BLACK OAK BOOKS IS OPEN!

Berkeley , CA , June 26 th 2008: "The rumors of its death are greatly exaggerated." What is true is that the assets of Black Oak Books have been sold to a new corporation, Black Oak Books Holdings Corp, headed by Gary Cornell, a long time friend of Black Oak Books. But, except for a short closing in the not too distant future for long needed renovations, Black Oak Books is and will remain open! Any changes planned will preserve and enhance what has made Black Oak Books a North Berkeley icon for more than 20 years. In particular, most of the staff remains and the store will continue to be run by its current manager Stephanie Vela. The previous president and chief buyer Bob Brown of the old Black Oak Books also continues to be involved.

The new owners plan to expand the available space in our flagship Shattuck store by these renovations. They will use this extra space to substantially expand the stores stock of both new and used books at the store. In addition, we have leased space on San Pablo Ave so that we can greatly increase the number of high quality scholarly used books for sale through a modern "brick and click" store model. We are thus extremely interested in paying top dollar for high quality libraries!

About Gary Cornell

Gary Cornell has been a long time friend of Black Oak Books since he first visited Berkeley on sabbatical when he was a mathematics professor at the University of Connecticut. He has a PHD in mathematics from Brown and in addition to being a mathematics professor he has, among other things been the director of the program in Modern Visual Computing at UCONN, a visiting scientist at IBM's Watson labs and a Program Director at the National Science Foundation. He is also a bestselling, award winning author of numerous books for computer professionals. After leaving UCONN, he co-founded Apress (www.apress.com) , which under his leadership grew to be the second largest imprint for books for Information Technology Professionals in the world and achieved compound growth rates in excess of 28% during a time when his industry was shrinking. After Apress was sold to Springer Science and Business Media, the largest publisher of scientific and technical books in the world, he stayed on as a part time senior strategic advisor to Springer. He lives in Lexington. MA where he has been visiting Harvard while researching his latest book tentatively titled "The Mathematician's Secret", a popular book on the techniques used by modern mathematicians to solve problems such as Fermat's Last Theorem that stood for centuries. He can be reached at garyc@blackoakbooks.com.