share the fun of reading! After all, as they say in Bats in the Library—"It's hard to settle down and read when life flits by at dizzy speed!"

StoryTime is Every Tuesday from 11:45-12:15.

Lisa's Looking Glass

Lisa Wells Reviews:
Stories in Stone: A Field Guide to Cemetery Symbolism and Iconography by Douglas Keister

October (and its proximity to Halloween) seemed like the best time to divulge something about myself. I'm fascinated by old cemeteries. Even as a child, I recall how friends and I found a small hidden cemetery near my home and we made up stories about why the graves faced the way they did and the evil brother who did the other wrong... The truth is the gravestones do tell tales and my companion through my unusual journeys is Stories in Stone: A Field Guide to Cemetery Symbolism and Iconography by Douglas Keister.

Symbolism is exceptionally prominent in older cemeteries. This small, hard-cover book is priceless for me as I walk through these quiet places, seeing people and meaning where I saw only stone before. Most of us are familiar with lilies adorning graves, but did you know that a sheaf of wheat on a tombstone is often used to denote someone who has lived a long and fruitful life? Or that if you see hands shaking together, you should look carefully at the sleeves—if one is feminine and one is masculine, it is a symbol of matrimony; if the sleeves are gender neutral, the hands can represent a heavenly welcome or an earthly farewell. But what if you see daisies, pelicans, oak trees, a bee or an anvil? Everything is chosen with a purpose and it all tells a little bit more about the history of the people, the family, even the area in which they lived.

This book covers cemetery architecture, societies and organizations, and symbolism from fauna and animals to angels and religious devotion. The text is interesting, the color pictures are beautiful and plentiful, and an index is provided in the back, a necessity for any field guide. I've found this book invaluable whether I've been in an old cemetery in Port Gamble, WA, older cemeteries in Charleston, South Carolina, or in even older cemeteries in Salzburg, Austria. Even if you can no longer read the script, this book hands you the key. You can now understand a bit more about these people who lived decades, even centuries before—simply by looking at the stone...

Stories in Stone: A Field Guide to Cemetery Symbolism and Iconography - $24.95

JipKiss is looking ahead with Green Tips for the Holiday Season and Beyond!

Amber Lotus 2009 Calendars with 100% Recycled Paper!

It's that time again. It's time to select your wall calendar for 2009. You probably already know from experience that buying early is key—the best designs always disappear fast—but now, there's even more incentive... Amber Lotus has come out with their line of Green calendars! The interior pages of these 2009 wall calendars are of 100% recycled paper from 54% post-consumer waste and their designs are some of the most beautiful and captivating around!

From the whimsical to the sublime, from depictions of the cosmos to Dracula, there are calendars for everyone, and it's twice as nice knowing you've stayed eco-friendly! We have the hidden world of alley cats, organic kitchen gardens, and incredible equine photography, just pick your pleasure! The Posters for Peace & Justice Calendar is fascinating - a survey of modern political poster art, but you'll also find calendars of the Zen Mind, Women of Spirit, the Tao, and those of Prayer and Meditation. Stop in and peruse our selection of Green 2009 calendars. At $13.99 for monthly calendars and $15.99 for the datebooks, they'll go fast, and when they're gone, it will be another year before we see the likes of them again!

This will be the year you buy your
Holiday cards early and get
your cards out on time!
Positively Green Holiday Cards
are now available at ABFAS!

Our line of Positively Green greeting cards from Compendium are among our most popular. After all, they are high quality and eco-friendly to boot, but now we're happy and proud to announce that Positively Green Holiday Cards are available as well! The beautiful hand-drawn designs are simple and lovely and when you read the heart-warming quotes and the endearing sentiments, you'll instantly know they will be cards your recipients will treasure.

This year, feel even better about keeping in touch by sending your cards the Positively Green way. You'll not only be spreading a message of Christmas tidings, but also one that says, "Let's be eco-friendly all year long!"

Click here to see the cards and to find out more info!

Do You Know The Talented Myndi Hanberg?

Folks who come to ABFAS are used to seeing familiar faces working in the store as many of our employees have been with us for a long time, but did you know there is one face that you might not know as well and yet, she has the distinction of being the first employee hired at ABFAS (the first that wasn't family, that is)!

Sixteen years ago, Myndi Hanberg came to Leavenworth from her home in Silverdale, WA. After choosing to leave a stressful job for the four seasons and recreational opportunities of this side of the mountains, she found a new home in Plain and decided to look for work in Leavenworth. It must have been meant to be since Myndi had just been thinking, "If I could just get a job in a bookstore, that would be really cool" when she turned around and saw a sign in the window of the new ABFAS store looking for help. The store moved locations a couple of times since those early days, and each time, Myndi moved right along with them.

When asked about her title, Myndi doesn't have an easy answer. If you have to put a label on it, office manager and bookkeeper may describe her job, but she does much more, and over the years, Myndi has done nearly everything at ABFAS, from part-time employee to store manager to store mascot. Yes, I did say store mascot! Myndi tends to be one of those people who will do things that "no one else will do" so she spent her share of time donning big furry suits such as Winnie the Pooh and Cat in the Hat and then socializing with the festival crowds. Her husband, Gary (who she happened to meet right next door to her in Plain), even jumped in a suit a time or two himself! Some might think of furry suits as uncomfortable and hot, but thanks to Myndi's sunny disposition, she always managed to have some laughs. She laughed as she recalled one Octoberfest patron who had seen her in one of her suits and after rubbing his eyes several times, told his friend that he'd just seen the biggest rodent ever!

Myndi is also the person who does a great deal of the special decorating for ABFAS each year. Whether it's Maifest, The Autumn Leaf Festival or the Holiday Season and Christmas Lighting, Myndi always has the most original craft ideas for the store decorations. Her artistic flair certainly doesn't end with the store either. Myndi is an artist in her own right as she has been making intricate and beautiful pine needle baskets ever since she made the move to Central Washington. She started to take a class when she first moved to town, but missed it so she used the instructions and taught herself. Since then, she's continued to make these baskets and she improves her art with each one. The baskets are exquisite and they come in all sizes. On the bottom of the basket, she adds a creative flair to finish it off, limited only by her imagination as she uses stones, agates, walnuts, woven raffia...

So the next time you're in ABFAS, keep in mind that back in the office, behind the counter, working away, is Myndi - a woman you may rarely see, but one of many talents!

Pat's Corner

Since last September we have been fortunate to have a webmaster on our staff. Lilly-Anne joined ABFAS with the expertise to revamp our web image and coordinate all of our electronic outreach. The past year has been filled with upgrades and changes, which I am sure you as our viewers have noticed. Our web site has been organized, revitalized and updated in keeping with our goal of connecting readers, authors and books.

Some of the features that have evolved over the past year include a SHOP tab, which focuses on the books of local authors and authors who have visited our store, the bestselling books at A Book for All Seasons, our gifts and gadgets, and our events. We love seeing our friends and customers in our store, it is what makes us the happiest but we are happy to offer you the ability to shop our bookstore on-line too. Other features on our web site include a link to our MySpace Page and a tab dedicated to the KIDS in our community. Our newsletter focuses on our upcoming events, our top ten bestsellers for the month, what's new and exciting in the store, what's happening in our bookstore community and on location@ABFAS. We have kept you our friends and neighbors in mind as our web site has evolved. We so enjoy our day to day conversations with you here at our store or at one of our author events that we hope to extend that conversation with our newest feature, our ABFAS Forum. The ABFAS Forum, as introduced earlier in this newsletter is about ABFAS's connection between readers, authors and books. Lilly-Anne, has literally been behind the scene making all of this happen and I want to acknowledge publicly how much I appreciate her taking our brainstorming and planning sessions and turning them into a virtual reality. I invite you to meet us on-line and start the conversation. Hope to see you there.

Click Here to go to the ABFAS Forum.