Green Apple Gives SF Kids Some Credit

By Bridget Kinsella -- Publishers Weekly, 10/31/2007 11:04:00 AM

To celebrate its 40^th anniversary, Green Apple Books and Music in San Francisco decided to give every one of the 3900 third graders in the city’s public school district $10 credit to buy books in its store.

The idea came from one of the store’s customers who asked Kevin Ryan, one of Green Apple’s owners, if there was a way for her to donate the store credit she got when she sold them used books. Green Apple expects to pay for most of the credit program itself, but it has also reached out to its customers who wish to donate their store credit to help supply third graders with books. Mayor Gavin Newsom wrote a letter for the flyer announcing the program in which he encourages the kids to use the book credit—and “read, read, read.”

Ryan said Green Apple decided to extend a hand to third graders because he heard somewhere that that was a pivotal age for children and their relationship to reading. The flyers will start going out next week to a number of schools and the store plans to roll out the program gradually week to week until all of the schools in the district are involved. When Barbara Beaver, a sales rep at Chronicle Books, heard what Green Apple was doing she got the publisher to sign on as a sponsor and pony up $500.

“I am just so thrilled because they are going after the next generation of readers,” said Beaver. “It’s such a dynamic and joyful store; it’s one of the gems of the city, why not remind people of that?”

The three co-owners of the bookstore said they saw the credit program as a way to reach out to their community and also to cultivate a new generation of readers.

“We hope they come in with their parents,” said Kevin Hunsanger, a store co-owner. Green Apple sells new and used books out of its three-story building that has lots of nooks and crannies and is located in the Richmond area of the city by the bay. “Hopefully this will enable kids to develop a love for reading and to do it in a place like Green Apple,” said Hunsanger.

Pete Mulvihill, the third co-owner—“the new one” with only 14 years experience working at the store as compared with Ryan’s 18 and Hunsanger’s 16—joked that the credit program helped them get the kids “while they are young and most vulnerable.”

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