The Bookselling Online Blog is collecting responses to Abebooks’ BookFinder acquisition from some of BookFinder’s other clients — Abebooks’ competitors Biblio and Alibris — and now from AddAll, one of BookFinder’s direct competitors. They also secured reassurances from Abebooks that they won’t be taking advantage of their new conflict of interest.

The acquisition is a good move for BookFinder and good news from its users. New resources (money, servers, and people) gives them the chance to expand and fine tune their service. Perhaps they’ll work out a way to integrate information like dealer reputation and shipping charges into their search results.

I haven’t seen any speculation about this elsewhere, but I’m guessing one of the things that made BookFinder an attractive buy is the BookFinder team’s expertise in analyzing search trends.

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It seems that HarperCollins doctored the photograph of illustrator Clement Hurd on a recent printing of Goodnight Moon. They removed a barely visible cigarette from his hand. One children’s bookstore launched the site Goodnight Reality to campaign to have the original photograph reinstated.

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A quick follow up to the last entry: You’ll remember that HarperCollins airbrushed a cigarette out of illustrator Clement Hurd’s author photo on Goodnight Moon. Collectors will want to snap up their variant dust jackets before the current printing sells out, today’s Shelf Awareness newsletter shares this from a HarperCollins email: “…we recognize the concern over adjusting historical photographs, and have therefore decided to print an alternate picture of Clement Hurd in future reprints that does not feature a cigarette.”

Using Books was given an advance look at the replacement photo and we’re a little surprised by the choice. Have a look.

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Today’s amusing (if less than titillating) literary gossip comes from the Sunday Telegraph, where one bookseller tells of a curmudgeonly encounter with …someone. Then we get the dirt on Graham Greene’s poor spelling.

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After The New York Times’ recent profile of a happy owner of the $8,000 Complete Penguin Classics Library and the release, on Amazon, of five more economical sets of Penguin Classics (The American Collection Volumes One & Two, The Complete Greeks and Romans, The English [& Scottish] Collection: 19th-Century British Fictions, and The Children’s Library), I though it would be a good time to revisit the matter of the forgotten Classics — that is Penguin Classics that have fallen out of print and aren’t included in the 700 pound shrink-wrapped pallet of print that makes up the Complete Library.

So I’ve searched my shelves for another sampling of forgotten Classics. Parts of some of these books may be represented in titles that did make it into the Complete Library and the others are likely in print from other publishers. Whether they’re classics or not, they’re no longer Penguin Classics.

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With the simultaneous arrival of the holiday rush and some unrelated projects, posting here will remain infrequent.

Over on the commerce site, I’m running a series of specials through the end of the year. The current sale is “Buy 1 Book, Get a 2nd Book of Equal or Lesser Value for 1/2 Price”. It’s a good deal, if awkwardly phrased. The details are here.

To soften that blatantly commercial plug, I’ll pass along this link to an archive of recordings of writer interviews by CBS Radio’s Don Swaim. These are 20-60 minute recordings from 1982-1993 that were originally edited down to little two-minute radio segments, so they include some ice-breaker questions and occasional unguarded comments. I haven’t heard anything too controversial though, unless you count Jonathan Raban loading his pipe.

Did I mention free Gift Wrap Service?

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