Tag: bookstores

Barnes & Noble likes books again

Ted Gioia on the remarkable rebound of Barnes & Noble:

[CEO James Daunt] used the pandemic as an opportunity to “weed out the rubbish” in the stores. He asked employees in the outlets to take every book off the shelf, and re-evaluate whether it should stay. Every section of the store needed to be refreshed and made appealing. 

As this example makes clear, Daunt started giving more power to the stores. But publishers complained bitterly. They now had to make more sales calls, and convince local bookbuyers—and that’s hard work. Even worse, when a new book doesn’t live up to expectations, the local workers see this immediately. Books are expected to appeal to readers—and just convincing a head buyer at headquarters was no longer enough.

Daunt also refused to dumb-down the store offerings. The key challenge, he claimed was to “create an environment that’s intellectually satisfying—and not in a snobbish way, but in the sense of feeding your mind.”

His crucial move was refusing to take promotional money from publishers in exchange for purchase commitments and prominent placement of only certain books:

[Daunt] refused to play this game. He wanted to put the best books in the window. He wanted to display the most exciting books by the front door. Even more amazing, he let the people working in the stores make these decisions.

This is James Daunt’s super power: He loves books. 

“Staff are now in control of their own shops,” he explained. “Hopefully they’re enjoying their work more. They’re creating something very different in each store.”

This cheered me to read, not only because of my interest in the success of bookstores but also because I worked at Barnes & Noble for about six months back in 2011.

Freshly stateside after months abroad, I was nearly broke and working at a grocery store when my friend Brian let me know he’d be leaving his job in the Music & Movies section at our local B&N store and would put in a good word for me if I applied. I did so immediately and got the job, which boosted my pay (from “enough to avoid destitution” to “meager”) along with my spirits.

It turned out to be one of the best jobs I’ve ever had, despite lasting only about six months before I got full-time work elsewhere.

Since whoever was working in the Music & Movies section couldn’t leave it unsupervised, I would be stationed there during my shifts no matter how busy it got elsewhere in the store. Some might have found that suffocating, but as a movie lover I relished being sequestered with thousands of Blu-rays, DVDs, and CDs to browse through and organize when I wasn’t helping customers.

Another big factor of my enjoyment of that job was the manager of the Music & Movies section, Joe. He was the most laidback of the store managers but also probably the most effective because, as my friend Brian said after I sent him the above article:

This strategy reminds me of how Joe would run the music section. He gave us a lot of power over the music that was on the shelves and it allowed us to sell CDs when the industry was in decline. Well done, Barnes.

I guess that’s the takeaway for Barnes and for all purveyors of the fine arts: Be like Joe.

January 26, 2023 1 Comment

Refer Madness: Buyers and Borrowers

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Refer Madness spotlights strange, intriguing, or otherwise noteworthy questions I encounter at the library reference desk.

A patron walked into the library and approached the desk.

“I was just at a bookstore but I didn’t want to buy too many,” she told me.

She had a list of books she wanted, some of which she got at the bookstore but a few she left to see if she could get through the library.

“Sometimes, when I buy books,” she said, “they just sit there. If I get it from the library, I’m reading up a storm.”

There is absolutely something to this. I have a bookcase full of books at home, yet I can’t remember the last time I picked one off those shelves to read over a library book. Because I know they’ll be there indefinitely, there’s no urgency to read them. A library book, on the other hand, has a deadline attached to it, and often a waitlist.

In the debate about library ebooks, one of the key points ignored by publishers is that there is broad overlap between library users and book buyers. More than that, the relationship between libraries/librarians and bookstores/authors is symbiotic. We may have different priorities, but I believe we’re on the same team and help each other immensely.

Yet publishers (and their new overlord Amazon) would have people believe libraries are parasites, stealing potential customers away from authors with free* books.

(* not actually free)

The book world isn’t a zero-sum game. In the case of this patron, everyone won. The bookstore and authors got paid, the library got checkout stats, the woman got what she wanted, and the books got read (victims of tsundoku aside).

I keep thinking of the quote from Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist about his illicit relationship with Heath Ledger’s Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain:

You know, it could be like this, just like this, always.

In the context of the movie, this was a naive, desperate wish. I sincerely hope that’s not the case for the future of ebooks.

September 9, 2019 2 Comments

Scenes from an Evanston type-in

The Evanston Literary Festival graciously facilitated me hosting a type-in at the Bookends & Beginnings bookstore yesterday. I was there with my typewriters for about two and a half hours and had about 20-30 people sit down to type during that time.

It was a good mix of people old enough to be familiar with typewriters and young enough to know nothing about them. It was fun to get them started with the basics and then watch their inner lightbulbs grow brighter with every ding of the margin bell.

A collector stopped by and we talked repair and favorite machines. A college student was so enamored with the machines and typing experience that he talked of getting his own. A girl of about 7 or 8 sat down at the Skyriter and started in like she owned it; I learned her family had a typewriter at home so she was a well-practiced typist already!

I brought speed typing tests and writing prompts, but since most of the participants were so new to typewriters I figured it was best to keep things informal and low-pressure. Learning how to make an exclamation point and the number 1 were reward enough for most of them I think.

Overall I’m very happy about the turnout and enthusiasm. Besides selling a few typewriter books for the bookstore, it brought disparate people together in a shared public experience. I’d love to do it again, and find different ways to do public typing and meet more Typospherians in the area.

The bookstore had their own Remington Quiet-Riter, which they said hadn’t been working since they got it. I quickly realized the ribbon selector was set to stencil. The vibrator was still a little sluggish, but it typed fine:

Always interesting to see what people write when trying a typewriter for the first time:

One quiet and serious thirtysomething walked in, sat down, and started typing without a word. He was there for a while, pausing occasionally to ponder his next type. When he left I went over and snapped what he wrote:

May 20, 2018 3 Comments

At the corner of ‘84 Charing Cross Road’ and Typewriter Street

A stately British bookseller and an American writer exchange letters across the pond? Sounds like a cozy English romance novel to me. Turns out 84, Charing Cross Road is neither a novel nor a romance, but a collection of actual letters from over 20 years of correspondence, and it’s delightful.

Frank Doel, one of the booksellers at the rare book store at the titular address in London, is the straight man in this epistolary relationship. This allows Helene Hanff, a Brooklyn screenwriter and lover of British literature, to sparkle with personality. You get a pretty good sense of what Hanff was like right away. It doesn’t take long for her to playfully badger Doel, a man she’d never met, about a book she requested:

Frank Doel, what are you DOING over there, you are not doing ANYthing, you are just sitting AROUND. .. Well, don’t just sit there! Go find it! i swear i dont know how that shop keeps going.

And:

what do you do with yourself all day, sit in the back of the store and read? why don’t you try selling a book to somebody?

— MISS Hanff to you. (I’m helene only to my FRIENDS)

Their letters also place them in the specific historical moment of postwar England where rationing made basics like meat and jam luxuries:

I send you greetings from America—faithless friend that she is, pouring millions into rebuilding Japan and Germany while letting England starve. Some day, God willing, I’ll get over there and apologize personally for my country’s sins (and by the time i come home my country will certainly have to apologize for mine).

She’s also clearly a bibliophile. When the bookstore employees send her a book and a note with their signatures as a Christmas gift, she admonishes them for writing the note on a separate card rather than in the book itself:

I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages some one long gone has called my attention to.

And yet, she’s not precious about them:

My friends are peculiar about books. They read all the best sellers, they get through them as fast as possible, I think they skip a lot. And they NEVER read anything a second time so they don’t remember a word of it a year later. But they are profoundly shocked to see me drop a book in the wastebasket or give it away. The way they look at it, you buy a book, you read it, you put it on the shelf, you never open it again for the rest of your life but YOU DON’T THROW IT OUT! NOT IF IT HAS A HARD COVER ON IT! Why not? I personally can’t think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book.

I watched the 1987 movie version right after reading the book. It includes pretty much every word from the original letters, so reading the book will give you all you need. Then again, you’d miss out on some solid typewriter action, as seen above and here, with Hanff played by Anne Bancroft:

Anthony Hopkins, who plays Frank Doel, also gets in on the action with his Underwood:

There’s also the real Helene:

February 12, 2018 1 Comment