About Bookstores

Scott's Bookstore is the only general bookstore in Mount Vernon, Washington, a city with a population of over 60,000. Nonetheless, the 5,000-square-foot store, which occupies the historic 95-year-old Granary Building, enjoys a special camaraderie with its independent bookstore colleagues, said Megan Scott, manager of Scott's Bookstore.

At first glance, the recent feature article in the Los Angeles Times about Santa Monica's well-known Midnight Special Bookstore seemed to be telling an all-too-familiar tale: independent bookshop forced out of long-time location by rising rents. Future prospects: bleak to none.

Dateline: Wednesday, June 26. It was a dark and stormy night in landlocked Fort Wayne, Indiana. The staff of the 10,000-square-foot Million Story Book Company was closing up at 9:00 p.m. when the storm sewers serving the bookstore and other businesses in the Covington Plaza strip shopping center reached their capacity and "geysered up," according to store co-owner, co-founder, and marketing manager Dave Kaverman.

Two independent bookstores in the Detroit, Michigan, area were recently treated to a visit from the 2002 Newbery Medal winner, children's author Linda Sue Park. Dressed in a traditional Korean gown, Park talked about her writing, answered questions, and autographed copies of her books at Halfway Down the Stairs Children's Book Shop in Rochester, on Friday, June 28, and the next day at Book Beat in Oak Park. Park won the Newbery, which is awarded annually by the American Library Association, for her novel A Single Shard.

Call for Bookstore Photos for the Fall 2002 New Yorker Book Sense Insert

Book Sense is working with The New Yorker on its September 30 Book Sense insert to feature as many independent bookstores with Book Sense as possible. All Book Sense stores are encouraged to send photographs of their stores -- exterior and interior shots as well as photos of in-store, window, or point-of-purchase Book Sense displays.

For both Pat Willoughby and Petra Williams, the prospect of running an independent bookstore represented a radical change from their careers in corporate America.

Willoughby, in sales and marketing for the last 20 years, is the owner of the Burke’s Books of Park Ridge in Park Ridge, Illinois, set to open in late July. Williams, the co-owner, along with her husband Daniel, of All About Books in Smithville, Missouri, just outside of Kansas City, was an engineer. All About Books will open in mid-July.

Linda Ramsdell, owner of the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick, Vermont, is hanging up her bookseller’s hat for a few days and donning both author escort and limo driver’s caps to add a new dimension to New England handselling. The author Ramsdell will escort, from June 30 to July 3, is Michael Crummey (Book Sense 76 Pick River Thieves, Houghton Mifflin), and the limo is her Subaru Impreza.

On June 28, a new and improved Sarasota News & Books in Sarasota, Florida, will reopen after a disastrous plumbing accident on March 27 left the store with extensive structural damage and a complete loss of usable inventory. (For the full story about the flood, click here.)

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.

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.

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.

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.