The Art of Bookstore Shelving

The Atlantic takes a look at the intricacies involved, here.

A Cross-Country Traveling Bookstore and Publisher

A New York Rare Book Dealer

A New York Rare Book Dealer from Louise Dewast on Vimeo.

The Last 13 Feminist Bookstores in North America Are...

...these ones.

Vintage Photos of Bygone Bookstores

Enjoy.

18 Booksellers Who Blog

A list, care of AbeBooks.

The Economics of Used Books

Some thoughts, here, care of Eureka Books.

From the piece...

The shop in question, which I’ll call Ye Olde Bookshoppe, had been open just over seven years at the time of the appraisal. There were two partners. When Peter visited, the store had 45,000 titles in stock, about evenly divided between hardcovers and paperbacks. What follows are extracts from the analysis section of the final appraisal.

Start Up
The partners had been involved in bookselling in various forms for ten years. Together, they pooled $5000 in cash, plus 15,000 books acquired at an average of $1 per and 10,000 books acquired for $2,000. “20 cents each!!!” writes Peter. So 25,000 starting books acquired for $17,000, mostly at garage and estate sales. Their average retail price was $7.

Things NOT To Do in a Bookstore

The list, care of Publisher's Weekly.

From said list...

If you’re in a massive hurry, please don’t take that out on us. We all do the best we can to speed you along, but sometimes staffers are busy with other customers. Calling ahead is hugely helpful. If we have time we can get your book – usually it’s a present for a party that starts NOW – wrapped and ready to be picked up fairly effortlessly. A tiny bit of planning can make shopping fun and easy.

Please don’t feel sheepish about reading a book to your kids. We love that. And we’re not listening, too much. Nothing makes me happier than hearing a lively story read aloud and a small child laughing and interacting with her parents and the book.

What Will the Bookstore of the Future Look Like

BBC News ponders.

13 Reasons You Should Always Buy Used Books

The list, care of the Huffington Post.

16 Bookstores You Must Visit Before You Die

The list, care of Buzzfeed.

Books: A Documentary

Sylvia Beach - Founder of Shakepeare & Company Interviewed

The Japanese Art of Book Stacking

Enjoy!

The Last Bookshop

Book Heaven in Paris

Shakespeare & Company.

The Bookseller Who Cannot Read

Her name is Mary. She works in Chennai, India.

From a piece on Hindu Business Line...

Though the shop doesn’t have an address, Mary still receives couriers. And though she doesn’t know how to read, she digs out all the books her customers need – from 5th standard texts to engineering guides, law to Chartered Accountancy, test banks to crack IIT’s entrance exam, the GMAT and GRE to comics and classics.

“I am telling you Jeffrey Archer is not there!” She snaps at a customer who doggedly tries to sift through her mountain of books. She says that it becomes difficult to find books if people keep shuffling through them. She has become distrustful of her customers because even those who ‘look decent’ have stolen many of her precious books.

“Regular patrons who used to visit and buy a few classics every day are now long dead,” says Mary. “Now the demand is for comics, novels, school books and engineering books.”

The Novel Resurgence of the Independent Bookstore

The Christian Science Monitor monitors the indie bookstore's rising from the dead.

From the piece...

A funny thing happened on the way to the funeral.

While beloved bookstores still close down every year, sales at independent bookstores overall are rising, established independents are expanding, and new ones are popping up from Brooklyn to Big Stone Gap, Va. Bookstore owners credit the modest increases to everything from the shuttering of Borders to the rise of the "buy local" movement to a get-'er-done outlook among the indies that would shame Larry the Cable Guy. If they have to sell cheesecake or run a summer camp to survive, add it to the to-do list.

"2012 was the year of the bookstore," says Wendy Welch, co-owner of Tales of the Lonesome Pine in Virginia and author of the 2012 memoir "The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap." In her memoir, she recounts how she and her husband, Jack Beck, created – sometimes despite themselves – a successful used-book store in a town that, by any business measure, is too small to support one.

"Jack and I will never be rich. But we found a place where people said there wasn't a market and we said 'yes there was,' " says Ms. Welch. "We feel like it's important for bookslingers to hang together – we'll hang together or we'll hang separately.... And we're holding the line."

Lawrence Ferlinghetti - the Documentary

A Ramble on the Bookshop Experience