When a Bookstore Moves Closer, or Further Away--A Visit to Three Stores on the Way to Worcester.

What value is a trip anywhere if there isn't at least one bookstore detour? Being that I had to get from Logan Airport to Worcester for my talks at Holy Cross, I thought about what bookstore I hadn't seen that was not too far out of the way. Then I remembered reading that Newtonville Books, which I'd never been to, was planning a move. And I'd never been to Newton, despite it being in my consciousness since the days of watching Zoom, where every kid who wrote in seemed to be from there.

The store was opened by Tim Huggins in 1998, and quickly became one of those places that was constantly making news in the book world for its innovative events, combining books and brews, books and rock music. There's some memory in my brain saying there weren't any section headers in the store. Now that's a store created for discovery!

Huggins sold the store to Mary Cotton in 2007. And now they've decided to move the store from Newtonville to Newton Centre. The former is a shopping district with a nice assortment of cafes, but it is only on a bus line. There is a commuter train stop but apparently stopping every two hours isn't convenient for many people. Their new location is near a T stop, which they think will really make a difference. And there's still a decent amount of parking. One thing that's interesting about Massachusetts retail in general is that there seems to be a higher density of bank branches than in Wisconsin.

I scouted the new location and then headed to the original storefront, which is open through March. Almost immediately I found (and subsequently bought) a signed copy of Peter Orner's Love and Shame and Love, which I'd been talking about with Joel Berkowitz at UWM's Center for Jewish Studies. The new store is getting out of the used book biz and is expanding the kids' area. But the biggest change is that the store as it stands now has a dedicated events space, with chairs set up pretty much all the time. They'll be moving to the Boswell-preferred method of cases on casters, that you move out of the way for events.

At the checkout, I wound up talking with Sarah (contact me if I should drop the "h"), who I'd met at a bookseller conference about a year and a half before, and she gave me more details. Whatever changes they make, they plan to continue their fine events schedule. I left a note for Hannah Pittard, who was there on Thursday for The Fates will Find Their Way.  And we chatted a bit about Andre Dubus's Townie, appearing on February 28.

But really, the event I wanted to attend was their celebrity book club discussion, led by Allegra Goodman, on February 16 7 pm. The book selection is Middlemarch. Can you imagine a more interesting evening? I think I could have chartered a trip with our friend Jane's class from Cardinal Strich.

Oh, and I love their signature walls in the back. It's something they can't move physically, but Tim's going to help them move it in spirit.

So enough excitement for me, so you'd think. But Claudia cut out an interesting article about a bookstore in Webster, about a half hour away, called Booksellers Gourmet. The store is tight, at about 1000 square feet, and the owner does just about everything herself. Why not visit?

One of the upsides of the possibilities of huge numbers of tiny bookstores would be how the personality of the proprietor comes to the fore. You don't have enough time to do everything, so you have to decide what's most important to you.  In this case, there was a mix of new and used books, art on the walls, quirky gift items, some chocolate, and a small cafe. Important new titles from Russell Banks and Mark Bittman shared the stage with pulp comics from a deceased author of note and artisan pottery. There was a second-hand room with "collectibles" from the 1920s and in the kids room, an assortment of Melissa and Doug toys.

The current art on display was a called "The Heart of the Matter", a multi-artist display with a timely theme. Here's a list of their other art shows.  I could criticize this or that, but then I thought about how the owner was doing this all pretty much by herself. Amazing! In keeping with the theme of the show, this store was definitely a endeavor straight from the heart of its owner.

As we were already wandering around, I asked my sister if we could visit the current location of Tatnuck Bookseller in Westborough. As you may know, Tatnuck was the beloved bookstore in Worcester. My sister said that if you went there for lunch, you'd always run into someone you know, sometimes three to four people. They opened this branch in Westborough several years ago, but wound up having to close the original location and sell off this one to new owners.

Unlike their first two locations, which were in neighborhoods, this Tatnuck shares a big box strip with national and regional chains. It's still a very large space, with books taking up a little less than half. Like many of my friends at other bookstores, there's a great number of gift items, from games and toys, to mugs and kitchenware.

If I knew the owners, I'd probably suggest more journals and boxed cards* which seem to work very well in most bookstores I visit, and less ceramic collectibles. Similarly, I might suggest playing with book sections, adding a lot more fiction, and decreasing shelf space of some of the more thinly-stocked sections like photography. Hey, some folks charge thousands of dollars for this expert service...

But in the end, cosmetic changes aren't really what's needed in order to turn my sister into a regular; everybody makes a calculation of distance and opportunity and connection as variables, and this adds up to...it's just too far.  She needs an indie bookstore in the Worcester area**, home of several major colleges (Holy Cross, Clark, WPI, Assumption, Worcester State) and three enormous hospital campuses. As I learned in Atlanta, however, folks say they want an indie bookstore, and then are unhappy that it isn't exactly what they wanted and don't support them, and this is the unhappy house-of-card moment for indies. How do we figure out who we should please the most and still stay true to our visition, because you can't please everyone and if you don't love the store you've created, you can't put your all into it?

And the conversation continues. Back to Milwaukee to see if I learned anything. Locating closer to a light rail station is pretty much out of the question.

*For journals, how can you go wrong with Paperblanks, and for boxed cards, it seems like Galison was an obvious addition. I could be wrong, but I didn't see a presence of either at the store.

**Of course she would love it in the city limits, but admitted that just about everybody also shops in Shrewsbury.

On Sherry Turkle and Being Connected, and How They Relates to Books and Bookstores--a Visit to Holy Cross in Worcester.

About a month ago, my sister was telling me about an interesting project going on at Holy Cross, in conjunction with their Monserrat freshman immersion program. The students were participating in a digital turn-off day (officially called Connections), and as part of the experiment, they were reading Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other.

After discussing it with some of her colleagues, they decided it might be a good idea for me to talk to a few classes about the changes in publishing and bookselling over the past 25 years, with special notice paid to online vs. bricks-and-mortar bookstores, and ebooks vs. physical books,.

First I decided to read Turkle’s book, which came out last year and seems to approach the issue from two directions. In part one, Turkle, MIT professor of social studies of science and technology, explores the increasing use of robots as substitutions for human behavior. This can be things like Tamagotchi and Furby toys, to the development of the more advanced My Real Baby and AIBO the robot dog. And then there are the robots that are more than toys, like the development of Paro, a pet seal for the elderly that has become quite popular in parts of the world.

In part two, she looks at the rise of less personal forms of communication, from text and instant messaging, to social networks like Facebook. At the same time, she investigates folks who spend time on Second Life and World of Warcraft. Connected or not? Well, it’s Turkle’s thesis that Facebook and even texting are just another avatar, a place to reinvent yourself. And in both cases, what were once personal connections get reduced to data. Those former connections—the personal interactions, particularly phone calls, are shunned.

At one extreme, technology becomes the substitute for the living being; at the other, people sort become part of the technology. And I guess both ideas describe what is going on in the book world. The physical bookstore becomes a website. The bookseller becomes a checkout device and a recommendation algorithm. A book tour budget is trimmed, and the savings are spent on buzz-creating social networking sites.

One thing I note about bookstores is that when you take price out of the equation (and you do have to take price out, as the prices are not "true" in a market sense—our major online competitor loses money on books to build market share), the major hurdle for competition is convenience. And I suspect folks make the decision about whether to shop online or at a physical bookstore for comparably priced items depends on how close a bookstore is and how much they like it.

All three classes went pretty well. I was surprised what a high percentage of students had been to a physical bookstore in the last few years to do something aside from buying textbooks. The last class, which ran a little longer, actually discussed how they read books, where they buy them, and how they make decisions about what to buy. And surprisingly enough for me, I think more of the students in the class read non-schoolbooks on a regular basis than I did in college.

So now it is up to the Holy Cross students, faculty and staff. Can they still stay connected without their technology? I’ll find out afterwards and who knows, maybe I’ll try to duplicate the experiment back in Milwaukee.

Whistful Wordplay Categorizes Local Literarian Lauren Fox--Whereas I Am Only Good with Alliteration. Friends Like Us out 2/14, Our Event is 2/16, 7 pm.

I wish someone would say to me, “Let’s eat vegetarian” and I would offer suggestions like “The Lentil-men’s Club.” That’s not the way my brain works, but that’s the way the synapses fire for Milwaukee-area novelist Lauren Fox, whose second novel, Friends Like Us, is being published by Knopf on February 14.

I read Fox’s first novel, Still Life with Husband, when it first came out, but I wasn’t really involved with her event, and if we met, it was briefly. But for Friends Like Us, it’s been a different story. Jason and I saw Fox at the Great Lakes Booksellers conference, where she was part of the reading room series. Then she was at the store for another authors’ launch event. And then we got to chat again at the holidays. And there I found out that her childhood babysitter was our good friend Rose Anne. And there are probably 700 other connections. So it goes when you work on the floor of a bookstore, but even more so when you own it, I suppose.

The new novel is about a young woman sort of stuck in the maturity process. I kind of call this genre slacker novels, only I wonder whether this denigrates them. That’s not the case—I read plenty of them. In fact, we just hosted novelist and poet Leigh Stein, whose novel The Fallback Plan certainly fits the bill.

The other thing to note is that they are often as different from each other as noir mysteries are from cozies. Categorizing can do more harm than good. But I suppose I am drawn to these types of stories. You can only imagine that while there are a good number of “lifer” booksellers, there are just as many who are between gigs. You’d be surprised at how many resume cover letters imply if not state, “I don’t know what I want to do so I’m thinking bookselling because I like to read.” And just about all of us start out that way--you turn around and realize you've been bookselling for a quarter century.

Willa, however, writes freelance copy for an ad agency, and also works in a flower shop. I wouldn’t exactly call her a flower arranger as that implies a skill that she doesn’t exactly have. Her friend Jane clean houses, babysits, and writes poetry, Her once-gawky high school friend, now filled out? He’s a part-time librarian sans MLS, which is pretty much bookseller equivalence.

So Ben’s back and though he’s got his eye on Willa, she can’t get past the high-school friendship and so he winds up dating her best friend Jane. Willa’s got, well, issues. Her parents had a messy divorce. Her brother has a series of messed-up relationships and has recently been kicked out of his apartment for yet another. She’s had a short-lived affair with her boss, only he pushed her aside for someone else.

Issues indeed. Willa’s got a lot of work to do to recover from the sins of her parents. It’s not just a question of forgiveness, but just even an acknowledgement that we, as humans, are prone to mistakes, and we have to work through them. Friends and family let us down, and it’s what we do with that knowledge that we become adults. Fox may see the world through a bit of a fractured lens, but there’s a sense of humanity about this separates it from some slacker novels that fall into satire and meanness.

But really, whether Fox wrote a coming-of-age novel or a murder mystery, her sense of wordplay is what separates Friends Like Us from the pack. Fox is the master of clever bon mot, and by keeping most of the voice as Willa’s, she’s able to create a hard and soft woman both, cracking wise through her disappointments. And this is a sad story. Couples break up or come to relationship détente. Friends separate. Career paths, when you finally map them, turn out to be disappointing. But how can you be sad for long when the path is filled with such silliness, such as orderly Jane’s poem, The Universe is a Vacuum Cleaner, in which she rhymes “clog of hair” with “fog of despair”?

Another piece of fun Fox has is with her setting. It’s Milwaukee to be sure (though not necessarily the building below right), but as she did with Still Life with Husband, she chooses to neither to make up an imaginary city nor use actual landmarks with their names intact, although there is an expedition to the Domes. I don’t know if folks know that several of her first novel’s scenes were set at White’s Bookshop and that Schwartz (as in Harry W.) is “black” in German. In the new novel, among other places, several characters head to the River Rock coffee shop. And a wedding is planned at Alewife Park. Can I just assume that is a smelly take on “Atwater?”

The only problem that ever happens (and this is not easy; happens with the best of writers) is that it’s probably enough that the protagonist and the higher power who created this world are wordsmiths of the first order. It’s tempting to give every other character these mad language skills. I think that’s why a lot of my favorite humorists stumble when they write novels. It’s hard and sometimes boring to write the straight men (and women). Fox for the most part avoids this trap, but like a rough on a golf course, she sometimes hits into it.

That sort of aside makes me wonder what it would be like to have Fox write a collection of humorous essays. And then I start thinking of how much fun everyone will have at Fox’s event at Boswell. She’s speaking/reading on Thursday, February 16, at 7 pm. Hope you’ll join the celebration, and you’ll be forgiven and even welcomed if you make a few jokes along the way.

How Did Our Book Club Discussion For Townie Go in Advance of Our Feb. 17 Event, Plus Upcoming Selections, Including a Special Mystery Group Guest on Feb. 27.

A little change-up this month. Due to a combined family visit/talk at a school, I didn't have time to write up our notes for the in-store book club discussion of Townie, by Andre Dubus III, who is coming to Boswell on Friday, February 17, 7 pm. So instead, her are my impressions of Dubus's memoir, and why it was a great choice for what I hope to accomplish with book club reading.

One of the things I hear all the time from our in-store lit book club attendees is that they never would have read what we had picked up outside the group. Generally they are grateful for the expansion of boundaries. Usually at least one member is not. But I think each stretch tends to be a little different, and that is the point of the group—to read great contemporary literature with enough of a challenge to it that there’s something to talk about, and that it is actually more rewarding to read it with discussion than without, at least for some of us.

Townie is one of those books that stretched me. Andre Dubus III’s memoir of growing up in a string of river towns along the Merrimack River is not just about fighting to survive drugs and violence and poverty and broken families and ignorance; it’s literally about fighting. In these towns, on the wrong sides of the tracks at least, there are bullies everywhere. And worse than that, there are what bullies are when they grow up—angry, bitter, drug-and/or-alcohol addled men with nothing to lose and power to gain.

Once Dubus decides to start working out and fight back, he gets in a series of fights, many, many, many fights, that form a persona as sort of a revenge-enator. This is the case where if Townie were a novel, I might say, “Enough fighting already”, but being that its true, I just kept reading on the edge of my seat. There’s always a sense that this is the fight that’s going to kill someone, maybe Dubus. I heard one reader describe it to me as a real-life Fight Club. There’s truth to that, but I think that might be simplifying the story a bit.

In a sense, this story is a classic “what will I be when I grow up” narrative. We read memoirs all the time of famous scientists who were playing beakers at ten, of sports stars who started shooting hoops and running laps at seven. Dubus, however, did not expect to follow in the footsteps of his father, the renowned writer. In fact, Junior was barely present in III’s formative years. He split after four kids and kept his presence to weekly meetings with the gang together. Only later did each kid get an evening alone with Dad, and that was just once a month.

This is one of those memoirs that follows the path of many a great novel—how did I get from there to here? Dubus follows many paths—construction worker, prison clerk, bartender, Marxist studies graduate student, and yes, boxer. At one point, Dubus sees how drawn he is to fighting and decides to start competing in the ring. The story is a classic competition then, but that of muscles versus the brain.

Townie is also a father-son narrative of course. And because it’s a memoir, we know what happened to Junior. But there’s an unexpected narrative there as well, with an arc that sort of reminds me of reading Raymond Carver’s biography (Raymond Carver), another story of a working class guy who had a phenomenal talent for writing and less success controlling his demons. Slightly different demons, of course, but let’s just say that at least some of my readers feel that III gave Junior a bit of a pass in the story.

In all, a great book club book in my estimation. It’s outside my comfort zone, great writing, with much to talk about. That said, I know I have customers that won’t be comfortable with Townie. They’ll tell me that they hated it. This book isn’t escapism, but brutal reality. And it’s possible that you don’t really hate the story; you just might not to confront the truth of it. Dubus and most of his family escaped that life, but there were an awful lot of people left behind.

Now I should remind you that Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and other books (but not In the Bedroom, that’s his father*) is coming to Boswell on Friday, February 17, 7 pm. And yes, we still have hardcovers--the paperback, though still of trade trim, is a little mass markety in feel.
Here are our next three in-store lit group selections, all starting at 7 pm:

Monday, March 5: Swamplandia, by Karen Russell.

Short-listed for the National Book Award and one of the New York Times Book Review’s top ten books of the year, this is our second Jason pick in a row. It’s got a quirky premise (a girl growing up in a struggling, second-rate Florida alligator theme park) but don’t expect a comedy; it’s a sad and beautiful story.

Monday, April 2: Open City, by Teju Cole.
Just short-listed for the NBCC awards, Cole’s first novel was one of the best reviewed novels of last year, and was #1 on his best books of the year countdown. I have a rule that I always read his #1—that was one of our reasons for tackling The Hare with Amber Eyes, and did we go wrong? No.

Monday, April 30: Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel. Note the special date!
We read our first graphic work, though it’s not a novel, but Bechdel’s memoir of her closeted gay father. It's billed as a tragicomic, which I love. And yes, it was shortlist for the National Book Award. We’re moving to the fifth Sunday of April for this book club discussion because Bechdel will be at Boswell the following Monday, May 7, at 7 pm.

And speaking of book clubs, our mystery book club has a special guest this month. The mystery group is reading But Remember Their Names, by Hillary Bell Locke on Monday, February 27, 7 pm, a legal thriller set at the Pittsburgh Natural History Museum (yes, I know in real life it’s the Carnegie). Joinng the group will be the real-life persona of Locke, our own Michael Bowen.

I just figured out that the title of the book is a play on "Flashdance," as this series is set in Pittsburgh. I love catching that stuff.

*As Mr. Dubus III notes, if it doesn't bother you about all the Hank Williamses out there, then you shouldn't complain that he and his father are both writers and share a name.

***

Actual post-event wrap up: I wasn't that far off from the reaction.

Two Interesting Local Talk/Reading/Signings This Week--K.M. Koenigs and Abraham Louis Clark

With me out of town for several days, I did not want to over-schedule events at the store. Our event calendar has a rhythm and my time away from the store is beginning to conform to that rhythm. Though I'd much rather be gone in spring and fall, that's prime event time. It's winter (with its weather conditions) and summer (with its crowds) that give me time to do things like visit family and gift shows and conferences with other booksellers.

That said, we do have two interesting events scheduled with local authors, the first being Tuesday, February 7, 7 pm. K.M. (Kevin) Koenigs has three works of fiction for sale at Boswell, but his newest is Cast a Cold Eye, a noir mystery set in Milwaukee. And the only problem with our timing is that it should be even colder than it is. I quote from our marketing materials below.

"In the numbing deepfreeze of January on the gray gritty streets of Milwaukee, the frozen body of a much-hated local artist is found abandoned atop the tallest building in the city. Detective Harry Kelso and his partner Jack Raney investigate, meeting a half-mad professor of German philosophy, a slime bag realtor from L.A., an alcoholic sad sack turned voyeur, the hot-bodied ex-girlfriend of the deceased, and many other suspects and informants along the way. Action, fast-paced dialogue, local color and even some urban history all make for a great hardboiled read in Cast A Cold Eye."

K. M. Koenigs lives with his wife Marsha on the Lower East Side of Milwaukee. A graduate of UC Berkeley with a degree in Literature, he teaches English as a second language when he is not writing. His first novel, Kramm, was published in 2010 and a collection of short stories, Virgil Lost and Other Stories, was published in 2011.

And then on Thursday, February 9, we're hosting Abraham Louis (Abe) Clark, author of Running Water: A Thirst Quenching 2,960 Mile Solo Run Across America. Here's more about the story.

"In 2010, one month after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake rocked Port au Prince, Haiti, 23-year old Abraham Clark set out to fulfill his dream of becoming the 15th person to run across America solo and unsupported. Caught in the middle of young love and a world racing to raise funds to save the dying country, his journey became much more than an escape from the chains of a post-college career.

His journey began as a new way to experience life without regrets, but when tragedy struck an island nation and snared the world’s attention, Abraham decided each step had to take on a greater meaning beyond his own life. This soft-spoken, humble man with big dreams managed to raise nearly $89,000 for Living Water International, a 21 year old Christian-based charity that has completed more than 10,000 projects in 26 countries that lack clean drinking water."

When Mr. Clark in, I recognized him as a regular at our adjoining coffee shop, and indeed, he is, despite the international nature of Running Water, an East Sider. And this is just one of his extreme endurance adventures that he's taken on to raise awareness of the global water crisis. We haven't even talked about his 9200 bike trip.

If you come for either of these events, please say hi to Stacie, who will likely be enjoying a hot beverage from her new Penguin Classic mug. We have an assortment of titles at $9.95. And you'll forgive me for forgetting about them--I ordered them last June. Talk about extreme backorers!

What's Selling This Week at Boswell? Post-Event Sales, Books for Classes, Film Tie-Ins (or Not).

Hardcover Nonfiction:

1. Veganomicon, by Isa Moskowitz

2. In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson

3. Eminent Outlaws, by Christopher Bram

4. Quiet, by Susan Cain

5. The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Stephen Pinker

A customer who was perusing Eminent Outlaws insisted on playing "can you name this gay outlaw writer?" He won by a landslide.  It turns out that Harry Houdini was a very bad guess.

Some years ago, we had a great sale on a small-press introvert book. I can't remember its name! But it just goes to show the bookish people are ready to buy into a pro-introvert argument that is made in Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking.

Hardcover Fiction:
1. American Dervish, by Ayad Akhtar
2. Death Comes to Pemberly, by P.D. James
3. Goodnight iPad, by Ann Droyd
4. The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson
5. The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach
6. On Canaan's Side, by Sebastian Barry

Four out of the top six hardcover fiction are post event sales. It's fascinating to me that I didn't really see this as much when I was Schwartz. I think it's because the effects were diluted among multiple stores. I'm happy to say that we are the #3 store in sales for Sebastian Barry's On Canaan's Side on Above the Treeline. A substantial percentage (I'd say one out of six, which seems high to me) of folks who are convinced to buy the book come in afterwards for one of his backlist titles.

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. Film School, by Steve Boman
2. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, by George Perec
3. Bossypants, by Tina Fey
4. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
5. Townie, by Andre Dubus III

We've still got a few students coming in for suggested titles. Buy your books already! Your first paper is due next Thursday. But aside from that, it's nice to see a pop for Townie, the book we're discussing in the in-store lit group tomorrow (Feb. 6) and we're hosting in the store for a talk on Feb. 17. Since at least one of our custromers got confused--time to make it clear, Dubus appears at Boswell on Friday, February 17, 7 pm.

Paperback Fiction:
1. The Tiger's Wife, by Téa Obreht
2. Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been, by Chase Twichell
3. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John Le Carré
4. Three Weeks in December, by Audrey Schulman
5. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson

Our HMH rep wondered last week why Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has not consistently on our bestseller list compared to say, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which has often in our top five. Honestly, I don't know. I think the sales are more evenly split on Foer's novel between the tie-in and classic cover, whereas almost all our Le Carré sales are on the new non-tie-in jacket. I also think that this market had massive sales on Foer over the course of the years, but honestly, there is a more compelling reason.

The film simply isn't playing at the Oriental or Downer, and "Tinker" is. The Downer is down the block. The Oriental is about 10 blocks away. In either case, a customer who likes the film will come over afterwards to buy the book. Customers who are planning to see the film will stop by first to read the book. But when the nearest screen is five miles away, the equation changes.

But I'm still wondering whether there's something we can do to make the book work better. Focus on one edition or the other (I don't combine isbns for sales--too confusing). Put a rec on it--hey I read the book and loved it. We'll see what happens.

Books for Kids
1. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
2. Hug Time, by Patrick McDonnell
3. Tea with Lady Sapphire, by Carl Sams
4. Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins
5. Wonderstruck, by Brian Selznick

Patrick McDonnell actually had two books in our kid top ten, with Me, Jane showing up on the tail end. The new Hug Time is the board book of a hardcover picture book from 2007. Needless to say, it is spearheading our Valentine's Day sales.

Saturday Gift Post--Finally There are New Arrivals Without Hearts or Cupcakes.

I didn't think I'd timed it that well, but it turned out that within a day of our inventory, about five gift orders arrived. This stuff tends to be very difficult to count, and it is really nice to be at a low point, not just because of the time involved, but because your payment is tied to the dollar total.

So over the next few weeks (months, really, since I stage the shipments), we'll be having new things in the store.

The first thing I received was a new shipment of reading glasses. Half-empty spinners particularly infuriate me. When I go in other retailers, I want to go up to one of the folks working there and inquire whether they have a basket or some other shelving that will accomodate the product better until the new arrivals show up. Actually, I don't mind if they are just waiting for a shipment--it's when you're pretty clear they aren't restocking; then the items should either be re-merchandised or marked down, don't you think?

And yet I am constantly guilty of my own accusations. But now we've restocked the Madison and brought in the floral San Remo. From this line, 20/20 Vision, $1 from each pair of glasses bought at Boswell goes to the ABFFE (American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression) fund.

Up next was a toy shipment. Out immediately were some three-dimensional wooden puzzles for the puzzle table (and the restocked jigsaw puzzles should also be out this weekend) and the Flexi Folk  animals that are like mini version of our popular bendy robots.

But I think my favorite item (and probably the item for which I finally opened this vendor account and placed the order) is the gymnatics monkey. It's another childhood favorite where you press the bars together and thorugh a stringed connection, the monkey does front and back flips over a bar.

There's a lot more to come. Hope I didn't over order!

Inventory is Done, Part Two.

Jason and I got here early this morning (5:30 AM) so we could redo our inventory, using a service. General Business Services got through the whole thing in four hours; it was a particularly good team, I thought. We're still pulling cards from the sections. But it had a happy ending, for as you know, our first do-it-yourself attempt crashed when it turns out one of the scanner guns malfunctioned. And yes, we didn't find out it was a problem until after the 18 hours of loading data.

So what does that all mean?
1. We're happy to say that we were less than 2% off in our inventory number.
2. I'm too tired to write a full post.