Last week John Mutter of Shelf Awareness spent two days with New England Independent Booksellers Association executive director Steve Fischer visiting bookstores in Connecticut and New York. It was a great little working vacation! Here's the second part of a multi-part series reporting on what we saw.
Founded in 1975, Oblong Books & Music now has two stores, about 25 miles from each other, in Millerton and Rhinebeck, N.Y. (Millerton is near the Connecticut border; Rhinebeck is directly on the Hudson River.) The Millerton store, the ur-Oblong location, as it were, is managed by Dick Hermans, who started Oblong with Holly Nelson (she officially retired in 2001) and occupies a sprawling, 4,200-sq.-ft. space in two 19th century buildings where a perfect 90-degree angle is as rare as a first edition of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
On the other hand, the Rhinebeck store, opened the Saturday after the September 11 attacks, is in a strip mall--a reasonably attractive one--in a space of about 2,500 square feet and is managed by Suzanna Hermans, who joined her father's business two years ago after graduating from the University of Iowa and has managed the Rhinebeck store for the past year and a half. (The timing of the opening meant that "it has taken all this time to hit stride," Dick said.)
The two stores and managers are studies in contrasts in a variety of other ways since they serve slightly different markets and since father and daughter have different approaches to the business. For example, as is obvious in the Millerton store, Dick doesn't do a lot of returns, whereas Suzanna does, in part because of having less storage space.
Millerton draws somewhat more on residents and visitors to nearby Litchfield County in Connecticut, a rather wealthy area. The store's customers are slightly older, "people steeped in books a long time," Dick said.
The Millerton store sells twice as many new fiction titles (many more in hardcover) and cookbooks as the Rhinebeck store. Millerton also sells more history, classics and mysteries. The Millerton store has a very strong children's section, called Oblong, Jr., which takes up a building with about 1,000 square feet of retail space that Oblong bought in 1994. The two buildings are connected by a back passageway.
Oblong traditionally has not offered staff picks, Dick said, but this summer it has highlighted near the front doors of its stores a selection of summer reading titles, most priced at $14 to $16, that include old and new titles, such as The Leopard, Pride and Prejudice, Mudbound, The Elegance of the Hedgehog and Under the Banner of Heaven. Although Oblong offers a third book at half price is customers buy two of the books, most buy just one or two. Some 40 to 50 books are sold off the display every week.
The Rhinebeck store started a very popular staff picks section in February, for which Suzanna borrowed an idea from Bookpeople, Austin, Tex.: the shelf talkers are all at eye level. Among titles that have done well: Obedience by Will Lavender, a midlist title that has sold more than 40 copies in two or three months.
Another handselling accomplishment: since April of 2008, the store has sold about 120 copies, one at a time, of The Music Lesson by Victor Wooten.
Current bestsellers at Rhinebeck include The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo and The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb.
Another strong title at both stores, especially in Rhinebeck, is Stanford White, Architect, a $75 Rizzoli book published last October whose cover features an interior picture of Rhinebeck's Ferncliff Casino. Now known as the Astor Courts, the local mansion was designed by White for John Jacob Astor IV.
Among popular sidelines are Moleskine notebooks, which the Rhinebeck store now has in a spinner rack.
Both Oblong stores sell music, but at Millerton, music has been cut by a third ("our customer base stopped caring about music," Dick said) and represents 10% of sales. By contrast, the Rhinebeck store has a large selection of music and sales have grown, now representing 25% of sales. The Rhinebeck store has become "the biggest independent music shop between Albany and New York City," Dick added.
The Rhinebeck store is the Oblong outlet that has a steady events schedule, usually featuring something on Friday or Saturday evenings, so that customers "know there are regular events." Suzanna said she prefers not to have more than one or two events a week because "less is more" and "you don't want to have bum events."
The stores also do many offsite events, including being the bookseller three years running for annual meetings of the Omega Institute and the Jung Society. (Interestingly at this summer's meeting of the Jung Society, attendance was down 40% but books sales rose.) And this week through Sunday both Dick and Suzanna Hermans are spending 12 hours a day at the Dutchess County Fair in Rhinebeck selling books and other items at a booth. The Fair is one of the largest in New York State and draws 500,000 people during six days.
Suzanna was especially excited about Oblong's new website and extolled the importance of social networking sites. As any fan of Twitter knows, @oblongirl posts frequently and amusingly. Suzanna said that Twitter has been an important way of connecting with customers, particularly about events. Quite a few people she has spoken with first on Twitter have wound up visiting the store. She advised booksellers using Twitter who want to find locals who read and should be interested in bookstores to use search.twitter.com to search within 25 miles with key words like books and reading.
Oblong Tidbits:
*Suzanna noted that the two most shoplifted types of books are poetry and the Library of America series. Sorry, Abbie Hoffman.
*Dick lamented the popularity of stainless steel refrigerators, which had killed refrigerator magnets.
*The stores' name refers to a bit of land whose ownership was disputed by the New York and Connecticut colonies and was nicknamed "the oblong": it was 50 miles long and less than two miles wide. In exchange for the territory, New York gave Connecticut the bit of land on Long Island Sound, including Greenwich, Stamford, New Canaan and Darien, that juts into New York State. [Editor's note: sorry for all the detail, but like Dick Hermans, we're history buffs.]
Suzanna and Dick Hermans (above with some delicious pommes frites) at Gigi Trattoria in Rhinebeck, nearly next door to Oblong. Incidentally Gigi master chef and founder Laura Pensiero is the author of a new Harper title, Hudson Valley Mediterranean: The Gigi Good Food Cookbook, which includes 150 recipes from the restaurant. (There's a branch in Red Hook.)--John Mutter
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In her introduction to this beautifully designed picture-book tribute to Mexican artist Diego Rivera (1886-1957) and his paintings, Guadalupe Rivera Marín (daughter of Diego Rivera and his first wife, Guadalupe Marín) immediately engages both young readers and fans of the artist (he "earned [the] nickname, el chile bola, because he was fiery and round, like a chile pepper"). The conversational tone of the narrative allows viewers to experience the featured painting on every spread as they would in a gallery led by a knowledgeable guide. The type and borders set off each piece of art with just the right mood, and the final pages offer details about its medium and location. In the text that accompanies the opening portrait of the author, Picos con naranja ("Picos with an Orange"), Marín explains that her father called her Picos "because I was so small and he was so big" (a photograph at the opening of the book proves it). The plump, round, golden typeface set against a saturated aqua background echoes not only the orange young Guadalupe holds, but also the toddler's posture, which suggests an understandably fidgety mood. Later, a more intimate painting of a mother braiding her daughter's hair, Mujeres peinándose ("Women Combing their Hair"), features a rose-hued background and formal Gothic-style type that mimics the terracing of the fields below. The accompanying narrative explains that when the author was a girl, "all women in Mexico wore their hair in braids, trenzas," and that "to wear your hair long and loose . . . was scandalous!"