One thing many booksellers have in common is a weariness of answering questions about the publication date of the third book in Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller trilogy. It is a weariness shared by others ...
A year and a half into sole ownership of the bookstore—after twenty years with a co-owner—I’ve found my business behavior transforming. Once, I was a kind of groundskeeper with four or five bookstore ...
This year marks my 20th BEA or so (I started going back in 1989, when I was a whippersnapper in publishing, the show was called “ABA,” and it was held in venues other than the Javits Center). Though ...
The only kind of retail store I would want to open besides a bookstore is a stationery /art supply store. I have a huge weakness for thick, toothy paper and glass pots of ink, tidy rainbow displays of ...
– In-store displays that are too wide. Yes, I love Captain Underpants as much as every eight-year-old boy in the country, but a display that’s three to four feet wide is bordering on too big to fit.
It’s astonishing how accustomed we’ve all become to a certain tone in middle-grade books, a voice or mood that’s become so familiar it takes something radically different to remind us of the fact that ...
Fun for a Friday morning: I can’t resist sharing this with you caretakers of language. CollegeHumor.com has taken on the Alanis Morrissette song, “Ironic,” and given it lyrics that are in fact ironic, ...
It always amazes me how the weather drives business at the bookstore. The unseasonably warm weather in Vermont has had a very interesting effect on our shoppers. The first is, folks are coming with ...
Forget Universal and Warner Bros, folks. Children’s book illustrators have studios just as full of whimsy, magic, and fantasy, along with the advantage of also being real and personal and beautiful.
On Monday of this week, when hurricane Sandy was screaming towards the New York City area, we got a call in the morning from a woman asking about our website. Kelly, my co-worker, started talking to ...