Print: A Bookstore Gets Finishing Touches for November Opening

Print: A Bookstore, a new general-interest bookstore owned by Emily Russo and Josh Christie, will open in Portland, Maine, in mid-November, with a grand opening celebration to follow on December 3.

A storefront on Portland’s Congress Street, which formerly housed rug and furniture manufacturer Angela Adams, is being transformed to accommodate the new bookstore. Russo found the space via a stroke of luck, when a family friend, a commercial broker who knew she was looking to open a bookstore, called with the perfect location. “We looked at it a week later and loved it. It was almost too good to be true,” Russo said.

Russo and Christie are working with bookstore designer and consultant Kate Whouley of Books in Common, a full-service consulting firm specializing in the retail book business. “The retail space itself didn’t need a ton of work, so the fun part of looking through various layouts, picking the right wood for our fixtures, etc., started pretty quickly,” said Russo. “As with all contracting work, there’s a lot of hurry-up-and-wait, but I’ve really enjoyed the process.”

Many local vendors have also had a hand in helping Russo and Christie get the store up and running, including Cornerstone Building and Restoration; Might & Main, which designed the store’s logo and branding; and Russo’s sister, Kate Russo, and brother-in-law, Tom Butler, who are handling painting.

On the store’s shelves, customers will find a little bit of everything, said Russo. “I’m a big literary fiction nerd, while Josh reads more nonfiction. We’re both also very supportive of small presses, so we hope to do well by them,” she said. “Portland is a huge foodie town — it has more restaurants per capita than any other city in the U.S. — so we aim to have a thriving cookbook section as well.”

For non-book items, “we’ve dug deep into the world of creative crafters to discover items that will appeal to our customers,” said Russo. The store will offer items from brands new to Maine and New England, such as Uncommon Green, Shinola, and Hearth & Hammer.

In-store events will include author readings, interviews, and panels, as well as cookbook demos from local chefs, beer tastings, and book clubs. Russo is also aiming to form partnerships with other local businesses and organizations.

A September trip to the New England Independent Booksellers Association  trade show in Providence, Rhode Island, also proved helpful as the owners put the finishing touches on the store. “We came back with a million and one little ideas on how to fine-tune our store and vision,” said Russo.

The show also gave Russo the chance to reconnect with colleagues from her days as a bookseller. After starting out in the agent side of the book business, in 2007 Russo, whose father is author Richard Russo, became the events coordinator at The Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, Massachusetts. In 2010, she moved to Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. “I loved and continue to love both stores, but it only took me about a year of being in the business to realize that I wanted to be doing what my bosses were doing, which was buying,” said Russo.

She moved back to her home state of Maine to pursue her dream of opening a bookstore. “Josh was the first person I thought of as a potential business partner,” said Russo. “He’s one of the best hand-sellers out there.”

Christie, who met Russo in 2010, began working at Sherman’s Books and Stationery in 2004 and has held positions ranging from part-time seasonal bookseller all the way up to store manager and book buyer for all six locations in Maine.

He also served on the board of directors for the New England Independent Booksellers Association and on the selection committee for ABA’s Indies Introduce program and was named an emerging leader for the book industry in Publishers Weekly’s inaugural Star Watch program in 2015. Christie is also the author and co-author of several books.

Russo and Christie both have a passion for the printed word, as evidenced by their careers in the book business and by the store’s name. After tossing around the idea of naming the store Paper in homage to the physical book, they landed on Print, Russo said, because it “evoked the image of the physical object, but was more book-centric in its interpretation and flexible enough to include new technology.”

Watch for updates about Print’s opening on the store’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages.