About Bookstores

Martians, murder, magic, and mayhem are thriving in California. On May 10, Mysterious Galaxy, the purveyors of the aforementioned, celebrated 10 years of bookselling as San Diego's only mystery, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and suspense specialty bookstore.

May 4, 2003, marked JoAnn McGreevy's 33rd anniversary as director of the New York University Bookstores. As she plans her retirement at the end of this month, she recalled for BTW her extraordinary first day.

Nearly three months after it temporarily closed its doors, Santa Monica independent bookstore Midnight Special announced that it had found a new location at 1450 2nd Street. The new store is less than a half-mile from its previous location on the Third Street Promenade.

How can a regional public radio station that covers parts of seven northeastern states, including New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and New Hampshire, offer local coverage for listeners in very different communities?

The May 12 issue of The New Yorker magazine on sale now features a special insert, "Bound to Please," highlighting "the sage recommendations of America's independent booksellers."

Instead of "bigger is better," small business owners often practice the lesser-known adage "better is better." That's the philosophy of Vivien Jennings, co-owner of Rainy Day Books in Kansas. Her approach focuses not only in-store by maintaining a happy staff, but on the Greater Kansas City community at large by hosting about 150 author readings a year.

On Friday, May 2, the Women's National Book Association (WNBA) announced the winners of this year's Lucile Micheels Pannell Awards. Dutton's Brentwood Bookstore in Los Angeles won the award for a general bookstore. The children's specialty category went to Halfway Down the Stairs Children's Book Shop in Rochester, Michigan.

Where people purchase the hundreds of thousands of copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on June 21 may ultimately be more memorable than the book itself. Based on correspondence from independent booksellers around the country, customers should be prepared for anything at midnight -- documented bookstore ghosts, abandoned owl adoptions, homemade chocolate frogs, slug canapés, and vault tours of an actual bank.

In rural areas where the local mega-mall isn't an option, independent bookstores sometimes do double or triple duty in their community. Owners Rita Moran and Eric Robbins, along with their 13-year-old daughter Branwen, have certainly taken on that role at Apple Valley Books in Maine. Aside from new and used books, they sell jewelry, music, art, incense, tarot cards, imported and local pottery, stuffed animals, sculpture, cards, handmade soaps, Maine buoy bells, puzzles, candles, Pokemon cards…. The list goes on.

How many Ph.D.'s, J.D.'s, and locksmiths does it take to run a successful bookstore? If the Literary Bookpost in Salisbury, North Carolina, is any indication -- a total of four, with some help from Book Sense. Owner Deal Safrit, who formerly ran an industrial locksmith business, founded the store in 1998, and has built a small staff of part-timers comprised of doctors of philosophy and a lawyer. Safrit traces his dream of owning a bookstore to his preteen years spent scouring the shelves of the now defunct Bunker's Bookstore in Salisbury.

On behalf of his client, the lawyer representing the customer at the center of a landmark case involving Denver's Tattered Cover Book Store and its fight to protect the privacy of customer records recently authorized Tattered Cover's legal counsel to reveal the name of the book that had been sought by law enforcement officials for more than two years. The title, Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters by Kenneth G. Henshall, had nothing to do with the case involving a methamphetamine lab.