After years of dreaming and almost two years of planning, Jessica Stockton Bagnulo and Rebecca Fitting finally opened Greenlight Bookstore in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn. I’m well aware of Greenlight Bookstore’s opening even though I live 3,000 miles away and have never been to Brooklyn. How did they do that?

Before you buy your bookcases for your new bookstore, take some time to figure out what display method will be the easiest for you to maintain and show your books off to best advantage.

There is no book or article that can map out your success, but there are plenty of highways toward failure. I know I have a long way to go, but you’re in a good spot when you know what you’re doing.

a guest post by Jo Canham of Blarney Books
For information on becoming a contributor click here..
How We Came to Be: Part 2
Part 1 can be found here…

So here I am, sitting next to the baptismal …

I signed the lease and spent any and all of my extra cash from my paying job to buy library red paint and material for my counters and bookshelves. I needed to make approximately 700 square feet into the best little bookstore I could. After everything was ready, the lease signed (one year, which I consider my trial run), the new books ordered and the used books acquired, I hung up the open sign on April 3(my birthday).

I loved finding an out of print or hard to fine title, even one with a dedication in a flowery script would have me buzzing. As a bookseller, I had no experience. I had a barrage of questions, all of the most obvious ones: what to buy, where to buy it, how to sell it…

Another nugget of insight from one of Canada’s premier used bookstores Fair’s Fair of Calgary, Thanks George . Please take a moment to visit Fair’s Fair.

Google and Microsoft started in times like these.
I remember hearing …

Yesterday, I picked up the key for a strip mall storefront that I hope to transform into a
profitable used bookstore. The store, cleverly named Blue Plate Books, aims to serve up a
healthy helping of books at affordable – ‘blue plate special’ – prices. Our byline? “Feeding
Your Need to Read”

The Bookshop Blog will be opening a new section on the site and we need your help. We will be starting up a Bookstore Profile section in the hopes of giving you a little insight into your fellow bookshop owners, at the same time we hope that we can promote your shop a bit.

Once again it is time to see if any of you are interested in contributing a post to our site. The last time we put out a little feeler like this the result was very positive. We received a lot of very interesting articles, from a Dream of Opening a Bookstore to a fantastic trip to the Pulpwood Queen’s Girlfriend Weekend.