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<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\nAutumn:<\/span><\/span> Delighted to come. I love the trees in your window, by the way. I feel right at home!<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n Kenny:<\/span> That’s lovely to hear but what brought you to Farmington? I never expected my annual requests for an interview to take this turn.<\/p>\n\n\n Autumn:<\/span> Well Kenny, I may have teased you often enough, but really you have been a good friend to me and when I learned of all the supply chain issues affecting bookstores, I thought at once of all the squirrels in my arbor gathering supplies for the coming winter season, and I thought it might be helpful for me to see your preparations for myself and make sure you are laying in the right books for the challenging holiday season ahead.<\/p>\n\n\n Kenny:<\/span> I’m most touched!<\/p>\n\n\n Autumn<\/span>: Don’t press your luck and go soft on me.<\/p>\n\n\n Kenny:<\/span> Not at all.\u00a0In fact I have often thought of the squirrels as I’ve been gathering in stock for the holidays. Most often, though, I’ve thought of the store as a ship setting out for a long voyage with no surety of fresh supplies at a port along the way. Are not our back room and overstock shelves much like the hold of that ship?<\/p>\n\n\n Autumn: <\/span>An apt metaphor. Let’s have a look.<\/p>\n\n\n Kenny:<\/span> Sure, here we have our regular overstock shelves. As you can see they are loaded to the brim.<\/p>\n\n\n Autumn:<\/span> Ah yes, you have quite a mix of great new titles like Stephanie Garber’s Once Upon a Broken Heart <\/em>and Chris Colfer’s A Tale of Sorcery<\/em> along with extra stock of established store favorites like Diane Magras’s The Mad Wolf’s Daughter<\/em> and Lynne Rae Perkins’s Nuts to You.<\/em> Very good.<\/p>\n\n\n Kenny:<\/span> Well spotted! Next we’ll go to our college shelves and college cart which we have converted to an overstock area for key holiday season titles.<\/p>\n\n\n Autumn<\/span>: Ah ha! Now we leave the peripheral chaos and lean more into the meat of the matter as it were. Hmmn, I see you have big stacks of Betty Culley’s terrific Down to Earth<\/em>, Allison Croggan’s sublime Threads of Magic<\/em>, and B.B. Alston’s excellent Amari and the Night Brothers<\/em>. You wouldn’t want to head to sea without those. Well! It’s gratifying to see a nice stack of She Who Became the Sun<\/em>, Shelley Parker Chan’s exceptional historical novel. I see you have laid in plenty of\u00a0Naomi Novick’s absorbing entertainment of a novel, A Deadly Education<\/em> in paperback, and\u00a0I’m pleased but surprised to so many copies of P.G. Bell’s imaginative romp, The Train to Impossible Places<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n Kenny:<\/span> Yes, I chose that as a title to feature this year for strong young readers reading above grade level and for a family read aloud pick.\u00a0 Autumn:<\/span> Ah this is well. You have not stinted on that glorious\u00a0picture book, Bear Is a Bear<\/em>. Oh and here is a tall stack of my favorite psychological thriller, Vera Kurian’s Never Saw Me Coming<\/em>. It has a Hogwarts for psychopath thing going, so many deliciously unreliable narrators. And I see plenty of copies of that stupendously genre defying tour de force, James Hans Matson’s Reprieve<\/em>. These are the right stores for the store, to be sure.<\/p>\n\n\n Kenny:<\/span> I’m glad we are of one mind on those books! But what of what isn’t here. Do you have any suggestions?<\/p>\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n
Finally, we completely cleaned out our back room shelves for extra overstock space. Have a look.<\/p>\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n