Bank Street’s Beth Puffer Retires

After more than 25 years at New York’s Bank Street Bookstore, Beth Puffer retired as the store’s director at the end of April. She had originally planned to retire at the end of 2011, but stayed on to train her replacement, Andy Laties, the founding manager of the Eric Carle Museum Bookshop in Amherst, Massachusetts, and author of Rebel Bookseller.

During Puffer’s years at Bank Street, the store, which is owned by the Bank Street College of Education, grew from 500 to 4,000 square feet and moved to two floors in a building separate from the college, which increased its involvement in the neighboring community.

Puffer was nearing the end of her second three-year term on the American Booksellers Association’s Board of Directors when she made the decision to retire. In anticipation of her retirement, she resigned from the Board at the end of last year.

Puffer didn’t always plan to be a children’s bookseller. She was a teacher in 1973, when she went to work at a New York City bookstore over a holiday break. “I decided to take a seasonal job at the now-defunct Brentano’s ... and stayed,” she told BTW in 2009. “I had a couple of great managers who took me under their wing. I really loved it, and I decided it was my place.”

Puffer later moved to the Boston area and became manager of the now-closed Eeyore’s, a children’s bookstore. “I’d been working in a general bookstore for many years and thought it would be a little difficult selling only children’s books. But I’ve been selling children’s books since 1981, and I love it,” Puffer said. Upon her return to New York in 1986, she began working for Bank Street.

In addition to serving on the ABA Board of Directors since 2006, Puffer worked on behalf of indie booksellers as a member of ABA’s Booksellers Advisory Council and as chair of the Nominating Committee. She also served on the boards of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association and New York Is Book Country and was treasurer of the Association of Booksellers for Children (now the ABC Children’s Group at ABA).

A consummate children’s bookseller, Puffer said that there is nothing more satisfying than getting the right book into the hands of a child.