That’s Larry McMurty’s simple advice to booksellers from this profile. He continues:
Junk is a major problem, it tends to creep in. The taste of the bookseller is important. We sell only our kind of books, a general humanities selection, all in very good condition.”

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Edwards Books of Springfield, MA was at the center of one of my favorite bookselling memoirs: Suzanne Strempek Shea’s Shelf Life: Romance, Mystery, Drama and Other Page-Turning Adventures From a Year in a Bookstore about her time working in the shop after battling breast cancer.
Sadly, the shop is closing.

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I’ve spent the past two days going through over 300 boxes of books that were part of an estate. I estimate I looked at over 7500 books. Now, here’s a question. How many books/boxes did I go home with? Take a minute. I’ll wait.
Ready? Have your number?
Answer: Five boxes. […]

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Okay, seriously. I mentioned last week that I was being offered a lot more books than normal and I wondered if perhaps this was an indication of the weakening economy. But it’s now official. I’ve bought / been offered more books over the last two weeks than I have over the preceeding […]

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“Do you have any old books with clasps on them?”
“You mean that would be attached to the covers and used to close the book?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Does it matter what the book is?”
“No, I collect books with interesting clasps.”
“Actually, I do. I have this lovely 19th Century Bavarian prayer book.”
“Oh, that is nice. I’ve never […]

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This prescient question comes courtesy of a Chicago Tribune piece, The future of books resides in their past:
What is amazing and inspiring about books is just that: their very physicality, the sheer thinginess of them, the fact that you can hold a book in your hands, thump a couple of knuckles on the cover, riffle […]

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SCENE: The shop. A woman has brought in three nineteenth-century books. Two are poor-condition reprints of classic works. One is a handsome reprint of a decidedly minor poet. Some nice plates, but otherwise unremarkable.
ME: I’m afraid these just aren’t in good enough condition. This one is nice, though. I […]

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Picking up on the news Friday that employees of the legendary Strand bookstore in NYC are suing for discrimination, Gawker has an interesting (if often juvenile) discussion going on (scroll down to the comments section). And colleague Michael Lieberman raises some important questions:
Is there a point when a bookstore becomes too big to remain […]

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Hoaxes Hit Bookstores:
The call came from someone who said he was the Los Angeles blogger and first novelist Mark Sarvas, who was reading at the store in a few days and seemed to be in a pinch. His car had been impounded, he needed money to get it back and he needed it right away.
“I […]

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For those readers who are not themselves booksellers, the recent fee hikes at abebooks.com, one of the most widely-used online sites for the buying and selling of used and rare books, likely have passed unnoticed. In the relatively small world of book dealers, however, the additional costs have been the topic of conversation for […]

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ILAB has posted to YouTube bibliomania, the:
ABAA-produced documentary filmed entirely on location at the San Francisco Book Fair. Filled with interviews given by both booksellers and attendees, it gives a revealing look at the reason to collect antiquarian books.

Also: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 (mislabeled “Part 6″), and (the actual) Part 6.

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[T]he interesting catalogue sits somewhere in the intersection of curious material pointed up by obvious learning and a certain restrained enthusiasm. (Is an interesting title in a catalogue still interesting if you are not shown why it is of interest?) A brief explanation of the merits of a late 18th c. chapbook edition of Tom […]

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Yesterday I had three people come into the store with books to sell and three others calling about bringing their books in later in the week. Normally I get 2 or 3 inquiries like this a month. I suspect as the economy gets worse, more and more will be coming out of the […]

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Nice short comic [click image above for complete strip] from Eastern Europe about a bookseller who has every book in the world “except one.”

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“Did you read the new catalog**?”
“Yeah, looks really good.”
“Thanks.”
“Just one question though.”
“Okay”
“Who’s James Fenimore COPPER?”
“Oh crap.”
“Better call the printer.”
“Yeah.”
“And while you’re on the phone with him, you might want to ask him if he’s heard of an artist called NORMAL Rockwell, cause I know I sure haven’t.”
“Noooo…”
“Oh, and I’ve NEVER seen a letter written on […]

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The results of my six-year-old daughter playing with my label maker when I brought her to the shop Saturday.

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Bibliopolis, who make Bookhound (the database program I use), has put together a fantastic aggregator of bookselling blogs. Great layout, slick design. Hmmm…Don’t see me on there though….

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It dawned on me yesterday, now that the holidays have calmed down, that Thanksgiving marked the one year anniversary of my taking over the shop. It’s my one-year birthday as an open shop. In honor of this momentous occasion, I offer:
18 THINGS I’VE LEARNED THIS YEAR (Or: 2007, A Bookseller’s Year in Review)
1) I […]

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My wife commissioned my brother-in-law to make this sign for my shop window. I won’t even tell you what I had there before. But needless to say, this is a vast improvement and exactly what I would have gotten had taken the trouble to do so myself. Thanks, sweetie.
I know I’ve been […]

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1] Began with a nice sale to a fellow book-dealer (book-talk, book-talk, book-talk) who visited the shop and then…
2] …An even nicer sale to a civilian so…
3] …Promptly spent a good portion of these sales on several fantastic (and much-needed) reference books…
4] …Purchased from another bookstore across town (more book-talk, book-talk, book-talk), followed by…
5] […]

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