A New Acrylic Display for Our Bookmark Calendar, A Waffle Maker for Daniel Shumski, The Mystery of the Two "Found" Covers, and A Selfie with Lisa McMann.

1. A bookseller asked me what we were going to do with our bookmark calendars, but we were using the plexy for another sideline, so we decided to buy a new plexy. These multi-tiered acrylic displays are very, very helpful at Boswell, and only occasional fall and break.

We decided that the only thing wrong with our existing displays is that tended to be limited to two or three tiers, and so we upgraded to four. And then the craziest thing happened. Without measuring, it turned out that the display exactly fit the twenty styles of bookmark calendars that Amie brought in, meaning no rotation of titles on her part. How the heck did the happen when we were just winging it? Sometimes things just work out.

2. It took longer than we hoped, but we finally put together a program to backup our event with the dynamic Dan Shumski, author of Will it Waffle: 53 Irresistible and Unexpected Recipes to Make in a Waffle Iron. At first we hoped to have a restaurant help us with a dinner, but we couldn't get any takers. A lot of breakfast places do not make waffles, it turns out, and a lot of waffle places are franchises (meaning it's tough for them to do something out of the box) or are located too far from the store. While we sometimes go a half hour away for things like a library event, this seemed too complicated to do too far afield, as our best hope was to get our customers engaged.

In the end,, we found the perfect companion in Julie Pandl, author of Memoir of the Sunday Brunch, and marketing person for Boelter SuperStore. Pandl documents her time on the brunch line in her memoir, but I suspect they rarely used it to make, say, waffled meatballs, except perhaps as a prank. Ms. Pandl agreed to make samples and demo a recipe at our event, and all we had to do was find her a waffle maker. The only problem? It's not as easy as you think to find a classic (that reads "non-Belgian", where the indentations are too dep), rectangular (that reads "not round") waffle maker. We finally picked one up at the Bayshore Boston Store, with the help of Carla in the housewares department.

3. I bring up a mystery that has not yet been solved in her current series of Margaret Peterson Haddix, "The Missing." For one thing, we long thought that the series would have seven installments, and it turns out with the release of Revealed, there are now eight. It's sort of like the fourth book in a trilogy, which is not that unsuaul. But stranger than that, when we got our lrage order of volume one, Found, it turns out our stock was equally divided between bluish covers and purplish covers. And we had a lot of copies to sample.


It's probably just an issue of dye lots, but I couldn't help thinking there was some sort of secret code involved.

Speaking of our event with Haddix and McMann, there's no consistency with when we get author photos and when we don't, but for some reason, the camera was flashing a lot during our two days (four events, including the school visits) with our authors. I have some nice photos of Ms. Haddix and Ms. McMann with students, with principals, in front of their Powerpoints, and so forth, but for sheer amusement, nothing beats this silly selfie with Lisa McMann, right?

That sort of catches me up on the posts I hoped to write last week. And now I'm already behind for this week! So goeth life in a bookstore.