Tom Nealon …when a woman brought in a few bags of vampire books – mostly what they are calling paranormal romance – I was more inclined to look. Obviously we’ve paid some measure of attention to Anne Rice (as she’s slowly become impossible to sell) and the Twilight books have moved rapidly in and back out of the shop, but I was completely unprepared for how this phenomenon still has legs…
It’s funny – when I was packing up our 20,000 books and all of the associated detritus that collected along with them over the past five years, I swore that had to be the worst part of the move. Before that, when I was pulling down pink plywood, plastering over holes, sheet rocking and painting, … Read more
So we labor at plastering and rug removal, sheet rocking and painting (colors have been a chore to agree on – I won’t ruin the surprise as to what we chose for a scheme, but some have suggested we’d have been better off with the pink)
Last weekend we had a booth at the Boston Antiquarian Book &
Ephemera Fair which was part of Boston Antiques weekend.
..It’s funny that a recent post here was about optimism, because no where is the typical
bookseller’s lack of optimism more evident than at a book fair…
Shall I compare thee to an unread text?
Thou art less lovely but more affordable
Rough hands withdraw them not nor their pages vex…
Clicks and bricks, bricks and clicks – people throw these around, and they
are certainly descriptive of a business that operates both real world and
virtual stores, but what they lack in practice is a true synergy between
the businesses. I know for our shop that we’re really just running two
largely parallel businesses out of the same location.
Every time something is going to go terribly wrong, there are foreshadowing missteps that not only make you cringe when you look back, but also provide ample time to anticipate your undoing.
Innovation has been limited (have a look at any of the book sites via the
Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine which archives sections of the internet)- the internet is
still basically an electronic version of a print catalog, with little to
recommend it, particularly bookselling wise.
