Like most booksellers, we “take the show on the road” every single week, to sell books and sidelines offsite. Community and professional events are a large part of our monthly sales, and we look for every possible opportunity to sell books not only in our stores, but out “in the wild” where the readers are. Festivals, conferences, public lectures, concerts, parades and other events that have some tie to literacy or our customer base of families with children are all fair game – and we have become semi-professional movers at wielding our luggage cart piled with boxes of books through parking garages, loading docks, and into hotel and convention center hallways.

For the last few years I’ve been posting about our annual bookmark contest. It’s one of my favorite things that we do all year. We collect hundreds of submissions every March and let the full BookPeople staff vote on designs across five categories, selecting a winner from each to be printed for distribution the rest of the year. We also display all the entries we receive on the art wall in our cafe for the full month of April. I honestly wish we could have them up year round. They just make me smile! Take a look at this blast from the past and tell me it doesn’t make your day a little better:

It’s Tuesday morning at the shop, and our weekly “Stories and Snacks” program begins at 10:30. I picked up the muffins on the way in this morning, but forgot to get napkins, so I text a staffer to stop at the grocery store on her way to work. Normally, we’d have lots of extras, but we hosted an author event with cupcakes last weekend, and the napkin situation is now dire. (Note: cupcakes require WAY more napkins than frosted cookies. Plan more cookie events, and put napkin inventory on the Friday task list.)

(Please remember to vote today!!)

While it’s hard to think about much else besides Super Tuesday this morning, plus coronavirus prep (retail = lots and lots of wipes for surfaces and hand sanitizer for credit card and cash handling), we are still aglow from a lovely visit on Sunday from the brilliant and (in the words of one of my staffers) ‘badass’ author, Pam Muñoz Ryan.

It was a gorgeous day, and we had popped into the bookstore before the offsite event. While there, Pam graciously signed a copy of Esperanza Rising for a customer who had come in to show us his 17-year-old daughter’s self-published picture book. We mentioned that we had a bona fide superstar in the store, and the dad lit up as he told us that he’d read Esperanza to his daughter years ago and they’d loved it. (While that was a happy moment, it isn’t the one this blog post title promises.)

We do a lot of preschool events in our store. There’s a themed story time each and every weekday morning with activities, several Saturday events per month, and usually a few offsite events for local MOPS groups and preschools. All in all, we sing “Open, Shut them, Open, Shut them” more than the average bear, and if you wake me up in the middle of the night, I’m just as likely to launch into “Itsy Bitsy Spider” as to stumble out of bed to let a dog outside. So I feel pretty confident in my ability to keep the attention of a group of two, three, and four-year-olds, and savvy enough to know when a case of the wiggles has taken over the group, and it’s time to wrap things up or break out some music and dance.