Ann Patchett on running a bookshop in lockdown: ‘We’re a part of our community as never before’

Ann Patchett

Fri 10 Apr 2020 02.00 EDT

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/10/ann-patchett-nashville-bookshop-coronavirus-lockdown-publishing

The novelist reveals how the store she co-owns in Nashville is making, and remaking, plans to get books to readers who want them more than ever.

We closed Parnassus Books, the bookstore I co-own in Nashville, on the same day all the stores around us closed. I can’t tell you when that was because I no longer have a relationship with my calendar.

All the days are now officially the same. My business partner Karen and I talked to the staff and told them if they didn’t feel comfortable coming in that was fine. We would continue to pay them for as long as we could. But if they were OK to work in an empty bookstore, we were going to try to keep shipping books.

In the first week we did kerbside delivery, which meant a customer could call the store and tell us what they wanted. We would take their credit card information over the phone and then run the books out to the parking lot and sling them into the open car window. Kerbside delivery seemed like a good idea but the problem was, so many people were calling that the staff wound up clustered around the cash registers, ringing up orders. No good. We reassessed and decided that all books would have to be mailed, even the books that were just going down the street.

We make our plans. We change our plans. We make other plans. This is the new world order.

Our bookstore is spacious and tidy, with rolling ladders to reach the highest shelves, a long leather sofa, and a cheerful children’s section with a colourful mural featuring a frog telling a story to a rapt pack of assorted animals. The backroom is the polar opposite, a barely contained bedlam jammed with desks, towering flats of broken down boxes, boxes full of new releases, boxes of books to be returned. There are Christmas decorations, abandoned spinner displays, dog beds, day-old doughnuts. We are squashed in there together, forced to listen to one another’s private phone conversations and sniff one another’s perfume.

It is not the landscape of social distancing.

But in the absence of customers coming to browse, the backroom folks have moved to the capacious store front, setting up folding tables far away from each other to make our private spaces. We crank up the music. We pull books off the shelves. The floor is a sea of cardboard boxes – orders completed, orders still waiting on one more book. We make no attempt to straighten anything up before leaving at night. We have neither the impetus nor the energy. There are bigger fish to fry. Orders are coming in as fast as we can fill them.

I think of how I used to talk in the pre-pandemic world, going on about the importance of reading and shopping local and supporting independent bookstores. These days I realise the extent to which it’s true – I understand now that we’re a part of our community as never before, and that our community is the world. When a friend of mine, stuck in his tiny New York apartment, told me he dreamed of being able to read the new Louise Erdrich book, I made that dream come true. I can solve nothing, I can save no one, but dammit, I can mail Patrick a copy of The Night Watchman.

At least for now. We’re part of a supply chain that relies on publishers to publish the books and distributors to ship the books and the postal service to pick up the boxes and take them away. We rely on our noble booksellers filling the boxes to stay healthy and stay away from each other. So far this fragile ecosystem is holding, though I understand that in the distance between my writing this piece and your reading it, it could fall apart. Today is what we’ve got, this quiet day in which finally there is time to read again. So call your local bookstore and see if they’re still shipping. It turns out the community of readers and books is the community we needed in the good old days, and it’s the community we need in hard times, and it’s the community we’ll want to be there when this whole thing is over.

• The Dutch House by Ann Patchett is published by Bloomsbury.

One book at a time

Japanese bookshop stocks only one book at a time

by Alison Flood

Owner of Morioka Shoten in Tokyo says the strategy adds up to a dedicated exhibition for each volume it sells

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/23/japanese-bookshop-stocks-only-one-book-at-a-time

With hundreds of thousands of books published every year, the choice of what to stock can prove bewildering for booksellers. The owner of one small bookshop in Tokyo has taken an unusual approach to the problem: Morioka Shoten, located in the luxury shopping district of Ginza, offers just one title to its customers.

Owned by experienced bookseller Yoshiyuki Morioka, the store opened in May, stocking multiple copies of just one title, which changes weekly. Books to have featured in the shop include Finnish author Tove Jansson’s novel The True Deceiver, in which a young woman fakes a burglary of an elderly artist’s house to persuade her she cannot live alone, and Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales.

“Before opening this bookstore in Ginza, I had been running another one in Kayabacho for 10 years. There, I had around 200 books as stock, and used to organise several book launches per year. During such events, a lot of people visited the store for the sake of a single book. As I experienced this for some time, I started to believe that perhaps with only one book, a bookstore could be managed,” said Morioka.

“This bookstore that sells only one book could also be described as ‘a bookstore that organises an exhibition derived from a single book’. For instance, when selling a book on flowers, in the store could be exhibited a flower that actually appears in the book. Also, I ask the authors and editors to be at the bookstore for as much time as possible. This is an attempt to make the two-dimensional book into three-dimensional ambience and experience. I believe that the customers, or readers, should feel as though they are entering ‘inside a book’.”

Other titles to have featured in Morioka Shoten include Tsukiyo To Megane (Moon Night and Glasses) by Mimei Ogawa, Karachi No Moto (Source of Form) by Akito Akagi, Koichi Uchida and Takejiro Hasegawa, and Karl Blossfeldt: Working Collages, a collection of the artist’s photographs of plants. The first title to be sold next year will be Maseru Tatsuki’s photo anthology Fish-Man.

“The concept of this bookstore seems to have gained the sympathy of a lot of people, and I receive a number of guests from all over the globe,” said Morioka, who has sold 2,100 books so far.

The bookseller added that while “the current book market seems to be taking second billing to ebooks and other media such as social networking services”, he believes that “a book is a physical object with special attraction that has been, is and will always be the same, and that many will continue to utilise physical books, especially as a communication tool”.

Shelf catering: tourists offered chance to run a bookshop on holiday

For £150 a week, AirBnB users are invited to live in – and run – The Open Book store in Wigtown, Scotland

The Open Book in Wigtown, Scotland

by Allison Flood

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/21/tourists-offered-chance-to-run-a-bookshop-on-holiday-wigtown

For all those who agree with Neil Gaiman’s maxim in American Gods that “a town isn’t a town without a bookstore”, and who yearn to spend their days amongst the pristine spines and glossy covers of a small bookshop, what might be the perfect holiday retreat has just been listed on AirBnB: the opportunity to become a bookseller for a week or two.

For the sum of £150 a week, guests at The Open Book in Wigtown, Scotland’s national book town, will be expected to sell books for 40 hours a week while living in the flat above the shop. Given training in bookselling from Wigtown’s community of booksellers, they will also have the opportunity to put their “own stamp” on the store while they’re there. “The bookshop residency’s aim is to celebrate bookshops, encourage education in running independent bookshops and welcome people around the world to Scotland’s national book town,” says the AirBnB listing.

The Open Book is leased by the Wigtown book festival from a local family. Organisers have been letting paying volunteers run the shop for a week or two at a time since the start of the year, but opened the experience up to the world at large this week when they launched what they are calling “the first ever bookshop holiday experience” on AirBnB.

“I wouldn’t call it a working holiday,” said Adrian Turpin, director of the Wigtown book festival. “It’s a particular kind of holiday [for people] who don’t feel that running a bookshop is work. It’s not about cheap labour – it’s about offering people an experience … It’s one of those great fantasies.”

The money is “just essentially to cover our costs”, said Turpin, admitting that “it can be a hard life, selling books in a small town, so it’s not a holiday for everybody”.

“I suspect [the shop] would have closed, without this,” he said. “Wigtown is Scotland’s national book town, but it’s quite a long way from anywhere. So part of the idea was to get new people in – people who would hopefully end up having a good time and a long-standing relationship with the town. And also to keep the bookshop afloat. It might otherwise have shut down.”

The rest of the article: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/21/tourists-offered-chance-to-run-a-bookshop-on-holiday-wigtown

Found story: The Last Bookshop

The last bookshop man in the world sat alone in his small store. There was a knock on the door. Startled, he looked up from his science fiction book to find the woman of his dreams standing in the doorway, wearing very little at all. And though she was an android, it had been a long time, so he proposed something indecent to her.

The last bookshop

She smiled at him, not without some sympathy, then said, “Not tonight, honey, I have to reformat.”

She then turned and left the room.

He put the book back on the shelf and went to another section.

#

The last bookshop man in the world sat alone in his store. There was a knock on his door.

Before he could answer, the door swung open and a man in a fedora with a tommy gun barged in and started spraying the room with bullets.

The man with the machine gun aimed high, but was bringing his aim lower and lower, yelling over the noise that “The Boss” had sent him to get “the dame.” So where was she?

The last man barely had time to dive to the floor and even then he heard one speeding over his head.

The gun ran out of bullets. The man with the fedora backed out of the room and disappeared.

Old magazine from the shelves of the last bookshop

The bookshop man slowly picked himself up, limped to the door, and shut it. He could not be sure if the man with the gun was another android, but he put the Hammett novel back on the shelf just to be safe.

#

The last bookshop man in the world sat alone in his store.

This time a Conan-like brute with a broadsword did not bother to knock, but kicked the door open and charged into the room, swinging. He hit books, slicing the spines, knocking them off the shelves. He hit shelves, splintering wood, embedding his sword.

He yelled something about a woman, or that’s what the last man thought he heard.

Because the room was small, Conan-like was having trouble getting a full, strong swing of his massive sword. Still, as he stomped toward the last man, the last man was not sure how he would escape this one. The same thing preventing this Conan type from getting a complete swing of his sword was also prevent his escape.

The last bookshop man was sure this was going to be his last. Then the scantily clad android woman appeared in the door and announced, “I’m reformatted.”

The Conan-like man jerked his sword out of the shelf, turned, and lunged toward her.

She squealed in an almost mechanical way and ran away, the muscle-bound Conan-like in determined pursuit.

The last bookshop man slumped into his chair and waited for his heart rate to return to normal.

#

The last bookshop man in the world sat alone in his store. This time, there was a lock on his door. This time, he was reading haikus.

[Editor’s note: inspired by a visit to Central Street Books, dealer in old and rare books, in Knoxville, TN.]