Recently our store embarked on an interesting experiment that’s forced me to stretch my skills as a buyer. We’ve opened an additional small bookstore (approx. 600 square feet), in an office building, where we’re hoping its 1,000+ employees will be keen to buy books. The building that houses our "mini Booksmith" is the lovely new headquarters for a large insurance company, whose employees had previously been working in three different Boston-area locations. When the company merged everyone onto one site they conducted a "What conveniences would you like to see in your place of employment?" poll and "a bookstore" was apparently among the most popular responses.

Our "mini Booksmith" space is immediately adjacent to the building’s cafeteria and also carries some snacks and beverages provided by the contracted cafeteria company, to appease employees’ hunger pangs during the hours the cafeteria is closed. In order to streamline the check-out process, everything (food, books, gifts) is rung in on the cafeteria system’s cash registers and watched over by the cafeteria staff. In ringing in our store’s sales the cashiers press a button for either "books" or (in the case of our non-book items) a button for "gifts," then enter the price as it’s marked. As this doesn’t give us a ton of sales information, one of our hardy booksellers (the wonderful Lisa Fabiano) will be doing frequent hand-counts of the store’s inventory, receiving new stock as it comes in, shelving books, and rearranging displays. She’ll be reporting specific title sales and customer requests to Lorna and me, so that we can then order and reorder books accordingly.

As a buyer I’ve found it rather tricky to figure out what children’s books to include in the inventory of this store. I’ve had to take a gander at the interests and reading desires of 1,000+ people who may have relatively little in common, apart from the fact that they all work in the same large building. No doubt their pay scales are very different, their levels of higher education probably run the gamut, their interests, their hobbies, their home lives, everything (with the exception of their levels of Red Sox devotion) is likely to be quite diverse. I’ve tried to imagine the occasions these employees are most likely to be buying for and the ages their children and grandchildren are likely to be. We’ve all agreed it’s important that the store contain enough "classics" to immediately suggest that we’ve got a good selection (people generally judge this based on their ability to recognize an adequate number of titles they know and love), but not be so heavy on familiar titles that it seems we’ve got nothing new to offer, or that we have no distinct personality. (In other words, I don’t want us to resemble your average airport bookstore.)

The strangest part of this venture has been choosing books for a children’s section that’s not likely to see many children. (How weird.) The trickiest part has been buying for a store that won’t (except during Lisa’s hours) be staffed by knowledgeable booksellers. For the past nine years I’ve been wonderfully spoiled by the opportunity to buy a wide range of books in terms of both oddity and obscurity with the relative confidence that we’ll sell most of them, because our staff of booksellers and I will read them (or as many of them as can), embrace them, and then handsell them to our customers. It’s a considerable challenge (and considerably less fun, I think) to select books based, to some extent, on their likely ability to "sell themselves," judging from their cover art, their plot synopses, their already established track records. Is this what the buying life is like the buyers of big chain stores, online-only bookstores, and distributors?  Anyone care to weigh in?