In honor of last Friday’s Independence Day celebrations, I thought it only right that I give a salute to an independent bookstore, as independence is what we’re all about!

When I saw an announcement of the opening of The Mainstreet Trading Company in last week’s Children’s Bookshelf, I read it aloud to Lorna and Lisa, who were within earshot, and a fight then erupted over which of us should be allowed the opportunity to move to Scotland and work for this lovely-sounding store. Our interest was further piqued by a peek at the store’s wonderfully appealing logo, which screams "sweet, smart and sophisticated" — three qualities I admire in a kid-friendly independent bookstore.

Co-owner Rosamund de la Hay was most recently the children’s marketing director for Bloomsbury Books, where she oversaw the launch and promotion of a series you might have heard of, about a boy wizard named Harry Potter? In other words, she ought to know a thing or two about how to draw readers to good reading.

An article in the Southern Reporter quotes Rosamund saying that she and her husband Bill are feeling "exhilarated, exhausted, excited and plain terrified.” To them I send my sincerest best wishes (as I do to anyone else opening bookstores out there) and award them a gold star for a cracking good logo, for a nice solid-sounding store name, and for bravery.

Anyone interested in following their lead? If so you might want to look at the ad for ReadingLasses Bookshop-Café (and attached living quarters!) in Wigtown, Scotland, which is currently for sale. (Thanks to Susan Fox of Red Fox Books in Glens Falls, N.Y. for the link!)

Sadly, the wonderful Origami Now! exhibit I blogged about last year closed this month at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., after a wonderful year-long run. I wound up visiting Origami Now! three or four times this year, as the PEM has become one of Gareth’s and my favorite places to take out-of-town guests. My appreciation for the exhibit grew with each visit.

As a little salute to the art of paper-folding AND the objects of our collective affection, I give you this: a video of someone folding a lovely little origami book, accompanied by a lovely little Nick Drake tune.

Here’s another question that’s generated many an entertaining (and creative) response from visitors to our store’s "graffiti stall." Have at it!

If you could take up residence in (as in, live inside the plot and setting of) any one book, what title would you choose?

In March I blogged about the note that my pen friend Mirin (a kindergartner) sent me as a thank you for The Luck of the Loch Ness Monster. Apparently that book has really stayed with her, as she send me ANOTHER lovely letter recently, in which she mentioned it again, this time tying it to something different than she did in her first note. Her new letter came enclosed in this LOVELY card, which (in addition to depicting the sun, a cat, a house, and a vase) also shows a book with the letters "TE" (short for "The End," of course). The book reflects this fact, which Mirin recently shared with her mother: "Alison and I are book-friends."

No, I didn’t coin the term "book-friend" — Mirin did. But can you imagine a better friend to have?

Mirin’s most recent letter to me is pictured below. In case you can’t read her EXCELLENT penmanship or decipher her invented spellings, here’s a translation:

"Dear Alasin! [sic] Today I had oatmeal because I was thinking of Katarina Elizabeth [the main character in The Luck of the Loch Ness Monster, who HATES oatmeal]. On Friday I have a play! I am an astronaut! Love, Mirin"

In response to this wonderful letter, I have sent my "book-friend" a copy of The Astronaut Handbook (Knopf Books for Young Readers, June 2008) by the always entertaining Meghan McCarthy, as I think any astronaut should own a copy, whether she’s rocketing her way toward the moon OR about to embark on the adventure of first grade. I can’t wait to hear what my "book-friend" thinks of this one!

I see summer reading lists for many, MANY schools float through our store every summer. We keep notebooks at both of our point of sale counters that contain the summer reading lists for ALL local schools of interest to our customers, public and private, because every year they come in having left their copies at home. If a customer comes in and says "Do you have the summer reading list for _____?" we then open the notebook, flip to that school’s list, and make that customer’s day a lot easier. In the process, we make the sale.

Of all the school lists I’ve seen in recent years, the one that impresses me most is the one that’s produced by the English Department at Weston High School in Weston, Mass. I love this school list — not so much for the actual books it includes (though I do think it’s a rather diverse and interesting mix, especially compared to those of most high schools), but for the WAY it’s compiled and formatted. The list is available on the school’s website, so you can download a copy and see just what I’m talking about. (Click on the "W" beside download.com and it’ll open the list as a Word document.)

The Weston High School list begins with this introductory statement:

We English teachers believe that reading should be a pleasurable pastime as well as a source of intellectual growth. Anticipating the summer, we’ve been talking about the books we look forward to reading and the ones we highly recommend. Below, you’ll find the courses that will be offered in the fall of 2008 and books required.

Below the required reading you will find a lengthy list of books we heartily recommend but no longer require for any particular course. We have provided brief descriptions to help you make satisfying choices. We’re confident you’ll be drawn to many of them. 

The list of Required Reading books is an interesting mix, but what really wows me about Weston is the way they choose to present their recommended (not required!) summer reading choices. Each teacher in the department selects a handful of books to recommend then explains what each book is about and WHY they’re recommending it. Their entries are insightful, personal, and interesting. The books they’ve selected are a truly interesting mix.

I love the personable feel of a list like this and the potential avenues for discussion it could open up between students and their teachers, not to mention the potential for increasing students’ respect for the folks who stand at the front of their classrooms every day. Maybe Mr. So-and-So doesn’t give the best lectures but he has fantastic taste in fiction. Maybe Ms. Such-and-Such’s interests are a lot more complex than anyone would have guessed. The best thing about this list, though, is the message it sends to students, on the teachers’ behalf: WE READ BOOKS AND WE ENJOY THEM. I can’t imagine a more effective behavior for English teachers to model than that.

Is your decorating style more haphazard than orderly? If so, why not confine your literary clutter to the oddly-shaped chambers of the Opus Shelving System from Design Within Reach. (You decide whether or not the price is within reach too.) The unit is made from recycled expanded polypropylene, "the same material chosen for motorcycle helmets due to its light weight and durability." This means your Opus bookcase will withstand the elements if you want to use it outside. As for what such treatment will do to your books, though, that’s another matter…

While only a drunken bee would construct a hive this uneven, the honeycomb-like pattern of this bookcase nevertheless reminds of those fuzzy fliers and now also the young adult novel Kissing the Bee by Kathe Koja (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which I finally read two weeks ago.

I wasn’t intending to read this book at the time. In fact what I was trying to do was weed my overgrown stack of galleys at home, to make room for all the incoming ones. When I got to Kissing the Bee and asked myself the "stay or go?" question, I decided to read the first few pages as a means of settling the debate. If I was drawn in by them, the book would maintain its in-the-pile position for a while longer (at least until I’m forced to weed again). If not? Donation City.

Of course you can guess what happened. I read the first few pages and in rapid fashion finished the entire book, which I thoroughly enjoyed and have thought about quite a bit in the days since. I love that its open-faced, honest tone makes for such compulsive reading, and I love the intriguing parallels it draws between the world of fiction and non.

The narrator of Kissing the Bee is a high school girl named Dana, who has been slowly awakening to the fact that her best friend Avra isn’t actually all that good to her or for her. As if that’s not difficult enough, the situation is further complicated by the fact that Dana is deeply in love with Avra’s boyfriend, Emil — the only person who seems truly in tune with Dana’s interests and emotions, the one soul who is truly paying attention.

While this complicated triangle is unfolding, Dana is working on a project for a science unit on "cooperative societies." As she explains it, "I was tired of human beings by that point, so I decided to do bees." Notes from her bee studies appear in italics throughout the novel, enabling the reader to make clear connections between the behavior of bees and the behavior of human beings. In Dana’s life, for example, Avra is very much the Queen Bee.

I absolutely loved all the bee bits in this book. Not only did they teach me a great deal about apiculture (a word that was new to me), they served as thought-provoking metaphors for what was happening the story, and dramatic ones too. Drama? With BEES? Yep. Here’s a taste (and a lesson) of what good old Mother Nature has to offer, as explained by the talented Kathe Koja:

The creation of a new queen is extremely important to the hive — without the queen, there will be no honey, no colony, nothing at all — so anywhere from two to twelve queen cells might be constructed. As the new queens are about to emerge, half the colony may leave with the old queen, massing and waiting on a nearby tree or bush while the scouts find a safe location. Then the swarm follows her to their new home.

This is a beautiful novel about relationships — not just the romantic type, but the friends-for-reasons-neither-entirely-understands type too. It would be a great choice for high school-aged girls who are growing up, moving on, and opting out of unfullfilling friendships (you know — the kind that sting).

I’ve got TWO gold stars to hand out this week, both for excellence in design. The first goes to a book cover.

As may have become apparent in my recent post about silhouettes and boring stock photos, I’m picky about my book covers — both because I like to see books get their just deserts, design-wise, and because a good cover makes my job INFINITELY easier. (It’s so painful to have to say to a customer, "No, really! It’s great! Ignore the terrible cover and just listen to what I’m telling you….") I am constantly, then, judging book covers and expressing my opinions on them to my poor unfortunate sales reps, for whom I frequently have less than positive cover feedback. My beloved Simon and Schuster rep, Katie McGarry, though, was no doubt pleased that I said nothing but great things about one particular cover on the S&S fall list.

Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson will be featuring this beautiful and intriguing design when it lands on bookstore and library shelves this October. I love the power of this seemingly simple image, the subtle hints it provides about the plot of this book (look closely at those birds) and the way the fonts, which appear to be hand-drawn, play beautifully with the image itself. The front of the jacket is arresting and so is the spine, making it likely that customers will pick up this book even when it isn’t turned face-out on the shelf (though in most stores in most stores it probably will be for quite some time).

This week’s second gold star goes to a logo, though I’m a bit surprised to be giving it to such. It’s not often that a publisher or imprint logo elicits a particularly strong reaction from me, but the logo for Featherproof Books is a different matter.

To quote from their website, Featherproof Books "is a young indie publisher based in Chicago, dedicated to the small-press ideals of finding fresh, urban voices. We publish perfect-bound, full-length works of fiction and downloadable mini-books." One of these full-length works of fiction is  This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record, a young adult novel by Susannah Felts published this past March that is being distributed by PGW.

I haven’t read this book, so I can’t yet comment on its quality, but I will say that when I picked up my galley and the cuter-than-cute sticker that’s pictured here fell out of it, I sat up and took notice. To me this logo says "smart, quirky and fun" — three qualities I appreciate both in a book and in a publisher. I look forward to eventually reading some of Featherproof Books’ fare to see if the books they produce are half as appealing as the drawing they’re using to promote them.

Have you seen any gold-star-worthy designs of late (covers, logos, or otherwise)? If so, why not rave about them here, with the hopes that their designers’ might catch wind and whip up more of that same fabulousness.

While I don’t exactly live on an Anthropologie-friendly budget, I do sometimes browse the sale rack of the retailer known for its off-beat, elegant clothing inspired by vintage wear, and I do thumb through their mail order catalog whenever one arrives. Their May catalog took me by surprise this year because several pages of it had a "Summer Classics" theme in which EVERY photo showed a female model doing what? READING! And one page in each of five reading-themed spreads includes a quote from some famous work of literature (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Awakening, Mrs. Dalloway, Wuthering Heights, Ethan Frome).

I think it’s refreshing to see a clothing retailer showing reading in such a fashionable, sexy light, let alone showing reading at all. (I also thought it couldn’t hurt the reputation of models to be seen doing such a thing…) I wish more print ads, television commercials, music videos, mail order catalogs and the like would show MORE images of people with a book in their hands.

From the standpoint of someone wanting to promote the "coolness" of reading, this could only be a good thing. And for publishers these avenues seem like a potential gold mine for product placement.

I know, I know… Those music video and feature film spots are probably only affordable to companies with advertisting budgets the size of Coca-Cola’s, and devoted only to books with print runs in the millions. But surely some clever marketing guru could finagle a way to sneak in a superb book by a midlist author every now and again?

In any case, this Anthropologie catalog strikes me as a missed opportunity for some publisher, as the book this model is reading in every photo is one called The Color of Green. (I can just make out the words in the photo at the bottom of page 24.) Written by Lenard Kaufman and published in 1956, it’s a crime novel that’s now long out of print. But, hey? If any of you used or rare book sellers out there have noticed a sudden interest in this title, this could just be the reason for that.

Rivendell Books in Montpelier, Vt., has a REAL LIVE tortoise (not a giant one!) making its home in the bookstore. How cool is that? If you walk to the children’s section, at the back of the store, you’ll find Veruca under the "Vermont Authors" section, with a sign above him explaining the following:

Veruca
Rivendell Mascot
Russian Desert Tortoise
Central Asia
He’s a male

You can spot Veruca’s bin on the bottom shelf of the bookcase below.

I don’t know Veruca’s history at Rivendell or how long he’s put up with the curious stares and over-eager hands of Montpelier’s children and adults, but each time I’ve popped in to take a peek at the guy, he’s been surprisingly lively. I’m amazed at the speed he can pick up as he crosses the sandy gravel that lines his plastic bin!

When I first started working at Wellesley Booksmith over seven years ago, our store had been in existence just a year and a half. In its previous life the space had been a bookstore that was part of the Lauriat’s chain AND at one time or another it had been home to a cat. Frequently customers coming into our reinvented store space would ask if the cat was still there. "Alas," I would tell them, as I secretly thanked my lucky stars that I didn’t have to break out in hives at work each day. I love cats, but I’m highly allergic to them, so the presence of a store cat would be bad news for yours truly.

I do love the idea, though, of a store pet (who may or may not also be the store’s mascot). A store dog would be especially welcome in our space! We allow dogs to come into the store with their owners and have many a shaggy visitor stopping in on a VERY frequent basis, knowing full well that at either point-of-sale counter they can (and do) receive a biscuit from one of our booksellers. (Talk about a clever way to get your customers in the door — this way their dogs literally DRAG them in anytime they’re walking around the neighborhood.)

Of course having a few furry friends traipse through our store on short visits doesn’t even begin to put us in the same animal-loving camp as Wild Rumpus in Minneapolis, which is home to an impressive menagerie of critters, both of the furry and feathered variety. Their newest co-workers are two chickens named Pimento and Olive!

Have you been in/worked in/known about a store that had a living critter or two on staff (though presumably not on the payroll)? If so, please enlighten us readers as to what you thought of that arrangement. And/or tell us whether or not YOU would want to bring your pets with you to work.

I first discovered the web comic Toothpaste for Dinner when a collection of the site’s cartoons was published in book form a couple of years ago. Since then I’ve become a regular visitor of the site, on which cartoonist Drew posts a new cartoon daily. I couldn’t resist sharing this one:

toothpastefordinner.com