bookstores
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The Downside of Owning a Bookstore
Garrison Keillor is the host of “A Prairie Home Companion,” an author, and the owner of an independent bookstore in St. Paul, Minnesota, but even he doesn’t get everything he wants: …the worst thing [about the bookselling business] is that…
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Rumpus Round-Up: The Fight to Unionize a Bookstore
Late last month, employees of Book Culture, an independent New York City bookstore, voted to unionize. Five employees were promptly fired. Punitively firing employees who participate in labor unions violates federal labor law. On July 2, the remaining workers went…
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Wimpy Bookstore with Strong Ideas
How does a child experience a book? It’s such a different experience reading on a tablet or a smartphone. A physical book has a heft, a permanence that you don’t get digitally. So our hope is that the bookstore will…
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100,000 Free Books Dumped in Skip
Cut to a skip adjacent the River Foyle in Derry, Ireland, where over 100,000, count ‘em, one-hundred thousand, books lie in massive piles, free for the taking. “It’s heartbreaking to see what was once my life’s work being dumped into…
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Building a Better Bookstore
The 21st century bookstore needs to adapt to new ways of doing business to stave off competition from the Internet. And simply getting customers into stores isn’t enough—keeping up requires adding new attractions like literary sommeliers and better in-store event…
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A (Bookstore) Affair to Remember
Springtime makes us think about past relationships, and maybe there are none more romantic than the ones we’ve shared with the bookstores we’ve worked at. Janet Potter writes in The Millions about her own history with bookstores: My life became inseparable from the bookstore.…
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Bookstores and Gentrification
Last week, the New York Times wrote about the end of Manhattan’s bookstore culture as the shops follow the city’s literary scene into the outer boroughs. Now Dustin Kurtz over at MobyLives raises the possibility that bookstores are responsible for…
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Independent Bookstores Might Just Make It After All
Rumors of independent bookstores’ demise may be at least somewhat exaggerated. On the day before Christmas, New York’s iconic Strand Book Store tweeted that it just had the “best sales day in the history of 86 years at the store”!…
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Authors Try Their Hands at Bookselling for a Day
Ever wonder what would happen if a bunch of well-known authors invaded your favorite indie bookstore? This past weekend, patrons around the country saw it happen. Sherman Alexie’s “Indies First” project successfully launched with writers around the nation volunteering at…
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The Return of the Indie Bookstore
Could Amazon actually be helping indie bookstores? It seems counterintuitive, but after a devastating reduction in numbers in the late ’90s, the American Booksellers’ Association has finally started to grow—albeit slowly—since 2005. Nate Hoffelder at the Digital Reader argues that…
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Amazing Bookshops from around the World
A character in Jim C. Hines’s Libriomancer calls bookstores “the closest thing I have to a church.” If you, too, worship at the altar of crowded shelves and cracked spines, you’ll adore this list of ten unique bookstores from around the…
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Rumpus Video Premiere & Interview with Golden Suits
I think the part that gets me most excited is being inspired for a song by something that’s outside of music.