Our summer staff are all in place, and the daily row of extra large frappucino/slurpee/iced coffee cups with straws is on the staff shelf to prove it.  Well, actually, they’re running around like eager puppies in a ball pit, but that’s why we bring them back every year. We have a crew of part-time high school and college students who join us during school breaks on a rotating schedule, but when summer arrives, those who aren’t abroad (those lucky kinder) are on staff and on deck, ready to mop up paint after stories and crafts, demonstrate their alphabetizing prowess in the picture books, and reassure middle schoolers to “go ahead and skip Algebra 1 for geometry as a freshman, but get your PE credits in the summer – trust me.”
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We at the Flying Pig are a pragmatic crew. We hope to be creative and energetic, but we also know our limits. This translates into a healthy skepticism for new programs; we know they need to be easy to implement, maintain, and close out.
One of the reasons Candlewick’s Where’s Waldo? annual summer contest — in which bookstores engage local retailers in a fun competition that brings customers into all of our stores looking for the hidden Waldo figurine — is that they make it REALLY easy for us, with instructions, all the materials we need, and even some prizes to give away.
When Linda Devlin of Linda’s Story Time bookstore in Monroe, Ct., wrote to the New England Children’s Booksellers Association listserv about her Summer Reading Challenge, I was intrigued. She has fun ideas to make a game out of keeping kids reading great books over the summer, and trying books outside their usual comfort zones. So tonight, I was noodling around with a simple idea for our own summer reading challenge, and here’s what I came up with:
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My bookstore, due to a series of events both unfortunate and fortunate, has relocated a few times over the past 12 years. Lately I’ve been struck by how quickly and thoroughly the store and its staff have become knit into the fabric of our current neighborhood. We just moved in about 16 months ago, but already it feels like we’re part of the family.

Spellbound has been in a stand-alone building, a row of downtown storefronts, and even tucked inside an art gallery for a while. Right now, in what I hope will well and truly be its forever home, the bookstore is in a two-story shopping center on one of the city’s main thoroughfares. One of the owners of the building kindly approached me a couple of years ago about moving my bookstore into his building because, he said, he thought that we’d be good for his other tenants and vice versa. After some good and decidedly not-so good landlord experiences, I was impressed and heartened by this building owner who actually cared so much about the success of his tenants.
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Like several of my ShelfTalker colleagues this week, my mind is on the transition to the summer season. As I write this on Thursday afternoon, schools across Austin are letting out, marking the last official day of school. And the store is filling up. This week has marked one of the busiest in recent memory, crowded with people looking for summer reads (although today they were mostly flocking to meet YouTube star Ryan Higa). Continue reading →

Today we are finishing up new business and returning full circle to something older. We’ll start with new business. Last week I invited ShelfTalker readers to provide a name for the blank page on either side of the title of a new part of a book, the blank pages that are only there when there is a big stopping point and a new beginning in the story.
There were some great ideas put forward. Thanks to everyone who entered. What I have done this week is pick the four best and put them in a survey below for you to select your favorite from. Please take a moment and cast your ballot!
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Our school bells rang for the last time this year on Thursday afternoon (actually, we don’t have bells anymore, but if I say that the computer-generated timer “dinged” it’s just not the same visual, is it?) We get out of school pretty early here in central Indiana, especially compared to my East Coast friends. But the combination of our history as an agricultural state and the Indianapolis 500, which ran on Sunday (Did you see it? What a race!) supports our custom to end classes before Memorial Day. We go back (entirely too) early in August, which makes for some very hot two-a-day football practices and lots of discussion about dress codes at the junior high, but the entire months of June and July represent glorious freedom.
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Most kids are still in school here in Vermont, but summer has started in other parts of the country, so we are in the teeter zone. These are the few weeks in between our slower season, when one or two staffers can handle the store alone, and the tourist season, when we really need three or four.
In the teeter zone, we’re playing a dangerous game of guessing when we can be lean on the sales floor and in the back room. In late springtime, this is especially true, since staffers need time off for travel and graduations and other activities, and staffers are also out of the store working offsite events. So you make deals with each other: you take this shift, I’ll take that one, and you just hope that your gamble on the shifts that leave one person alone will work out. Selling books isn’t quite as hectic trading on Wall Street, but it can be surprisingly crazy when you’re solo. (Cynthia’s recent post is dead-on about what a typical bookstore day looks like.) This weekend, there were consequences to the gamble, and my teeter tottered the wrong way.
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I love the way the character of the store changes to reflect the personalities of the booksellers we have on staff at any given time. And right now we have a trio of creative crafters on our team whose inspired (and hilarious) designs are adding oodles of whimsy to our store’s energy. And they just keep trying to top themselves in what’s becoming an epic craft versus craft competitive showdown.

Staci and Eugenia stand off against Drew Daywalt.

There is a lot to be said for receiving a good questions that one doesn’t know the answer to. Dispensing information we’ve already acquired has its place, of course, but digging around and learning something new is a finer thing. The other day a longtime customer, who is a very thoughtful local chiropractor, asked me one of those questions.  It went like this.

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