Worldwide Books was pleased to exhibit at this year's ARLIS conference held last month in Boston. The messenger-style tote bags we handed out were very popular, and all 275 bags were gone by the morning of the second day. Each year we find that the speed with which our supply of tote bags is exhausted serves as an exhibit-hall-traffic-gauge of sorts, and indeed traffic in the exhibits hall this year was quite good throughout the weekend. We thank all of the attendees who stopped at our booth to view the many new and recent titles we had on display, to discuss their approval plans, to offer their compliments, or to just say hello. We always try to bring a wide range of titles for display at the ARLIS conference to underscore the depth and breadth of our coverage, and we typically include several just-released titles that we know will be new to most librarians. This year our display included more than 100 new titles, and a display list is available in PDF format to anyone who may wish to identify titles they saw on display at our booth.

We would also like to congratulate the winners of this year's Worldwide Books Awards, who each received a $1,000 prize, and to thank the ARLIS/NA Research Awards Committee for carefully reviewing the nominations and for selecting the winners: the Worldwide Books Publication Award was presented to Jeff Gunderson of the Anne Bremer Memorial Library at the San Francisco Art Institute for "A Combination of Accidents: The San Francisco Art Scene in the 1940's," an essay that appears in the book San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: 75 Years of Looking Forward (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2009); the winner of the Worldwide Books Electronic Resources Award was Katherine Chibnik of the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, for the online guide to the library's New York Real Estate Brochures Collection.

On the first day of the exhibits, author Richard Minsky arranged for a book signing at our booth, having brought with him several advance copies of his new title The Art of American Book Covers: 1875-1930, a handsome and well-researched volume that Worldwide now has in stock (see Worldwide item 138551).

During the conference Worldwide was also accepting orders for the soon-to-be-released Yves Saint Laurent: Haute Couture-l'Oeuvre Integral, 1962-2002 (Worldwide 139858), an exceptional limited edition publication that features four clamshell portfolios, each containing hundreds of loose sheets with drawings, fabric samples and production notes documenting 40 years of seasonal collections by celebrated French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent (1936-2008).