Happy eighth anniversary of soft opening, two days later. We get a present (cupcakes) and I get a present (an old shopping bag)

It was eight years ago, this past Monday that Boswell had our soft opening. We're going to be celebrating our 8th birthday (or anniversary, whatever you prefer), on Saturday, April 29, 7 pm, when I'll be in conversation with Liam Callanan, who wrote the Boswell essay in My Bookstore, which is coming out in paperback later this month. The new edition will have several new bookstore profiles.

April 29 is also Independent Bookstore Day.

And it's also the minus one year anniversary of the release of Liam Callanan's Paris By the Book. How exciting is that? We'll do a very, very early preview, of course. Just a tiny one, as I don't want to give everything about the new book away.

One of our favorite Friends of Boswell gave us two presents, one for booksellers (cupcakes) and one for me. And what do you think it was? It was a paper shopping bag from Polsky's of Akron, a store I visited after they went out of business but before it was redeveloped. One particularly great thing about Polsky's was that it was build on a hill, so you could enter on the first floor on one side of the building and could take the escalator up to an upper floor and exit out of the other side of the building. Yes, I got to visit the downtown Akron O'Neil's before it closed.

The store was run by the Polsky Brothers, even after it was sold to Hahn (later Allied) Stores. More from the Akron Beacon Journal.

I always look to the Department Store Museum website for old photos.

And yes, there is a bookstore in the building, a Barnes and Noble college store run for The University of Akron.

Officially this is not a shopping bag but a "flex box" made by Equitable Bag, which dominated the shopping bag trade and was based in Queens, near where my grandmother lived when I was young. Had I known better, I would have asked to tour the factory?

And the next day our new plastic bags came in. I chose a darkish turquoise which seems to be one of the "it" colors for the book industry. Look at the selection of books we have (all author events, no less) that look nice with the new bag, all available for purchase on the Boswell website. Maybe "Readers" doesn't have enough green to be in this photo, but I included it anyway.

Here are the books:
--Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo, by Boris Fishman

--Good Grief, by Theresa Caputo

--Books for Living, by Will Schwalbe

--The Nest, by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney (coming Saturday, April 15, 2 pm, at Boswell for our book club day presentation)

--Jake the Fake Keeps It Real, by Craig Robinson and Adam Mansbach, illustrated and autographed by Keith Knight

--The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend, by Katarina Bivald (and on that one, we've run out of signed copies as she came last May).

As a bonus the Polsky's and Boswell bags look very nice together.