Bookstore

Betsy F. Gorman, who had worked at Kennedy Krieger Institute and later owned a bookstore and was an auctioneer's sales representative, died Feb. 2 of ovarian cancer at her Lutherville home. She was 75. Betsy Fisher, who was a direct descendent of Alexander Brown, founder of Alex. Brown & Sons, and Louis McLane, who was secretary of state and secretary of the treasury during the administration of President Andrew Jackson, was born in Baltimore and raised in Ruxton and Butler. She was a 1953 graduate of Garrison Forest School and attended what is now Stevenson University.

A new restaurant opened up Aug. 7 in the old Ixia space. Old-timers still call it the old Louie's Bookstore & Cafe space. The owner is Tegist Alayew, who has run two restaurants in Washington in the same U Street corridor location. The first, Gogo Cottage , which had a menu of Ethiopian food, ran for about six years until Alayew replaced it with Creme Cafe , a still-hopping Southern-style restaurant best known for its Sunday brunch. Think chicken and waffles. The good times at Creme Cafe, Alayew knows, might not last forever.

Greer Begbie is concerned primarily about one thing when shopping for her son's college textbooks: price. The southern New Jersey mother, whose son Chris is a junior finance major at Towson University, scours Web sites, including Half.com and Amazon.com, for the best deals. She almost always buys used books. She says new, full-price textbooks are too expensive. "It's a rip-off," Begbie said. "You can end up paying way too much." The cost of college textbooks has been an issue for years.

Last month, in a stunning display of public irony, Amazon.com remotely deleted digital copies of George Orwell's novels "1984" and "Animal Farm" from customers' Kindles after learning that the electronic publisher of these works, MobileReference, did not have the rights to them. For a couple of days, observers in print and on the Web outdid themselves, noting that in "1984," government censors rewrite history by consigning offending news items to an incinerator chute known as the memory hole.

Before anything else, I want to say right away that this place makes the best sweet and savory muffins I think I've ever had. Really, really great muffins. When Nicole and Peter Selhorst opened Lauraville's Red Canoe Bookstore five years ago, there were, except for the Chameleon Cafe and good old Koco's, only sporadic and mostly sputtering businesses to serve the neighborhood's growing population of young families and first-time homeowners. It's hard to imagine the wonderful developments all along this Northeast corridor without Lauraville paving the way. The Red Canoe deserves pioneering credit.

Read Streeters have been vigorously debating a Utah bookstore's decision to remove Stephenie Meyer's immensely popular Twilight series from its shelves. Some say the Desert Book, which is owned by the Mormon church and deals mainly in religious texts, was justified in screening the books available to young readers. And though Meyer is a Mormon - arguably the most famous Mormon author - her tales of vampires and werewolves would never be mistaken for traditional Christian literature. One reader said: "Twilight encourages young women to accept abusive behavior, condone a lifestyle that includes killing and her message to leave your husband because you're 'bored' is outrageous.

Marianne Draper, a retired bookstore sales clerk and book collector, died of cancer Monday, on her 67th birthday, at Northwest Hospital Center. Marianne Stine was born and raised in Hagerstown. She was a 1959 graduate of South Hagerstown Senior High School and attended Hagerstown Junior College. The former longtime Ten Hills resident, who had lived in recent years on Cromarty Road in Baltimore County, had worked at Cokesbury Bookstore on Rolling Road from 1991 until 2005. "For the last three years, she worked as a caregiver for a stroke victim," said a son, Jared Draper of Odenton.

Margaret I. "Meg" Sicher, a Jemicy School volunteer who headed the Owings Mills school's bookstore for many years, died Thursday of complications from a brain tumor at the Brightwood Center in Lutherville. The Riderwood resident was 49. Margaret Iglehart French was born in Baltimore and raised in Lutherville. She was a 1977 graduate of St. Timothy's School in Stevenson. Mrs. Sicher attended Skidmore College and earned a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Virginia in 1982.

Barnes & Noble Booksellers, 4300 Montgomery Road in the Long Gate Shopping Center, Ellicott City, will sponsor a storytime at 11 a.m. Saturday with author Mona Kerby, who will read from and sign her latest book, Owney, the Mail-Pouch Pooch. The story follows Owney, who wanders into the Albany, N.Y., post office, is adopted by the staff and goes on to lead a life of adventure in the mail service. Kerby, who lives in Westminster, has written Amelia Earhart: Courage in the Sky; Beverly Sills: America's Own Opera Star; Friendly Bees, Ferocious Bees.

For 11 years, Howard County officials and some residents have fought to close the jurisdiction's only adult bookstore. They've passed legislation and waged costly legal battles, only to be thwarted time and again. And now, despite a county law designed to force the Ellicott City store to move away from nearby homes or close, the Pack Shack appears poised to prevail again - maintaining its "Adult Video" sign along a busy stretch of U.S. 40, along with shelves of explicit movies, skimpy lingerie and sex toys.