This holiday season 18-year-old Calendar Club is bringing something new to its mix of 1,220 kiosks and temporary in-line stores under the Go! Calendar, Go! Toys, and Go! Games brands, bookexpress. When it completes the roll out of all its stores, at a rate of 130 a week the closer it gets to mid-November, the company will have six bookexpress remainder bookstores, at least one of which will be in a former Borders location in Boise, Idaho, which will also feature calendars, games, and toys.
“We did this years ago,” said Marc Winkelman, president and CEO of Calendar Holdings, parent company of Calendar Club. “We didn’t do it well, and we abandoned it. We thought we’d give it another try.” Even though he owns a Nook Color, Winkelman said that he still believes in the long-term viability of print, which is why he’s testing the book market this year.
This is not Winkelman’s first bookstore venture, in 2007 he took a minority stake in the independent Tecolote Book Shop in the Santa Barbara community of Montecito, Calif. Winkelman began his bookselling career with his own store in Detroit in the late 1970s and early ‘80s before joining Barnes & Noble and helping them open some of their first superstores.
Nor is the Boise store Calendar Clubs’s only former Borders location. It is also opening temporary stores in several Waldenbooks and Borders Express locations, including San Francisco. And in January, it purchased the fixed assets, fixtures, trade name, and trademark of Borders’s Day by Day Calendar Co. for $9.2 million, before Borders filed for bankruptcy protection. About 300 of this year’s Calendar Club stores were part of the purchase. The company did not renew leases on 117 Day by Day stores nor does it have plans to use the name.
