Here's a question for booksellers: How often do people get your bookstore's name wrong when they say it out loud or mention it on a public platform (social media, traditional media, in an e-mail, snail mail address, etc.)?
During the 15 years I worked for the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vt., I soon lost count of the variations on a theme that a seemingly basic store name could conjure: North Shire Bookstore, Northshire Bookshop, Northshire Book Shop, North Shore Bookstore (though we weren't located near any apparent massive water features). Even the "Center" in our address would go missing regularly. And on at least one occasion, I fielded a call from a desperate book sales rep who said he was in Manchester but could see no signs of our bookstore. He was in Manchester, N.H., at the time.
Speaking of phone calls, the one bit of advice I would give to any prospective bookstore owner when it comes to naming your business is to imagine just one scenario. Let's say you've chosen a clever name that evokes the spirit of your vision and sparks bookish daydreams in your potential customers.
Now, imagine the shop phone ringing all day long, for years if you are lucky, and you or your staff picking up and offering a cheery greeting along the lines of: "[insert bookstore name here], this is Bob, how can I help?" Or words to that effect. Northshire Bookstore rolled off the tongue, but over the decades I've encountered bookshop names that might have a tongue-twisting phone potential.
There are workarounds, of course. One of my favorite bookstore names, Mr. B's Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath, England, has the perfect solution: condensation. I can easily imagine answering their phone and saying: "Mr. B's, how can I help?" I assume the callers know they're on the line with a bookstore. And if they don't know, well, I'm a bookseller. I can probably handsell them something.
Why am I suddenly obsessed with bookstore names? It's not quite so sudden. With all the indie bookstore openings we cover for Shelf Awareness, I have a front-row seat to the origin stories of many shops. It's a fascinating, deeply personal journey for people looking to find their perfect bookshop moniker.
Just for a few recent examples, I learned that Liz's Book Bar, which will open this June in Brooklyn, N.Y., is named in honor of owner Maura Cheeks's grandmother; that Henry's Books, opening later this year in downtown Spearfish, S.Dak., is named for the co-owners' two-year-old son; that newly opened Monstera's Books, Overland Park, Kan., which features books and plants, was named after a plant; and that Mayhem's Bookstore & Board Game Café, which will open this summer in Lancaster, Pa., is named for co-owner James Leavy's Dungeons & Dragons persona.
Those are all great and personal bookstore origin stories, and the names are easily repeatable when answering phones.
The precise moment I started down this bookstore name path for the column, however, happened yesterday when I read in the Irish Mirror that social media users in the country "are shocked after they discovered that the iconic Eason & Son book store commonly called Easons isn't actually spelt that way on the store sign.
"If you were to ask anyone around Ireland to name our most famous bookshop, most people would probably reply with Eason's, but as it turns out the storefronts on all of the 54 Eason shops around the country simply say Eason, with no plural."
On Wednesday, Irish social media "was set alight" after one user, sharing a picture of the well-known Eason storefront, asked: "Am I the only person that calls it Easons--as in the plural?' "
A commenter posted: "I've always called it Easons and everyone I know says the same!"; and another conceded: 'It's always been Eason but I've always called it Easons cause I don't want to sound like a knob."
The Mirror noted that while social media was shocked, "some people jumped to point out that the Eason website domain is Easons.com, but Eason.ie also redirects to Easons.com."
There are punctuation precedents for this issue. In 2006, the Waterstone's bookstore chain was "depunctuated" to Waterstones by managing director James Daunt, who said he dropped the apostrophe for "practical reasons.... Waterstones without an apostrophe is, in a digital world of URLs and e-mail addresses, a more versatile and practical spelling.... It also reflects an altogether truer picture of our business today which, while created by one, is now built on the continued contribution of thousands of individual booksellers."
At the time, John Richards, chairman of the Apostrophe Protection Society, disapproved: "If Sainsbury's and McDonald's can get it right, then why can't Waterstone's? It's just plain wrong. It's grammatically incorrect.... You would really hope that a bookshop is the last place to be so slapdash with English."
And in the 2014 April Fool's Day issue of Shelf Awareness, I wrote that "Barnes & Noble has officially changed its corporate name to Barnes & Nobles, adding the 's' primarily in reaction to 'common usage' among the vast majority of its patrons."
What's in a bookstore name? Everything and, sometimes, not so much.