Around Indies

Village Books Launches 12/12/12

Village Books in Bellingham, Washington, has launched 12/12/12, a plan to encourage customers to read a book each month for 12 months.

Readers can sign up through the Village Books Facebook page, Twitter feed, Goodreads group (Village Bookians), or by registering in the store. At the beginning of each month, participants will tell Village Books the title they have chosen, and in doing so, they will be entered in drawings for one of four $5 Village Books gift cards. In the middle of the month, Village Books staff will check in to see how customers like their chosen title. At the end of the month, the store will do another check to gather final opinions.

Village Books has created a PDF that participants can use to track their books throughout the year.

Malaprop’s Marks 30^th Anniversary

Emoke B’Racz, who came to the U.S. from Hungary and in 1982 opened Malaprop’s Bookstore & Café in Asheville, North Carolina, just a few doors down from its current location, is celebrating the store’s 30^th anniversary this year. Festivities began with a New Year’s Day sale, and plans include the publication of a mystery novel written by 12 area authors, as well as a new edition of a women’s poetry anthology.

“The beauty of owning your own small business is that, at least in our case, the decision is made here. This place is not that place,” B’Racz told the Citizen-Times. “I think a lot of small businesses get confused and lost because they’re watching everyone else. We’re here to do what we do. Our competition is internal, with ourselves — how to treat each other better, treat our customers better, do better financially. That’s our constant challenge. It’s not about other things that are happening.”

Spellbound on the Move

Asheville, North Carolina’s Spellbound Children’s Bookshop is in the process of moving and will reopen on February 1. The bookstore will share its new space, which is larger and brighter than its previous location, with ZaPOW!, a comics and illustration art gallery.

Spellbound, which previously shared a space with a photography studio on Asheville’s Wall Street, said it is moving to Battery Park Avenue to take advantage of its higher volume of foot traffic.

RiverRun Starts Move With Help of a Brigade

Last Thursday, about 160 customers helped RiverRun Bookstore owner Tom Holbrook move more than 250 boxes of books. Customers formed a brigade to pass the boxes from person to person along Congress Street to a storage location, according to the Union Leader. The bookstore will be closed for the month of January and will re-open in a new location on Fleet Street on February 1.

The book brigade was comprised of some of the loyal customers who, in November, rallied to save RiverRun when they learned the store would need new investors in order to remain open. Holbrook put another call out to the community two weeks ago, when he learned that the bookstore would not be able to stay in its current location through January. This “emergency departure” necessitated the book brigade to move the store’s inventory to a storage space above the new bookstore, where it will remain until the new location opens on February 1. During this time, RiverRun will continue to sell books on the store’s website.

Bookstores Recognized for Becoming Publishers

In Salon, Steve Almond wrote about the distinct advantages that independent bookstores have over their competition, such as their abilities to emphasize titles of local interest by local authors, to showcase the books on their store shelves, and, because of advances in printing, to bring books to market more quickly than traditional publishing.

Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Miami’s Books & Books, is mentioned for creating the imprint B&B Press, which published a new anthology of stories by South Florida writers called Blue Christmas: Holidays Stories for the Rest of Us.

Malaprop’s Bookstore & Café, in Asheville, North Carolina, is noted for celebrating its 30^th anniversary by reviving its Burning Bush Press with the publication of Naked Came the Leaf Peeper, which Almond called “ wonderfully goofy serial novel in the spirit of the serial mystery Naked Came the Manatee. Leaf Peeper includes chapters from Carolina authors ranging from Tony Earley to Fred Chappell.

And, in a reverse evolution, Hub City Bookshop in Spartanburg, South Carolina, grew out of the Hub City Writers Project, which supported local writers through Hub City Books, a small press that has published about 50 titles including works by local authors Ron Rash and George Singleton. When Pic-a-Book, the city’s only indie went under, Betsy Teter, Hub City’s executive director, decided to open a store. The downtown location now houses the bookstore and the press, along with a coffee shop and bakery.

“The leap into publishing by indies can be seen as the literary equivalent of the locavore movement,” wrote Almond. “It not only emphasizes local writers, and local subjects, but also asks residents to support a local business with their dollars.”