Around Indies

Poets & Writers on Boswell and Goldin

Boswell Book Company and its owner, Daniel Goldin, are the latest to be featured in the Poets & Writers "Inside Indie Bookstores" series. Goldin, a long-time employee of Harry W. Schwartz, opened Boswell after the Schwartz stores closed last year.

In the article, Goldin explained his philosophy of bookselling: "We have to be ahead of the game; we have to move on to the next thing when everybody else is still selling it; we have to find the next thing. For the publisher to pay attention to us we have to be the specialty electronics store instead of Best Buy. We have to be the place where, you know, people say, 'Wow! I have to go there because they’re going to tell me what to read. Because two years from now I’m going to hear from everybody about Water for Elephants, but I heard it from my independent bookstore first.'"

Twenty Years for Diane's Books

Diane's Books in Greenwich, Connecticut, celebrates its twentieth anniversary this week. The store is owned by Diane Garrett, who opened the business in 1990. According to the Danbury News Times, there were seven other indie bookstores in Greenwich at the time.

The News Times article attributes Diane's Books' longevity to Garrett's taste in books and customer recommendations. “Just because the New York Times says it's good, it doesn't (necessarily) pass my test,” she said.

Avid Bookseller Starts a Column

ABA member Janet Geddis, who is in the process of opening Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia, has begun a regular column for Beyond the Trestle, a regional blog. In her first post, Geddis discussed the evolution of her relationship with books: “Books are not dormant beings; they're ever-dynamic pictures of who we are and who we were, of who we will become. A couple of years back, I reread Tales of the City and didn't find it magical anymore, but I connected with my old self and found I was remembering things from an era of my life that had grown dim and foggy.”

NBC Blog Profiles Books & Books' Nosti

Niteside, a blog associated with NBC's Miami station, has published an interview with Cristina Nosti, director of events and marketing at Books & Books. Nosti, who oversees the five stores' 40 events each week, shared tidbits from past events.

“Many of the smaller, perhaps lesser-known authors are the ones who are most memorable in my mind. What strikes me as special and never ceases to move me are the readings where we introduce a debut author to an audience that we have had to nurture on their behalf. Here's a person who has been toiling in anonymity and out of the hundreds and thousands of books that are published each year, this one is supposed to somehow break through and stand out in people's minds. Those are the events I agonize over. If Barbara Walters is coming to town, you pretty much know you will have a full house, but what of the unknown writer with no name recognition, where there will possibly be a circle of 10 people, if you're lucky. To reach the right people and convince them to come and then see it actually all go down in the bookstore is incredibly inspiring to me personally,” Nosti said.