{"id":29138,"date":"2019-04-02T07:23:22","date_gmt":"2019-04-02T11:23:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=29138"},"modified":"2019-04-02T07:23:22","modified_gmt":"2019-04-02T11:23:22","slug":"the-great-pig-book-sale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=29138","title":{"rendered":"The Great Pig Book Sale"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The biggest boon and scourge for any bookstore just might be… storage space. What starts off as a godsend\u2014room for book fair and author event boxes! a staging area for store reorganization efforts! square footage for excess sidelines! a waiting corral for sections out of current favor! a place for lucite spinners and counter displays not in the current rotation!\u2014can, over time, become a coral reef of accreted detritus. We moved into our current location in 2006, and I swear, there are boxes in our basement that came with us in the move and haven’t been opened since. That is, until Jory.
\nJory is our newest bookseller, and she has the energy of three\u00a0regular people and the will of ten. Once she made her first pilgrimage to the basement and saw the boxes there\u00a0sitting in\u00a0near-perpetual limbo, she devised a plan. “What if,” she said to me, “we had a giant sale, and\u00a0offered a sneak-peek breakfast and shopping for teachers\u00a0before opening\u00a0the sale to the public?” While the prospect of figuring out where to put all of the boxes and bins of books was daunting, I was already halfway in. And then she\u00a0uttered\u00a0some irresistible words: “You,” she said, “won’t have to do a thing.”
\n
\nAnd true to her words, until the morning of the sale, I really didn’t. Until the actual sale itself, beyond brainstorming the terms of the sale and the process for getting to it, and approving various details here and there, I was blissfully free from the nitty gritty\u00a0of the prep, thanks to Jory and the rest of the Flying Pig team. (I wasn’t swanning off to Biarritz, mind you, just\u00a0able to continue doing the stuff I do to keep the lights on\u00a0and new books coming in.)
\nAfter a month and a half of prep\u2014Jory, Liza, and Laura going through boxes, sorting items, etc.\u2014we were ready.
\nSince the space next door to the store\u2014most recently a butcher shop\u2014has been empty for a few months, our landlord said yes to letting us use the space\u00a0to house the sale.\u00a0That made all the difference! We could create a mini\u00a0sale store without\u00a0crowding our own space with boxes and bins.
\nAs we sorted and arranged, the space went from this:
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\nto this:
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\n

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Looking crazy at 10:30 pm the night before the sale.<\/p><\/div>
\nAt last we were ready! On Saturday morning at 8 am, teachers flooded the sale space for Jory’s homemade scones and some good ol’ Box of Joe coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts, and the Great Pig Book Sale was off and running!
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\nIt was a smashing success! Books that had been languishing in storage for eons found new homes, and customers were thrilled with library-sale-style pricing that made it easy to walk away with stacks of new goodies. Or even just one good one.
\n

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Ambitious toddler.<\/p><\/div>
\nThe only\u00a0unanticipated issue\u00a0was that one or two customers who had never been to our bookstore before thought this WAS the store. Yikes! Can you imagine? “We operate out of plastic bins and cardboard here at the Flying Pig.” No, no, we told them, please visit our real store next door. And, fortunately, they did.
\nMore than 1,000 books found new life beyond storage. And that, my friends, is something to celebrate.
\n

\"\"

Nota bene: Jory and I took this pic the night before the sale, celebrating the completion of set-up, but it’s how we felt at the end, too. Wahoo!<\/p><\/div>
\nHuge thanks to Jory, and also to Liza, Laura, and Heather, who did so much work on this event, and to the rest of my staff for making it possible!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Biting the bullet for much-needed spring clearance was a blast.<\/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-29138","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\/29138","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=29138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}