"The women who write [cozies] stop the action to go shopping, create a recipe, or take care of cats," he says. "Cozies are not serious literature. They don’t deserve to win. Men take [writing] more seriously as art. Men labor over a book to make it literature. There are wonderful exceptions, of course -- P.D. James, Ruth Rendell."

"It has been felt that there was a bias against not only cozies, but [also] women authors," says Rhys Bowen, a Best Novel nominee this year for Evan's Gate. The prejudice, if it can be called that, may affect Bowen’s chances of winning tonight. "I am obviously the coziest on the list, because I have a small-town setting, touches of humor at times," she says. "Evan’s Gate isn’t about mean streets or violence."

Bowen takes issue with Penzler’s denunciation of female mystery-writing. "Some say the cozy is not worthy of the title of literature," she says. "There are powerful books that can be dubbed as cozy. Quite frankly, no mystery book is realistic. Real [private investigators] sit around in cars for days and spend most of their time filling out paperwork. And to me, murder is more horrifying if it occurs in a setting where it would not be expected. Ordinary people being forced to kill is somehow worse than a gang member mowing down a rival."

Maron thinks the MWA’s voting structure addresses this and other issues since members (all of them mystery-writers) are selected as judges based on their gender, geography and genre. Each year, the judges on 12 five-member panels read over 400 books in several categories. (Besides Best Novel, other categories include Best First Novel, Best Paperback Original, Best Fact Crime.)

The former employee at Armstrong Library pulled a mystery novel off a shelf and noticed a bulge in its dust jacket. She opened the book and discovered what library officials termed was a "substantial" sum of money.

"I felt something in there, and from my time working here, I just had to straighten it out and felt in there and pulled it out," Armstrong said. "I thought, 'Whoa, wait a minute.'"

Library officials declined to say how much money was discovered, or what the title of the book was, so they could locate the money's rightful owner. The book hasn't been checked out since March 2004, when the library switched its system of tracking books. Before then, the book had been checked out 45 times, but the library's record-keeping system doesn't track previous checkouts.

Reagan, who died at 93 last June following a 10-year battle with Alzheimer's disease, wrote in his diaries every day of his presidency, recording his thoughts on events both routine and historic, officials said.

While the volumes "were not initially intended for publication, we feel that these volumes offer an unprecedented insight into the Reagan presidency," said Frederick Ryan Jr., chairman of the Simi Valley, Calif.-based foundation's board of trustees.

The books disappeared from Apple Stores last week after a month of increasingly contentious discussions about the book written by Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon.

Young, who was a contributing editor for The Mercury News in the early 1980s, said he is dismayed by Apple's reaction to "iCon". He said it updates a biography of Jobs he wrote 20 years ago, called The Journey Is the Reward. The latest book retraces Jobs' early days as a computer maverick and chronicles his failure with NeXt. But it also documents his triumphant return to Apple, the successes of the iMac and iPod as well as his role in remaking animation through Pixar Animation Studios.

"Written with insider scoops and no-holds-barred style! Based on hundreds of highly unauthorized interviews with Jobs' nearest and dearest! New information on the acrimonious parting between Eisner and Jobs, the personal vendetta behind the return to Apple!"

But one poor guest got "really drunk," according to another spy, and paused to have a smoke in the house. After carefully removing a pen and paper from a vase, she began casually tapping ash in it.

"I didn't know I had a $40,000 ashtray," Grazer quipped when he noticed her, causing the embarrassed woman to flee the premises.

The letter said: "Book Club members stopped buying new fiction, and this changed the face of American publishing." It thanked Winfrey for her contribution to book sales and asked her to "consider focusing, once again, on contemporary writers in your book club".

The 158 writers who signed the letter included Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri and Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club.

Salz der Erde publishers, Heyne, part of German media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG, said they were printing more after a surge of interest in recent days. "It's a five-figure print run," a spokeswoman said. Ratzinger's latest book, Werte in Zeiten des Umbruchs (Values in Times of Upheaval), was already sold out after its release a week ago. Publishers Herder plan a reprint of 20,000 after an initial 3,000 copies.

Bookstores in Berlin were running out of Ratzinger stock. "There's been a run in the last week as his name has gained prominence. People are wanting to find out about the man," said the owner of a Christian bookshop in the German capital.

The books will be published by Birmingham, Ala.-based Oxmoor Books, a division of Time Inc.'s Southern Progress Corp., under an agreement with Manhattan-based Hearst Magazines, publisher of O magazine. Oxmoor specializes in lifestyle titles, including cooking and gardening books.

Live Your Best Life, the first book in the new series, will be published in September and feature 100 articles from the magazine's past two years. Contributors will include such Oprah regulars as relationships expert Dr. Phil and financial adviser Suze Orman. Oxmoor will sell the Oprah titles in both traditional bookstores and by direct mail.

The book will be the second compilation offered to O readers. The May issue of the magazine will come with a paperback compendium of the television icon's wit and wisdom.

"She had absolutely no help on the writing; she's been working on the book for five years and it's been coming to me in pieces for three years. It was always remarkably good; the only thing we had to do was cut, and she was great about that. She said, 'I don't want my book to be so fat that people won't read it. Tell me what you didn't like; tell me where you lost interest.' It's true, it was long. I told her, 'the only problem was that you didn't have any off decades.'"

Davies, who taught English at schools in the UK and Sri Lanka before moving to Wales to write, beat off competition from a strong shortlist, which included celebrated novelist Andrea Levy, to win the £10,000 award. Her book, A Good Voyage (Chatto and Windus), is loosely based on Twelfth Night. It was described by the judges as a "superbly constructed, magical story that brilliantly contrasts the timelessness of romance with the grittiness of reality".

"A Good Voyage takes readers back to the roots of romantic fiction in all its joys and turmoil," said chairwoman of the judges Danuta Keane. "It was a clear winner in a strong field of titles that ranged from domestic dramas to high politics. This is an astonishingly well-crafted first novel, peopled with believable, empathetic characters, and characterised by a poise and lightness of touch that evokes the magic and pathos of Shakespeare's lovers and losers. It is a wonderful illustration of romantic fiction at its best."

"There is an amazing creative community in Los Angeles that is untapped on the publishing side," Regan told Daily Variety, noting that close to half her authors live on the West Coast. "Hopefully, we will have more day-to-day contact with people in the film and TV business," she said.

"The book is about me, but it's really about our generation," the 81-year-old Dole said. "What happened to me happened to thousands of others — and it's, of course, happened since."

Near the end of his book, Dole writes: "Why did this happen to me? Why just a few days before the war ended? It's taken me 60 years to come to grips with the toughest questions of life, and in some small way, this book is my answer."

He hopes readers find some inspiration. "Others might take some comfort in the fact that you can be down one day and up the next," he said.

In his 70 years, he created more than 150 fairy tales, some of the most beloved ever written, including The Little Match Girl, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Ugly Duckling, The Little Mermaid and The Princess and the Pea.

"Mary Mapes hasn’t even handed in the manuscript, and already, people have been trying to get their hands on it," says a source. "They’re going to pull out all the stops to get a copy."