This year’s New England Independent Booksellers Association fall conference, held at the Rhode Island Convention Center in Providence, R.I., from October 12-14, had a slight bump in attendance with more than 400 attendees for the organization’s first mid-week show, which packed educational sessions and author events into the first two days and left a third day free for exhibits. As one sign of the times, many stores rotated staff to prevent more than one person from being away at a time. Others drove an hour and a half or more each way to avoid hotel costs.
The first day’s programming made no attempt to sugar-coat the difficulties of surviving, much less thriving, in a changing bookselling and publishing landscape. Many booksellers’ sales going into the show have already been affected and mirrored those of Karlene Rearick, owner of The Alphabet Garden in Cheshire, Ct., who said, “We’re sputtering along.” At the plenary session on The Bookstore of the Future, American Booksellers Association president and PW Bookseller of the Year Becky Anderson of Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville, Ill., prodded booksellers to understand the need for major changes now. “We need to look at the big issues,” she said. “It comes down to more than consignment and dating.” Donning a space helmet, just one of the many nonbook items Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Ariz., has added to its product mix in recent years, co-owner and former ABA president Gayle Shanks added, “It can’t be redefining what we’re already doing.”
NEIBA also experimented with the length and format of this year’s educational programs and created a Moveable Feast of Ideas with nine tables and nine topics to continue the conversation on the Future of the Book. Jane Dawson, co-owner of Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass., called it “one of the high moments [of the conference] to hear Gayle Shanks so passionately defend the percentage of books we sell. I don’t know [panelist] Carl Lennertz well, but I think it is one of the few times he was speechless.” Other programming covered a range of practical concerns, from Integrating Social Media into Your Store’s Activities to Inventory Management and In-Store Book Fairs.
If the conference began on a somewhat scary note, it also offered reassurance that booksellers can prevail. At the annual meeting out-going president Dick Hermans, co-owner of Oblong Books & Music in Millerton and Rhinebeck, N.Y., noted, “Lisa Sullivan deserves to be acknowledge for going through real s**t this year.” Sullivan is in the midst of rebuilding Bartleby’s Books in Wilmington, Vt., which was mostly destroyed by Hurricane Irene; her other store, The Book Cellar in Brattleboro, was demolished by a fire in the spring. In a show of support, the Booksellers Representatives of New England donated all the books left after the show to Sullivan.
Although The Norwich Bookstore in Norwich, Vt., was unaffected by the flooding, co-owner Liza Bernard is working to rescue the West Hartford Library in nearby West Hartford, Vt., which lost its entire children’s book collection and many of its adult titles. Because structural engineers haven’t yet assessed whether the building can be saved, Bernard is raising funds for the library to purchase books when it does reopen. She is encouraging the community to buy Norwich Gift Cards to be given to the library and is holding an event in conjunction with the publication of Countryman Press’s new edition of The Soul of Vermont by Richard Brown. The Bookstore Plus in Lake Placid, N.Y., is also hosting a fundraiser this month for its local library, The Wells Memorial Library of Upper Jay, which lost its children’s collection and part of its Adirondack Collection to the storm.
Of course, no show would be complete without lots of books and authors. This year’s New England Book Awards went to Geraldine Brooks for Caleb’s Crossing, Isabel Wilkerson for Warmth of Other Suns, and Jeanne Birdsall for Penderwicks at Point Mouette. Howard Frank Moser, who received the President’s Award for a body of work, kept booksellers laughing at the awards luncheon with his five commandments of touring. They include watching out for moose and trying to sell at least one book at each venue, even if you have to buy it yourself.
There were so many good books on display at the show that when pressed to name which ones stand out, Megan Sullivan, head buyer for Harvard Book Store, said, “there’s a soup of hot stuff.” Mixed into the broth are The Art of Fielding by Chad Harwich, who garnered some of the longest signing lines, and Comeback Love by Peter Golden, which is now on the Simon & Schuster list, after originally being discovered by Susan Novotny, owner of The Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza in Albany, N.Y., and published through her Staff Picks Press.
