Honor system

An independent bookstore made an appearance on Boing Boing this week: Local Hero's "if we're not here, take a paper and pay for it" sign drew one blogger's attention, and generated dozens of comments about other businesses that rely on the honor system.

From the not-a-surprise-to-booksellers file: Texas Pages reports that after Teri Tanner's (huge) plans for Legacy Books were published, she got hundreds of calls from people who wanted to work there.

Do your customers complain about their kids spending too much time with the Clique series? Direct them to this article, where OUPBlog shares all you ever wanted to know and more about the word's etymology.

I'd love to be able to give proper credit for the first blog that directed me to Books on the Nightstand, but it seems like all the book blogs have linked there this week. Michael Kindness and Ann Kingman, two fabulous Random House reps, are writing and podcasting about their favorite books. (One of these days I'm going to get headphones for my work computer. I mean it.)

J.L. Bell wrote about historian extraordinaire Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's appearance at a recent Massachusetts Historical Society discussion. Ulrich's comments about her involvement in the PBS dramatization of A Midwife's Tale led Bell to explore the difference between documenting history and telling a story.

I'm working on a history project of my own at the moment - the history of Book Sense (one of the many exciting things we have planned for BEA). While Bookselling This Week has been its usual font of information, I also discovered a great resource in Holt Uncensored.

Reading Pat Holt's columns from a decade ago is like crawling out of a time machine. In the late 1990s, I'd barely heard of independent bookselling. Okay, I hadn't graduated high school, either.

Posted at 04:27PM Apr 18, 2008 by Sarah Rettger in General  |