A Look at ABA Board Candidate Becky Anderson

Becky Anderson

American Booksellers Association Board of Directors ballots must be postmarked by April 17 and returned in a special postage-paid envelope to accountant KPMG by April 24.

Director candidates on the ballot are Becky Anderson of Anderson's Bookshops in Naperville and Downers Grove, Illinois; Beth Puffer of Bank Street Bookstore in New York City; and Gayle Shanks of Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona. Shanks is also on the ballot for a one-year term as Vice-President/Secretary, and Russ Lawrence of Chapter One Book Store in Hamilton, Montana, for a first term as ABA President.

BTW recently had a chance to talk to Anderson about her bookstore and about her focus if elected to the ABA Board.

Becky Anderson and her three brothers are the sixth generation of Andersons to run their family's businesses, which include Anderson's Bookshops in Naperville and Downers Grove; the 131-year-old pharmacy, Oswald's; and W.W. Wickel, a children's book wholesaler that handles school book fairs and educational events. A co-owner of all three businesses, Anderson is also the group's marketing and events coordinator. She is the children's book buyer for the bookstores and the sole buyer for the wholesale business.

In 2002, Anderson won the Charles S. Haslam Award for Excellence in Bookselling presented by the Southeast Booksellers Association and the Women's National Book Association's Lucile Micheels Pannell Award for Best Children's Bookseller in a general bookstore.

"Being involved in every possible way with the community, including the schools" has been Anderson's philosophy. This involvement has garnered the businesses an impressive number of awards including the Naperville Chamber of Commerce Retail Business of the Year Award and the Illinois Family Business of the Year award, both in 2001, and the Illinois State Board of Education Exemplary Partnership Award and the District 203 and 204 Partnership Award.

Anderson is a firm believer in participating in a strong downtown organization, and as such she serves as marketing chair and board member of the Downtown Naperville Alliance. She is a member of the Naper Days marketing and children's committees, as well as a member of the Naperville Sunrise Rotary.

Anderson is also co-founder of Naperville Reads, a community reading program co-sponsored by Anderson's Bookshop, the Naperville Public Libraries, and Naperville's school districts, and a board member and founding partner of the Midwest Library Festival. Another program founded by Anderson, Andrea's Angels, collects, sorts, and distributes new and gently used books to disadvantaged children and schools throughout Chicago and Northern Illinois.

Anderson has been president of the Great Lakes Booksellers Association, a member of ABA's Education Task Force and Booksellers Advisory Council, and a director on the board of the Association of Booksellers for Children.

Describing her nomination to the ABA Board as "an honor," Anderson said, "To work with other booksellers I've so admired [would be exciting], and I'd love to be able to do more for all of us."

Her primary interest is in "making us all better business people." She said, "We all have the passion for the books, now we need to look at the best practices -- to run our stores like businesses, but keep that passion as well."

Of initiatives sponsored by ABA over the past few years, Anderson said, "I've been very impressed with the education programming. I've participated on the educational task force and learned a lot. I'm also very interested in fostering good relationships with the publishers -- keeping avenues open and keeping us foremost in their minds."

Anderson envisions, somewhat fancifully, a "bookseller make-over project." She said, "What if we could take a bookseller and apply the lessons of 'The 2 % Solution,' and all the other best practices information, and demonstrate where they were and where they ended up. We could hold [this bookseller] up as an example -- that all these ideas work and can make [a bookseller] successful." --Nomi Schwartz

(A profile of Board candidate Beth Puffer appeared in last week's BTW.)