About Bookstores

The eponymous owners of Warwick’s, the 106-year-old book, gift, and office supply store in La Jolla, California, have run the store for four generations and have no plans to stop. Now a fixture of this affluent beachfront community outside of San Diego, Warwick’s was originally founded in Minnesota in 1896 as a paper goods shop selling books, writing paper, and writing instruments. Founder W.T.

River City Books of Northfield, Minnesota, open as of March 2002, is a direct descendent of two highly regarded educational institutions in Northfield: Carleton College and St. Olaf College. River City Books is technically a branch of the Carleton College Bookstore, and a close friend of the St. Olaf College Bookstore.

Wildfires covered hundreds of thousands of acres in Colorado, as approximately 1,800 firefighters from around the country headed to the state to battle blazes that have erupted in severe drought conditions. By Thursday, approximately 90,000 acres in the foothills south of Denver were burning, and officials estimated that over 150,000 acres statewide were affected by a number of fires.

Sarah Zacks, owner and founder of Books on the Square in Providence, Rhode Island, remembers the difficulty of toting one or more of her five children to downtown stores with few parking spaces and child-unfriendly sales people. That’s why, when she opened her bookstore 10 years ago, she selected a spot with good parking that was six blocks from the crowded Brown University area and away from the congested downtown.

On May 29, Olsson’s Books & Records, an independent book and record store with nine (soon to be eight) branches in the greater Washington, D.C., area, has announced that it will be closing its Georgetown store at the end of June.

In 1894, on a bluff overlooking Mobile Bay, Fairhope, Alabama, was established. It was the dream of Fairhope’s founders to put into practice the utopian ideals of Henry George, who, in his late-19th century work, Progress and Poverty, outlined his philosophy on how a society could evolve without poverty. Some 108 years later, Fairhope (population 12,000), is a thriving artistic and literary community, a tourist attraction, and home to many retirees.

On Saturday, May 4, while booksellers attending BookExpo America at New York City’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center are visiting publishers, grabbing advance readers’ copies, and networking, Annie Bauman will be ladling Kool-Aid at the grand opening of Village Books in Roslindale, Massachusetts. The 900-square-foot store is opening in a resolutely independent community midway through its renaissance.

By Maret Orliss, Vroman’s Bookstore Vroman’s has always been a big supporter of the Book Sense program. Through BookSense.com, the gift certificate program, and the Book Sense 76 list, Book Sense is an effective marketing program and a terrific way of promoting that independent bookstores, while unique, also share a common connection.

The May 6 issue of The New Yorker (on newsstands on April 29) will feature the fifth special Book Sense insert, "Bound to Please: Great Gift Ideas From Your Independent Booksellers." This 14-page special feature will showcase a number of independent booksellers, in both text and pictures, and will share their enthusiastic picks for gift-giving from recent Book Sense 76 selections.

Soon after the Book Sense 76 list debuted, Shirley Muller, owner of Bay Books of Coronado, California, had an idea about how to drive local traffic into her store. She began imprinting 10,000 copies of each new Book Sense 76 list with the Bay Books name and address and had it inserted in the local weekly newspaper, the Coronado Eagle and Journal. Muller continues to promote her store with the 76 to this day. "I noticed people coming in with the list marked, already checked -- they get it at home and they read it," she said.