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At Skylight Books |
Thoughts and prayers go out to all booksellers who have been dealing with that dreaded winter bookstore tradition, taking inventory. During my 15 years as a bookseller, "doing inventory" was easily the thing I most despised. Eventually we farmed out the actual counting to a professional inventory company, but the evil discrepancy checks were a forever curse.
As it happens, January is kind of an ideal month for "taking stock" as well as stocktaking, since business for most bookstores tends to get unsettlingly quiet (excepting the occasional Onyx Storm midnight release party front blowing through).
Some shops close for a day--and often a long night--of scanning, scanning, scanning. Skylight Books, Los Angeles, Calif. posted: "As promised, here is the official warning that we will be closed tomorrow due to inventory. We will miss y’all, so please come back on Saturday. Love y’all."
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At Old Town Books |
Others miraculously (from my perspective, at least) manage to find a way to count stock while remaining open, like Fables Books, Goshen, Ind.: "Inventory day! If you stopped by today, you might have noticed us counting, scanning, and moving things around. Don't panic; we're just doing our annual inventory. We thank you for your patience and understanding of the disarray. We promise the store will be back to its beautiful self soon."
Sometimes it goes unexpectedly well. Bookish in King of Prussia, Pa., posted on January 15 that it would be closed until January 16 for inventory, but on January 15 the shop had "Good News! Bookish is re-opening early! Our all star team finished inventory early so stop on by! We can't wait to see you!"
In the days that follow all that scanning, booksellers must find moments to steal away from their other responsibilities for discrepancy checks, aka "How could 3 copies of Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old just vanish?"
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First Chapter Books |
I caught my first scent of 2025 inventory season on the winter air December 28, when First Chapter Bookshop, Seneca, S.C., posted on social media: "We will be closed next week (12/31-1/4) to celebrate the New Year with family and to complete a full inventory count* (and possibly rest a tiny bit between all the to do list tasks). We will reopen Tues, Jan 7 for regular business hours!... * still send all the good vibes and energy because your gal continues to be nervous about this daunting task each year."
On New Year's Day, literally the annual moment when humans are "taking stock" of themselves, Liberty Bay Books, Poulsbo, Wash., noted: "We continue the tradition of tackling inventory on the first day of the new year. Thousands of books to count. And more to restock. See you on the flip side."
Then the momentum really kicked in:
Main Street Books, Davidson, N.C.: "Winter break ends today, so it must be time for... inventory! We will be closed on Monday, Jan 6th and Tuesday, Jan 7th as we work on our yearly inventory counts.... Now, wish us good luck and speedy scanning."
Little City Books, Hoboken, N.J.: "The all-day inventory crew (just missing Kate, who took this photo). For a week or two, we actually know what’s in the store!"
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Read It Again |
Read It Again, Suwanee, Ga.: "We're working hard to inventory the kids section! If it doesn't snow, we should be open regular hours tomorrow."
Deadtime Stories, Lansing, Mich., went all in on the season with "a complete inventory reset." Knowing that it "would be a herculean task, we certainly didn't expect it to take quite this long. We finished re-entering all of the books into the system last night at about midnight, so now all that's left is everything on the Screamatorium side of the shop. (Yes, everything.) We were hoping to get it all done today so that we could reopen a day early (we miss you!), but we just didn't quite get there. We need one more day to wrap everything up, so we will just be open our regular hours this week. (It doesn't help my time management that this guy has been taking full advantage of Mom's 12+ hour days this past week.).... Can't wait to see you all again soon!"
I would not recommend doing a book inventory the way time traveler Rod Taylor does it in The Time Machine (beginning at about the three-minute mark). I think those books should have been returned to the publisher before the apocalypse.
In his novel, H.G. Wells described the scene like this: "The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified."
Yeah, make sure to keep those returns up to date. And Happy Inventory Month!