feed me

You know you're in a real bookstore when the shelves are not only crammed with books, but tagged with reviews and recommendations —good wine stores do the same thing — and once you learn to trust the vendor (there's always someone on staff who shares your taste in books, it seems), before long you have an advisor as valuable as a personal chef.

Talk to Mimi, and/or buy Craig Davidson's books here...

Independent Bookstores: as American as French Fries

James Joyce in the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, Paris, 1938
(from: Gisele Freund)

"Everywhere in the world may look more and more like everywhere else, but there are still a few proudly Gallic institutions that you can count on spotting in any city or town in France: cafés that thrive in spite of Starbucks, bakeries with their total indifference to things gluten-free, tabacs that keep hanging on as smokers turn to e-cigarettes.

     Most pleasing of all, in this age of Amazon, are the independent bookstores—around two thousand five hundred of them, all told. Paris alone has nearly seven hundred, one for every three thousand citizens, though the ratio of bookstores to readers often feels closer to one to one. If you can’t find the Colette novel you’re looking for on Rue de Reuilly, you just go two blocks over to the Rue de Charonne, or to Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where bookstores share the street with Algerian tea shops and furniture makers that predate the Revolution.
     This isn’t a university neighborhood with an intellectual pedigree. It’s just the way things are there—pretty different from here. In a recent study of the American cities with the most bookstores, and the most per capita, New York didn’t make the top ten in either category. To a New Yorker who spent her formative years witnessing the routing of independent bookstores by Barnes & Noble, and then the gutting of Barnes & Noble by Amazon, the situation in Paris is luxurious beyond belief."
—Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker
Read more...

Hardbound; Hard-Pressed

"The Mann Press for Rotary Offset" (from: Retro Graphic Design)

"There’s been a great deal of conjecture lately about the future of the bookstore: What will happen to the B&N [Barnes & Noble] stores (especially if they do plan to reduce the number of stores)? What about independent bookstores? Will Amazon crush bricks-and-mortar stores out of existence? Oh, lordy, will there even be such a thing as a bookstore!?!?

     …Is there, in fact, a place for bookstores in our future?
     What does the business model for that bookstore look like?
     On the first question, I think the answer is yes. Here’s my bias — I LOVE bookstores. In my youth, I would bring my lunch and spend the day in multi-level used bookstores on Fourth Avenue in Manhattan (which was also the home of hot metal typesetters, printers and book binders, by the way). I prefer independent and used stores to B&N, but these days you take what you can get.
     Part of me wants to suggest that we take the emotional hot button of the 'nobility' of the bookstore (particularly the local independent variety) out of the discussion and just talk cold/hard facts. But I don’t think we can."
— Michael Weinstein, Book Business
Read more…

Independent bookstores... value added

The staff members of our our local bookstore always go out of their way to know exactly what's on their shelves. Especially all the books by the authors that will be reading at this year's Elora Writiers' Festival.

Find out more about the Festival and Robert Rotenberg here...

And get The Guilty Plea, and all of Robert's other books here...