About Bookstores

16 Mar

First Class Bookstore for the Second City

Chicago's The Seminary Co-op Bookstore, housed in the basement of Chicago Theological Seminary, was founded in 1961 when 17 students from the University of Chicago and area seminaries each invested $10 to open a co-operative and, shortly after, the bookstore. It has since expanded and has two more branches -- 57th Street Books and The Newberry Library bookstore -- with each store maintaining its own character and the initial co-operative business plan.

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16 Mar

Books & Books to Open a New Location

Florida's Books & Books, which in November opened a new location inside the Delray Beach headquarters and showroom of Levenger, Inc., will open another location in April at Bal Harbour Shops, an upscale shopping center north of Miami Beach.

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16 Mar

Second Story Looks to Stay Put

Second Story Book Shop in Chappaqua, New York, is in the middle of a wrangle to stay in its current location. The 32-year-old bookstore is on a month-to-month lease and ownership of their building recently changed. The new landlord is considering renting to a new tenant, while the neighborhood is working to keep the bookstore. Currently, the bookstore is in "limbo," said owner Joan Ripley.

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09 Mar

Knoxville Bookseller Seizes the Book(store)


Flossie McNabb and her daughter, Bunny Sonneland, in front of the store.


The four owners of Carpe Librum. Left to right: Claire Poole, Flossie McNabb, Martha Arnett, Shiela Wood-Navarro.

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02 Mar

Tattered Cover Considering a Fourth Location

Denver's Tattered Cover, which in mid-November opened a new store in the Highlands Ranch Town Center, is involved in a project that may lead to the opening of another location in a new retail center on the main east-west corridor in Denver, at Colfax Avenue and Elizabeth Street. The new store would be the fourth for Tattered Cover, which includes the original Cherry Creek location and a store in Lower Downtown Denver (LoDo). The Denver Film Society and Twist & Shout record store would also be part of the proposed center.

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01 Mar

Variety & Customer Service Key to Pages for All Ages' Success

Pages for All Ages Books, Music, Cafe & DVDs has been serving the Illinois communities of Champaign-Urbana-Savoy since June 1988. Brandon and Susan Griffing founded the store, but in a different location, with far less floor space and fewer titles, and certainly no DVDs.

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23 Feb

Script Offers Help in Handling Scam Relay Calls

Among the scams plaguing bookstores across the country is one in which fraudulent orders are placed through the relay telephone system developed to assist the hearing-impaired. To help new employees understand the scam and to provide an appropriate response to a relay call, Molly Seamans, the assistant manager of Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, put together a relay call reference sheet, which is shown to all new employees when they join the staff, and a dialog sheet, which is taped near the telephones at the store's information desk.

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16 Feb

The Spirit of '76 Turns 40


Bob Hugo at the 40th anniversary of The Spirit of '76 Bookstore.

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09 Feb

Bookseller Pens Her Adventures in The King's English

The King's English Bookshop is a fixture in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Betsy Burton is a local and national fixture as its proprietor. Her 27-year odyssey as a bookseller in the Mormon hub, and as a community activist, writer, and mother of a child with multiple disabilities, is chronicled in The King's English: Adventures of an Independent Bookseller, to be published in May by Gibbs Smith.

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02 Feb

The Old Meets the New at Cape Cod Bookstore

Titcomb's Book Shop in East Sandwich, Massachusetts, got its curious start in 1967 when Ralph and Nancy Titcomb bought a house in Connecticut and found caches of valuable books and documents throughout their home and barn. An impromptu business began when they sold their finds and then launched a mail-order business and had their eight children collating and compiling a catalog.

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26 Jan

Polar Express Delivers Prize to Minnesota Bookstore

The Polar Express Ride for Reading, a national marketing campaign developed by Houghton Mifflin and Book Sense and timed with the release of Warner Brothers' animated adaptation of Chris Van Allsburg's The Polar Express this past holiday season, spurred many booksellers to create special events, utilizing the party k

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26 Jan

Porter Square Up and Running Well

Dale Szczeblowski, co-owner of the three-month-old Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said that during his 25-plus years of bookselling, owning his own store hadn't been a career aspiration. "My dream was never to own my own bookstore," said Szczeblowski.

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26 Jan

Copperfield's Books to Make a Move

Copperfield's Books recently announced that it would be moving its current downtown Napa store to a new location in Napa's Bel Aire Plaza in mid-February. The new location, a 9,700-square-foot space, will house 60,000 - 70,000 book titles, 1,200 magazine titles, and will be the largest bookstore in Napa's history. "I am absolutely thrilled at the opportunity of being the biggest bookstore in the Napa valley," said CEO Tom Montan.

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20 Jan

Bookseller Breathes New Life Into Baltimore

While sitting in Los Angeles' Bodhi Tree Bookstore, it dawned on Susan Weis (it hit her "like a stack of books!") that Baltimore also needed a bookstore for the mind, body, and spirit -- a place "where like-minded people could gather for discussions and meetings in a space rich with literature and gifts, and for those new to their spiritual journey," she said. To learn the book business, Weis attended the Bookseller School presented by Paz & Associates in conjunction with ABA at BookExpoAmerica this past spring.

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20 Jan

Illinois Booksellers Make the News

Illinois, the land where Abe Lincoln plowed the fields with a book in his pocket, currently abounds with news stories featuring independent bookstores, many of them Book Sense stores. Business and consumer magazines, along with suburban newspapers, have recently published articles touting the various passionate and community-minded people who run bookstores around the state.

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About ABA

The American Booksellers Association, a national not-for-profit trade organization, works with booksellers and industry partners to ensure the success and profitability of independently owned book retailers, and to assist in expanding the community of the book.

Independent bookstores act as community anchors; they serve a unique role in promoting the open exchange of ideas, enriching the cultural life of communities, and creating economically vibrant neighborhoods.

Contact

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