About Bookstores

By Peter Schertz, co-owner of Maria's Bookshop in Durango, Colorado Last week, Book Sense and the History Channel announced that Maria's Bookshop in Durango, Colorado, was one of three bookstores recognized for their efforts in orchestrating a Fire on the Mountain fundraising campaign (for full story, click here). In the following article, Peter Schertz, co-owner of Maria's Bookshop, details the store's winning promotional campaign, and the steps taken to create it.

In late August, the American Booksellers Association announced that it would be holding a lottery to win a color inkjet printer for booksellers who dropped off photos of their current Book Sense 76 displays at the ABA booth at the fall regional trade shows. The prize at each was the printer that the association was using at its booth to demonstrate the ease with which booksellers can download and print the weekly Book Sense Bestseller lists.

In 1998, when Stuart Brown finally tired of Jack Daniel's, he and his wife Joanna decided to devote themselves to books. They purchased a slightly dog-eared, 34-year-old bookstore after moving up to Telluride, Colorado (altitude 8,745), from Louisville, Kentucky (altitude 462), where Stuart was a marketing brand manager for the Jack Daniel's brands.

A recently launched bookstore-based book club has fashioned a notable coalition of bookstore, local writers, and an area arts newspaper. The result has built in-store traffic, spurred sales, and helped increase customer awareness. Each month, the altReader book club, which was created by the Durham, North Carolina-based The Regulator Bookshop and is co-sponsored by a local alternative newspaper, The Independent Weekly, taps a different local author to pick his or her favorite book and to lead an evening discussion devoted to that book.

By Rita Brutsch I am in London on vacation, and, after a few days of sightseeing, I can't think of anything better to do than run up and down Charing Cross Road and check out all the bookstores. At first, I'm not really looking for anything in particular, but, then, it occurs to me that this would be the perfect place to look for an out-of-print copy of a book I've always wanted to read, Cape Horn: The Logical Route by the legendary French sailor Bernard Moitessier.

As of October 6, New Words Bookstore, a 28-year-old feminist institution in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is closed, but its legacy is assured for the future. All of the store's papers and records have been acquired by the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, for its permanent collection.

It would be an understatement to say that Books at Stonehenge has competition. The 2,500-square-foot independent bookstore, which is located in the Stonehenge Market shopping plaza in Raleigh, North Carolina, is two miles north of a Barnes & Noble, two miles west of a Borders, and about five miles away from a brand new mall, where a two-story Barnes & Noble's recently opened its doors.

The national in-store fundraising campaign to benefit local firefighters is gaining momentum in bookstores, as the October 28 air date of the History Channel documentary based on the book, Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire by John N. Maclean (Washington Square Press), grows near.

Authors Pat Conroy, Dave Barry, Connie May Fowler, and Cassandra King will speak at a Banned Books Week fundraiser at Books & Books, Coral Gables, on Saturday, September 21 at 8:00 p.m. The event is being held on the first day of Banned Books Week (September 21-28), the only national celebration of the freedom to read.