Among the stars of the Winter Institute were Daniel Goldin and Lanora Hurley, the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops managers who are taking over two of the four Schwartz bookstores and making them into their own shops: Goldin's is Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee, and Hurley's is Next Chapter Bookshop in Mequon. Several times when mentioned they received rounds of applause and garnered all kinds of offers of support. Hurley met some people for the first time and said with amusement that she was beginning to think her real name was "the other one."
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Besides bound galleys, the hottest items at the Winter Institute were messenger bags and stickers being sold by the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association in its hospitality suite. (The suite, with many seats, free beverages, free snacks and free wi-fi, was itself a hot commodity.) The bags featured either of two slogans, Reading Is Sexy and Read or Die, and nearly 120 of them sold out well before the end of the conference. (The Reading Is Sexy bag was boldly modeled in the suite entrance by an apparently enthusiastic reader. See illustration below.)
"Women are very comfortable buying both styles," Lisa Knudsen, MPIBA executive director, said during a pause in her own retail business. "But men are not buying the Reading Is Sexy items." She added that she was heading home with lots of orders and had handed out many order forms. 
The bags and stickers had their origin at the Arches Book Company, Moab, Utah, a store that annually prints up a special T-shirt. More than two years ago, during one brainstorming session, the staff of eight women came up with the Reading Is Sexy idea, featuring "the mudflap girl" reading a book with a cup of coffee (or perhaps tea) nearby. Arches owner Andy Nettell said he grew up "in a conservative household" so he decided against the idea. Laughing, he said, "They went ahead anyway and came up with a design." Reaction was mixed: men were "not too intrigued," he said, but women liked it and the staff kept saying it would sell. In the first year, the store sold many T-shirts and more than 1,000 of the stickers at $1 each. Nettell estimated that "90% of the buyers were women, and the men who bought them were buying them for women." Librarians especially liked them, he added.
Nettell, who is president of MPIBA, then "brought the idea to the regional level," as a profit-sharing program for the association. MPIBA sold stickers to many of its member stores, netting more than $4,000 for the association so far. (The association isn't selling T-shirts this way because with a variety of sizes, "it's more complicated," Nettell said.)
The messenger bags were the "next generation." The cost is about $20, and at Arches Book Company, they retail for $39.95. Bookstores across the country can purchase them for $20 each plus shipping.
The latest slogan is Read or Die, which features four graphic, funky skulls. After the Arches Book Company staff came up with the idea and printed out 200 designs from a clip art site, "my coffee bar manager's four-year-old son" picked out the four skulls, Nettell said. "A designer cleaned it up," and now the store and MPIBA have another hot seller.
For more information, see the order form pdf on MPIBA's website.
MPIBA talked with other regional associations at the conference about doing these and other products in a similar profit-sharing program. It looks like all the regionals will have fun promoting reading or die.--John Mutter