Inside the List - NYTimes.com MADE IN AMERICA: Dave Eggers's new novel, "A Hologram for the King," cracks the hardcover fiction list this week at No. The book (our review is coming soon) is about an American businessman hoping to land a big deal in Saudi Arabia, and one of its recurring themes is the decline of American manufacturing. So it's noteworthy that Eggers - who publishes his own books, through his McSweeney's publishing house - devotes a paragraph of his acknowledgments to the staff of Thomson-Shore printers in Dexter, Mich., where the novel was produced. "I have to admit that I had a bit of a come-to-Jesus moment when it came to the printing of McSweeney's books," Eggers told The New Yorker. Over the years, we've done a lot of our production in the U.S., and even more in Canada, and then, about five years ago, we started printing in Asia, too. But then, a few years ago, I got to know this printer outside Detroit called Thomson-Shore. They'd done some pro bono work for our tutoring center nearby, 826 Michigan, so I visited the plant, and thanked them, and saw some beautiful books they'd made, and met the men and women who worked there. Walking the production floor was very much like meeting members of an extended family. . . . The fact that they're in Michigan makes it easier to communicate, to reprint and to correct problems, and the prices are close enough to China's numbers, when you take shipping and various delays into account. I don't mean to beat a made-in-America drum, but I would be lying if I said it doesn't feel somehow right to be printing books in the U.S. VEEPSTAKES: Four months before the presidential election, speculation about Mitt Romney's potential running mate has concentrated on four men: Tim Pawlenty, Rob Portman, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio. But only one of them - Rubio, the junior senator from Florida - has written a New York Times best seller. His memoir, "An American Son," hits the hardcover nonfiction list at No. The book is a standard political autobiography, long on rhetoric and short on policy, but its 41-year-old Cuban-­American author does take a firm stand on music: "I watched "Soul Train" on Saturday mornings, and became a big Michael Jackson fan. By the end of sixth grade, I had begun enjoying a new kind of music, rap, and I've been listening to it ever since. My white friends liked hard rock acts - Van Halen, Ozzy Osbourne and others. I didn't care for that kind of music anymore. Among the other contenders, Portman and Ryan haven't yet written books all their own - not unless Ryan is the Paul Ryan behind "The Art of Comedy: Getting Serious About Being Funny," in which case he should move immediately to the top of Romney's list. Maybe he should anyway. Reviewing Pawlenty's "Courage to Stand" last year, the Atlantic staff writer Conor Friedersdorf said a better title would have been "Well-Adjusted Man From Loving Family Is Hardworking, Unlikely to Do Anything Terribly Objectionable." IN MEMORIAM: Nora Ephron, who died on June 26, placed five books on the hardcover fiction and nonfiction lists over the years. She also wrote a handful of articles for the Book Review, including a 1980 spoof of the feminist novelist Marilyn French: "Vincent walked in. Her throat was dry. How would she ever manage to conduct an endless monologue on the plight of women with a dry throat? Ephron's final review for us was of "Two for the Road," a 2006 memoir by the food writers Jane and Michael Stern. She loved it. "I share with Jane Stern a passion for Jell-O," she wrote, "that unites us although we've never met."