First California Bookstore Day a Rousing Success
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| Jumping for joy: CBD at The Book Seller, Grass Valley. | |
At 2 p.m. on Saturday--about halfway through the first California Bookstore Day, Hut Landon, executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association--asked participating stores if they had surpassed sales from the comparable Saturday a year earlier. The answer was a resounding yes.
"Given all that the bookstores did to make the day special, I would have called the event a success in any case," Landon said. "But we always wanted California Bookstore Day to create more sales, and early feedback from close to 20 stores has been phenomenal. Stores were up 20%, 50%, 100% and more."
Andrea Vuleta, executive director of the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association, had similar news, saying she was impressed by the variety of events and all the buzz Saturday about CBD on Facebook and Twitter. "I would love it to be a financial success," said Vuleta, "but the traffic in the stores and the buzz was stupendous."
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| Customers waiting for Hicklebee's in San Jose to open | |
As store managers and staff slowly reported in over the weekend, the consensus was that overall sales exceeded most of the stores' expectations--and many stores sold out of the specialty limited-edition items created for the event just hours after opening.
"We sold out of Neil Gaiman by 10:30 a.m., and everything else has sold really well," said Allison Hill, CEO of Vroman's and Book Soup in Pasadena and West Hollywood. "I heard several people say they had never been to our stores before, and talked to a few folks who were making a day of it and had visited Vroman's, Skylight and Book Soup--which made me happy."
At Skylight Books in Los Angeles, manager Steven Salardino said the store surpassed previous year's sales between 2-3 p.m. "Fun surpassed at 10:15 a.m.!" he added.
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| YA authors Alyson Noel, Margaret Stohl and Kimberly Derting at Mysterious Galaxy, Redondo Beach | |
"We blew past last year at 12:15 p.m.," reported Luan Stauss, owner of Laurel Bookstore in Oakland. At {pages} in Manhattan Beach, owner Margot Farris said the store almost tripled last year's sales. "So cool to have a line out the door before the store opened," she said.
"We doubled our sales from last year--which was a big day!" said Amy Thomas, owner of Pegasus Books, which has two locations in Berkeley and one in Oakland and which began celebrating its 45th anniversary on Saturday. Mysterious Galaxy reported a great day at both its San Diego and Redondo Beach stores. In San Diego, it gave the customer who put the store past its sales benchmark a special teddy bear sporting the California Bookstore Day logo.
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| Brian Selznick at Warwick's in La Jolla. | |
Books Inc. operates 10 stores in the San Francisco Bay Area and planned different CBD events for its locations. Ingrid Nystrom, manager of Books Inc. in Laurel Village, called the day a success, noting a 50% increase of sales over last year in her store. "Above all, it was a conversation," she said. "There was a woman who picked up a book, took a picture, put the book back down, started to walk away and noticed my CBD T-shirt. She said, 'Oh, that's right, that's today. Well, then, I'd better buy the book from you.' If this helps people who are so inclined to repeat that throughout the year, it was completely worth it."
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| Customers lining up to pay at Diesel. | |
At Green Apple Books in San Francisco--the store that brought the idea of California Bookstore Day to the NCIBA--co-owner Pete Mulvihill said the event was "nuts, in a good way" for staff, authors and customers. "We haven't had a day like that [in sales] that was not within seven days of Christmas," he said. "Our customers are already saying they can't wait to see what we come up with for next year."
Whether California Bookstore Day becomes an annual event or even goes national has yet to be decided. But Hill at Vroman's summed up the sentiment of many participants in the inaugural event when she exclaimed: "We're already talking about ways to make it better next year!" --Bridget Kinsella
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A cast of leading authors and illustrators "will show off their other talents" in a variety show to be held May 28 during the 
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NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday looked at 
American Craftsmen
Firmly rooted in the remote Yaak River Valley of northwest Montana during the Reagan administration, Smith Henderson's robust first novel centers on Pete Snow, a dedicated Department of Family Services officer, and his caseload of broken families and displaced children. Among the "twitchy and dysarthric" kids, "newly suicided fathers and their wreckage" and mothers with "shifting partners and adversaries and errant unattached freaks" stands Jeremiah Pearl, a survivalist and paranoid fanatic. Although Pearl and his family have taken to the land and holed up in scattered wilderness camps with their guns and Bibles, his 11-year-old son, Ben, is referred to Snow when he wanders down from the mountains and is discovered sick and lost on the local school playground. With an epic sweep, Fourth of July Creek is the story of Snow's dogged attempts to "save" Ben, and Pearl's equally stubborn refusal to surrender his family to a society of "poisons and toxicants... entrapment, fiat currency, lawyers." It is also the story of Snow's scattered but sincere attempts to save himself from his own broken marriage and deal with his runaway teenage daughter, his alcoholism, his unpredictable brother wanted for assaulting his parole officer. As Pearl's paranoia increases and Snow's personal life unravels, violence escalates and Henderson's tale branches into a full-blown saga of modern American disconnection and extremism.