{"id":19151,"date":"2016-08-30T08:00:04","date_gmt":"2016-08-30T12:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=19151"},"modified":"2016-08-30T08:00:04","modified_gmt":"2016-08-30T12:00:04","slug":"turning-twenty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=19151","title":{"rendered":"Turning Twenty"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Hanging the flag at our new store location in 2006.<\/p><\/div>
\nOn November 23, the Flying Pig will turn twenty years old, and we are starting to plan our party! It’s hard to believe we have been around for two decades. We still call our current location in Shelburne “the new store” \u2013 even though we’ve been here ten years, the exact same length of time we were in our old store in Charlotte.
\nBack in 1996, we\u00a0opened our doors with 6,500 books and 850 square feet of selling space in a sweet little building that served as the town’s old post office. Twenty years later, we have almost twice as much space and five times more books, toys, cards, and gifts. We’ve seen babies grow into young adults, and young kids grow into grown-ups with children of their own (whom we call Flying Pig grandchildren). We’ve hosted a wedding in the bookstore, we’ve had a baby take his first steps in our picture book section, and we’ve seen so much\u00a0laughter and many tears over the years as customers navigate their lives with us as one of their community anchor points.
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Our going-away\u00a0party at the old location in 2006. (These kids are all grown up now!)<\/p><\/div>
\nI’m not big on the horn-tooting, but it feels good to have created something real. A bookstore feels worthy to me, and welcoming, and inclusive. (If only we could give away the books for free, that would be perfect! Like a library, but with brand-new books people could keep.)\u00a0Bookstores \u2013 those containers of joy and knowledge, those supporters of passion and curiosity \u2013 are most definitely worth celebrating.
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Our 2006 party poster, designed by Betsy Wernert. I’m delighted that Betsy is now a librarian in Ohio, but man, do I miss her graphic design skills!<\/p><\/div>
\nOne thing we’d like to do for the party is to have\u00a0a looping slideshow, with photos from store events over the years. We\u00a0are inviting families to contribute pictures of\u00a0themselves, both back\u00a0then in our early days and now. It will be amazing to see how they’ve grown over the past twenty years!
\nWe’ll have music and food, maybe\u00a0face-painting for the kids, and\u00a0funny toasts to staff former and present. We\u00a0may\u00a0celebrate our long-time customers with a silly raffle.
\nWhat else shall we do?
\nFor our tenth anniversary, we paired up with the Shelburne Arts\u00a0Center and invited our customers to paint tiles for display at the store. These tiles are incredible, from the most abstract toddler creations to elaborate pigs with 3D tails, favorite books, and renditions of Toot and Puddle and Charlotte.
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Some of the tiles customers created for our 10th anniversary.<\/p><\/div>
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More tiles. If you look very closely, you might see a iittle tail sticking up out of the book in the third tile down.<\/p><\/div>
\nI remember that Eight Cousins’ Carol Chittenden commissioned an amazing alphabet chair\u00a0that lives outside the\u00a0store in Falmouth.
\n

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Best internet photo of the chair? Shelf Awareness! Thanks, SA folks! (http:\/\/media.shelf-awareness.com\/theshelf\/2014EditContent\/alphabet_chair_Eight_Cousins_jm_081614.JPG)<\/p><\/div>
\nWhile I\u00a0have dreamed of a big flying pig statue outside our store for as long as we’ve been in business, that’s not going to happen. I’d like to do something special, but the Big Idea hasn’t hit me yet. I’m not worried, though. We always get some crazy idea.
\nMy colleagues, you\u00a0booksellers who have celebrated significant anniversaries, what\u00a0were the best\u00a0things you\u00a0have done\u00a0to celebrate those anniversaries? The most memorable? The funniest? The most touching?
\nI can’t wait to write after our party to let you know ours.
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From our tenth anniversary party.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anniversary party planning in the works!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}