Now to be clear: I’m not one of those people who sees Barnes & Noble, or Borders, as the root of all evil in book sales. They employ passionate, dedicated people who truly do love books, and even the corporate ownership, at least when I was working there, was very serious about selling not only the most popular or obvious books, but also books that in many cities might not otherwise be seen. However, a store of this size takes an enormous amount of simple grunt work; receiving, shelving, accounting, staff scheduling etc etc, and there’s nothing romantic at all about any of that!

I still harbor the dream of a small bookshop, but I’ve realized that it’s pretty much a contradiction in terms to run a small general bookshop. The most successful small bookshops that I have seen, in the cities that I’ve lived in, have all been specialist stores. Stores that specialized in children’s books, cookbooks, sci-fi, mystery, or other niches.

What I would most like to do is to have a shop that combines three elements; cookbooks, gourmet kitchen equipment and ingredients, and a demonstration kitchen/classroom for cooking classes. I think each section would leverage the other, and would be quite successful. But of course, the capital required to set up such a shop would be very serious