bookstores
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Book Industry Forecast
Who doesn’t want to validate their decision to purchase an e-book by seeing it in physical form at a bookstore first? At Melville House, Dennis Johnson discusses how the rapid demise of Barnes & Noble is slowly sucking the life out…
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“The Dean of the Clerks”
If the Strand is a palace for books, then Ben McFall is king—of its fiction section, at least. A New York Times profile of McFall discusses his history with, knowledge of, and love for the legendary bookstore: “It seems like a…
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The Lonely Voice #21: So Long Adobe Books
Another bookstore closes and San Francisco yawns. But Adobe Books on 16th Street, between Valencia and Guerrero isn’t another bookstore. It is a haven, a port for lonely souls, readers.
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Help A Bookstore Out
The good news, as The Atlantic Wire reported yesterday, is many bookstores in Manhattan and Brooklyn managed to weather the storm, and should be—if they aren’t already—doing business as usual within the next day or so. The bad news is powerHouse Arena,…
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“There are two things you don’t throw out in France – bread and books”
The New York Times reported yesterday on the notable difference between independent bookstores in France, and their struggling American counterparts. The article describes the way in which government intervention and price fixing for French-language books has buoyed printed literature in…
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Eulogy for Barnes & Noble #2628: A Personal History
The bookstore I worked at in college recently closed. I hadn’t thought of the store in probably a few years, hadn’t set foot inside in considerably longer.
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RIP George Whitman, Legendary Bookseller
George Whitman, owner of Shakespeare & Company, the famous Parisian English-language bookstore, passed away yesterday. Of his 98 years of life, 60 were devoted to his bookstore (the sister shop to San Francisco’s City Lights) described as an “offbeat mix…
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St. Mark’s Saved
“Cooper Union agreed to reduce the St. Mark’s Bookshop’s rent by $2,500 a month for the next year and send students to help St. Mark’s create a more sustainable business plan.” St. Mark’s bookshop is still in business and ready…
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Bookstores, Community, Shoppers and More Community
Here’s more fuel for the dialogue on brick and mortar bookstores and their integral role in creating and supporting the literary community. HTML Giant’s got a double dose of input on the subject—a video of Matthew Stadler delineating the difference…
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Love for Bookstores that Love Small Presses
This massive Milwaukee bookstore is overflowing with small press publications—an awesome bookstore size-to-indie love ratio that doesn’t seem to happen as much as it should. Besides Woodland Pattern’s impressively diverse chapbook section, the bookstore is integral to the literature community…
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Nostalgia for the 5 Finger Discount
It’s the age of all-things digital and this era of dwindling printed publications brings with it some serious losses. Among them, is the loss of the of the five-finger discount. Stealing books, which some authors have cited as a phase…
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Drunk Book Buying
“The number of books I buy while sober is, I have noticed, inversely proportional to the number I buy while drunk. It’s a zero-sum game, as Proust once observed of wet dreams: when all the resources are consumed in the…