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| Peter Glassman with Franklin Fixtures' Lisa Uhrik | |
Books of Wonder, the New York City children's bookstore, is helping out Bear Pond Books, the Montpelier, Vt., store that was severely damaged in floods on July 10, by selling at a steep discount lightly used bookcases from its former Upper West Side bookstore. That Books of Wonder branch was open only two and a half years before shutting down because of Covid--and a new landlord who was going to tear down the building. "It's hard to operate a bookstore with wrecking balls on site!" owner Peter Glassman said.
An interesting Hollywood connection is that the fixtures are identical to the ones used in Meg Ryan's store in the movie You've Got Mail--director Nora Ephron and her set designer loved the fixtures at Books of Wonder so much that they commissioned identical bookcases from Franklin Fixtures for the film set of the children's bookstore in the movie.
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| The fixtures in place at Books of Wonder's former Upper West Side store. | |
Glassman noted that he still has some 20 fixtures available; about half are two-sided cases meant to sit in a center aisle, the others are one-sided and can be placed against a wall or on the end of a row of double-sided cases. "They're really in beautiful condition," Glassman said. "We would love to see them put to good use at one of our wonderful fellow independent bookstores or a school or library, so we've priced them at roughly 50% of what new fixtures would cost."
Books of Wonder is moving them all out of storage this coming Friday, August 4. Picking up the shelves then will save additional labor costs for taking them back out of storage. For more information, contact Peter Glassman via e-mail or Franklin Fixtures owner Lisa Uhrik via e-mail. Uhrik and her husband, Dave, also own Plenty, Downtown Bookshop, Cookeville, Tenn.