Around Indies

Bookends & Beginnings Celebrates Grand Opening

Owner Nina Barrett hosted a grand opening celebration for Bookends & Beginnings in Evanston, Illinois, this past Saturday. The store is in the former location of Bookman’s Alley, an antiquarian bookstore that served area residents and visitors for more than 30 years.

Visitors to Bookends are noting its “fresh,” “open” and “homey” feel, Barrett told The Daily Northwestern. The store offers an inventory of both popular and “vintage” books, a special cooking section, and a dedicated space where customers can share ideas.

Barrett said a lot of work still needs to be done to kick off the second phase of her business, including negotiating with the city to sell the store’s cookbooks at the local farmers’ market and establishing an e-commerce website.

The opening celebration featured a raffle that asked customers to submit their “top three books.” Barrett plans to compile the results into lists that she will display in the store to promote the sharing of ideas.

Colorado Springs’ Bookstore Plans August Opening

Mountain Fold Books, a nonprofit independent bookstore and reading room that will focus on contemporary small-press books, journals, and magazines, is set to open in August, the Gazette reported.

“We’re focusing on books that are either works of art themselves or topical. The type of works that don’t easily translate to an online medium,” said visual artist Marina Eckler, who is opening the store with University of Colorado at Colorado Springs student Jonathan Fey.

In addition to selling books, Mountain Fold will offer a lending service that will work like a public library with a small subscription fee, Fey told the Gazette. The space will also have a small gallery that will feature print making and text-based visual art.

In October, the store received a $10,000 Ingenuity Grant from the Pikes Peak Community Foundation, which has been used to help pay for the 765-square-foot space a block south of the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum in a developing area that will soon house a brewery and a 33-unit apartment building.

On the Dot Books to Open in Farmers’ Market Stall

In a prelude to opening a bricks-and-mortar location in another 18 to 24 months, Yooree Losordo is opening On the Dot Books & More this Friday as a book stall at her local farmers’ market in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Shelf Awareness reported this week. The stall will feature mostly cookbooks, food-related memoirs, and children’s books about food and cooking, as well as some bestsellers and the work of local artists.

“Between inventory and fixtures and everything else, it’s just so expensive to open a new store,” Losordo told Shelf. “We’re hoping that before we open, we’ll have already built up a huge local following.”

By the end of the summer, Losordo plans to launch an IndieCommerce website and this fall she wants to provide curated book displays to other local businesses, including gardening stores, craft stores, and cafés. She also hopes to do readings and author events at venues around Dorchester and to develop a books and culture podcast.

Inklings Reviews, Video Clips Featured

Inklings Bookshop in Yakima, Washington, provides the Yakima Herald with a book review each week, and now the paper is adding a short video clip on its blog to accompany the review.

In this week’s clip, Inkling’s owner, Susan Richmond, talks about the Homesman by Glendon Swarthout (S&S), which she told BTW would be great book club read and will soon be a movie starring Tommy Lee Jones, Hilary Swank, and Meryl Streep.