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Just back from BEA in California. It was a weekend of book signings, walking the showroom floor and grabbing the galleys. I will be posting pictures soon of the authors I met and hot news from the show.

Here are a few of the highlights:

Jackie Collins has a new book coming out MARRIED LOVERS.

James Patterson was walking the floor and signing copies of DANIEL X.

Mario Lopez signed copies of KNOCKOUT FITNESS

Alec Baldwin signed sample copies of his book on divorce and raising children. Very funny, nice and charming, not at all intimidating.

Brooke Shields signed her children’s book.
Julie Buxbaum was a delight! Signed copies of The Opposite of Love.

This legal look at Sweeney Todd is by Oxford Law Division Editorial Assistant Michelle Lipinski.

The legend of Sweeney Todd has been trimmed and altered with the passage of time. The characters have also changed and their narratives fleshed-out. One point, though, remaining fairly static in the legend is the presence of lawmakers and legal defenders – starting with the creation of Sweeney Todd in The String of Pearls: A Romance, and all the way up to director Tim Burton’s newest cinematic installment based upon Sondheim’s musical adaptation, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. (more…)

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Yesterday, Robert Mack, the editor of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, wrote about the many incarnations of the tale. Today Mack looks at Sondheim’s version. This post first appeared on Powell’s.

Stephen Sondheim first came across the Todd story on a visit to London in 1973, when he saw Christopher Bond’s version on stage. Bond had made the story darker and less melodramatic than previous versions, in which Todd was portrayed as an increasingly paranoid homicidal maniac, who murdered simply out of greed. Bond was the first dramatist to provide Todd with a convincing, well thought-out, and fully integrated ‘back story’. At the beginning of the play, Todd’s anger is explained: it is directed exclusively at the local judge and beadle who together, many years before, had destroyed his career, transported him for life as a convicted felon, and (he believes) killed his beloved wife. Todd’s aim is revenge, pure and simple. Only after his initial attempts to do away with the judge and beadle are frustrated does he come to the conclusion that ‘the work’s its own reward’, and decides that until he has another shot at his enemies he will ‘practice on less honoured throats’. (more…)

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