About Bookstores

Booklovers were treated to a celebration of independent bookselling with an all-star cast on a recent weekly installment of The Book Report, on KMLB radio in Monroe, Louisiana. On the August 15 show, founders and hosts Elisabeth Grant-Gibson and Pat Grant, the owners of Windows a bookshop, interviewed Louis Buzbee (The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, Graywolf) and Betsy Burton (The King's English, Gibbs Smith).

Part II of a Bookselling This Week miniseries about web-centric undertakings that will help you stay current -- and stay connected to the tens of millions of people who engage in online conversations about books and reading. (Read Part I, "Booksellers Befriend MySpace.")

Becoming a blogger changed Jessica Stockton Bagnulo's life.

Read Between the Lynes, a general bookstore in the charming town of Woodstock, Illinois, quietly celebrated its second anniversary in July. Arlene Lynes, who opened the 1,700-square-foot store on the town square in July 2005, explained that there were several reasons for the store's low-key anniversary.

ABA welcomed to its membership ranks 11 indie bookstores that opened in July, as well as one branch of an existing store. In addition, one additional bookstore opened in June, bringing the total for the month of June to 13. (To read about the June bookstore openings, click here.)

After almost two decades of bookselling, Bennett Books in Wyckoff, New Jersey, will shut its doors by September 30. As owner John Bennett told BTW, when a business that's been around for 19 years closes, there's never one reason for it. Bennett cited a number of factors, which included a rent increase, a sales decrease, and the abundance of free information available on the Internet. "A bookstore can't compete with free," he said.

In 1951, journalist Edward R. Murrow debuted his This I Believe series on CBS Radio.

As stated in the Acknowledgements of Poems From Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak (Marc Falkoff, Ed., University of Iowa Press) collecting the poems for this volume was "no easy task." It took many human rights lawyers, as well as other Constitutional and human rights advocate

Military personnel on active duty overseas are a little closer to their young children at bedtime through the efforts of Quail Ridge Books & Music in Raleigh, North Carolina. In association with the United Through Reading/Military Program, the bookstore organized an event for Memorial Day that encouraged customers to purchase children's books for donation to the USO program, which strives to help military families stay connected.

Since 1986, Fact & Fiction in Missoula, Montana, and its owner, Barbara Theroux, have been fixtures in the city's cultural and literary life.