Community Update

I've always loved books. Even before I had my "Mommy I can read!" moment at age four (when, magically, the words on the page of Dr. Seuss's One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish changed from words I recited by heart to words I recognized, that had meaning) books were a constant in my life. As I got older it wasn't just the books in my house and at school that fed me, but books from the library and local bookstores as well. If I couldn't get a ride on Saturdays and during the summer I walked or rode my bike the three miles or so to visit either Corsillo's Bookshop in Norwalk, CT where I lived, or Remarkable Bookshop in Westport, the next town over. Aside from the occasional LP, I spent all of my allowance and babysitting money in the bookstores...after first spending many hours making my decisions, browsing the shelves and talking to the booksellers.

It took me a few years after college to find my way into a career that involved books, but from my very first day working at Borders on March 3, 1994, I never looked back. And despite the bad ending to that whole Borders thing--you know, the revolving CEOs who all seemed to believe that if you could sell a can of soup or a blouse you could sell a book, the will-they-won't-they bankruptcy dance, the extended pain of the liquidation that wouldn't end...until it finally did end, with a cough and a sputter and a locking of all the doors forever--even despite that bad ending I never stopped being in awe at the role of the bookstore in a community.

During my time at Borders I watched kids grow from Dr. Seuss to Goosebumps to Hemingway to SAT prep to Joyce and Pynchon. I experienced the delirious joy of four Harry Potter midnight release parties. I had a million wonderful spontaneous discussions about books with customers and coworkers. And so of course, when that Borders thing did finally come to an end, I couldn't let go of it.

As soon as we heard about the beginning of the end of Borders Pete and I started to talk about opening our own store. We wanted to keep it on the Peninsula, because although the Borders he ran here was a small one, it had a fiercely loyal customer base, and we knew that the community would appreciate and support an independent bookstore.

What we didn't figure into our calculations was that during the lag time between Borders closing and our store opening--six months--people would get out of the habit of going to the mall. And we had no way of predicting that the mall our store is located in would lose retail tenants at an alarming rate. But what really surprised us was the fact that we can't seem to get very many people to buy anything in our store! Don't get me wrong--we have a solid base of really good customers, who come to us first and are willing to wait to have us order books in for them. But what we see more frequently is the person who comes into the store wanting to buy something (and thanks for that! we appreciate that you think of us first), but when we don't have it says, "No, don't order it. I'll get it from Amazon."

Here's what we want to be: the place where you can come to get what you want, what you need, what you didn't even know you needed but now just have to have. Here's what we don't want to be: the adorable little bookstore that doesn't have anything. Right now, we fear we're coming close to becoming the latter, as we find ourselves caught in a vicious cycle. In the first place, fewer and fewer people are coming to the mall. We don't have enough inventory (or enough footsteps through the door) so we don't get enough sales. Without sales we can't buy inventory. Without inventory we can't get sales. You see where I'm going with this...

They say that people will vote with their wallets. We're hoping that book lovers on the Peninsula will vote with theirs and allow us to remain in business here. Help us buck the trend: point your footsteps to the mall and come on in and buy a book. Bring us your kid's school reading list. Come to our events. We want to be a part of the community, but we need the community to help us make that happen.