The new Black Oak Books is here!

With the largest selection of new books in the Berkeley area and an equally large selection of high quality used books, the greatly expanded Black Oak Books is up and running. So, "the rumors of its death are greatly exaggerated." What is true is that many of the assets of the old Black Oak Books Inc. were sold on June 24th 2008 to a new corporation, headed by Gary Cornell, a long time friend of Black Oak Books. The new owners are dedicated to keeping the new Black Oak Books open!

The changes we have made in the store were designed to preserve and enhance what has made Black Oak Books a North Berkeley icon for more than 20 years. For example, we expanded the available space in our flagship Shattuck store by much needed renovations. We used this extra space to substantially expand the stores stock of both new and used books at the store. we have a new computer system that allows special orders to be handled efficiently. We replaced the old lighting by new, 40% more energy efficient lighting and so on.

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 was a long time friend of Black Oak Books from the time 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.