Where do you Read? When do you Read? And the discoveries and devices that make it possible.

I often hear people say they simply don’t have time to read.  How is that possible?  Isn’t all time actually reading time?  That said I do have my favorite times and places to read which isn’t always physically easy but thanks to a little ingenuity, a pinch of creativity and a bit of luck you can actually read A REAL BOOK just about anywhere. 

We all have favorite places and times to read.  For me one of those is when eating alone.  It is a habit gained when I used to travel daily as part of my sales career.  Eating every meal in your car or in a hotel room gets old really fast and is anything but relaxing .  Yet sitting at a restaurant table staring out into space or heaven forbid accidentally making eye contact with another lone diner makes you look either rather conspicuous , desperate or a combination of the two.  So how do you handle this conundrum ? Why you carry a trusty friend in the form of a book everywhere you go and you will never eat alone!  But of course losing yourself in a book while eating is difficult if the book won’t stay open on its own at the table, particularly if you have ordered something like a steak requiring the use of both a fork and a knife and therefore the use of both hands.   Enter discovery number 1, the Easy BookClip.  What you may ask is an Easy BookClip? Well it looks like piece of metal coat hanger coated in latex and bent into something resembling a headless stick man doing toe touches.  My Easy BookClip was a gift with purchase when I subscribed to The Book of The Month Club several decades ago.  Basically you slide it into your book with the “arms” on the page you are reading and the “legs” tucked into pages on either side and it holds your book open.  Over the intervening 20 or so years I have lost it, searched for it , found it and sworn to never lose it again and then the other night I found the company that distributes them to retailers (thank you to my iPad and insomnia for that little find) so now I will never be without an Easy BookClip when I need one again – and soon you won’t have to be either , I know a bookstore that is about to start carrying them!

One of my other favorite times and places to read is while soaking in a hot bath.  We all know a 20 minute soak in epsom salts , perhaps with a bit of eucalyptus or lavender essential oil added,  is good for you but just soaking for 20 minutes with nothing to read sounds to me like the epitome of boring !  Add a good book to that picture and now in the words of a commercial from a bath product of yore “Take me Away”.  But how do you keep your book dry while you soak?  My favorite discovery for this task is the plexiglass fronted cookbook stand.  Available at any kitchen store and originally designed to keep your cookbook protected from cooking splatter it is also good at keeping your book dry and perched at the perfect viewing angle while bathing.  

I also like to read while waiting for appointments, getting my hair cut and of course while sitting on the porch to name just a few more options.  One of my favorite discoveries happened last night when I was reading while washing the dishes.  You see as I was opening my book to put it in my handy dandy cookbook stand I dropped my bookmark into a sink full of hot water.  I was not terribly upset, it was one of the new bookmarks I have ordered to give away at my bookshop so of course I literally have thousands of them but the surprising thing was that after about a full 20 or 30 seconds I pulled the bookmark from the sink and wiped it on a dishtowel and left it on the counter.  When I finished washing the dishes I picked it up to throw it away but it was not ruined, it was perfectly dry! It seems as though I ordered some kind of at least semi water resistant finish on our bookmarks.  I simply cannot tell you how happy this made me – it’s the little things you know.  So happy I just had to make this the topic of today’s blog, hope it made you at least a little happy too.  Oh, and come on by The Conundrum and get yourself a seemingly water-resistant bookmark… free with any purchase of course!

Quotes of the Day:

“No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance”.   – Confucious

(or said differently) : “The more you read, the more things you will know.  The more that you learn the more places you’ll go.” – Dr. Seuss

 

I Do Not Like Them in a Box, I Do Not Like Them with a Fox

It is true, we opened the shop in early December with just a few hundred books on the shelves.  When I first began talking with publishers and book warehouses there were plenty of options.  I thought there were a lot ofAcronyms and Creative Titles for things in my previous careers in Pharmaceutical Sales and Insurance.

Well it appears the book business has it’s own share and I am struggling (with the help of a giant binder on “How to Open A Bookstore”, thank you Paz & Associates) to figure out what they all mean.   When you start a new contract with a Publisher or Book Distributor and inform them that you are opening a new bookstore they immediately ask if you would like to complete a ROSI (Recommended Opening Store Inventory to those of you out there not in the book biz) , or would you like to use “Above the Tree Line”  (sounds prettier but basically the same thing).   At first it sounds like a good idea, after all they probably know more than I do, I am new to this game.  So I requested the forms and started filling them out.  They ask questions like how many square feet of shelf space does your store have? What percentage of fiction, vs non-fiction would you like?  What percentage of spiritual books , self-help books, business planning books, classical literature, etc would you like to carry.  

Honestly, not being so much of a numbers gal my head was spinning, and no where did they ask me if I wanted to carry books with really beautiful bindings , or what percentage of shelf space I thought should be dedicated to The Princess Bride.  

So I went out on a limb.  

While the idea of some computer somewhere making all of the decisions for my opening inventory seemed a heck of a lot easier (once you got past the math on the request form) , it did not feel like MY store and it just did not feel right.    Basically theywere offering to deliver “A Bookstore in A Box” that would be turnkey and ready to open fully stocked on day one.

We instead opted to curate our entire inventory ourselves with input from our community.  It is certainly a slower way to go and at first the shelves looked a bit empty but now just a few months later the shelves are filling up nicely and I can honestly say as I look around that I am surrounded by books that all MEAN something to me and/or to our community members and those that shop in our bookstore.  We ask everyone that comes in to recommend their favorite books and guess what…then we order them.   

We are not Everywhereville, USA we are St.Francisville.  We are a unique and beautiful community and I want to build a unique and beautiful selection of books for our bookshop.  So I invite you to submit your favorites to me in the comments section of this blog and to help us build the best selection of any small bookshop anywhere.

Quote of the Day :  (could not decide which of these expresses my feelings  about today’s blog best so I submit two thoughts for you today – ENJOY! ) 

 “Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success”.  – Napoleon Hill

“The best way to succeed is to discover what you love and find a way to offer it to others”.  – Oprah Winfrey

To Blog or Not to Blog , That is the question.

Have you ever had one of those conversations while on vacation with your spouse about how you guys are someday going to retire and open a book shop?   You know the conversation,  the two of you are wandering in a quaint independent book store in some picturesque vacation town and one of you mentions how idyllic  life would be if the two of you were to while away your retirement years curating and manning your own shop in a town with a comfortable and laid back way of life.    And so it began. 

That conversation for us happened last February,  then one day last summer my husband Rob  came home from a trip into downtown St. Francisville, the small historic town along the Mississippi River where his family had lived when he was  a boy and where we have a second home, and he announced that he had “Signed a Lease”.  Signed a Lease on what I asked.  On the bookstore he answered.  To which I responded, I thought that was our retirement project and I did not know we had retired!

Now you may ask yourself:  why open a bookstore when so many bookstores are closing their doors? Or you may ask yourself:  why open your bookstore in a small country town with a VERY limited population base?   Or perhaps you might ask: why open our new bookstore in a small town that you do not actually live in full time?  All of these are good questions, but I do not have a really good answer.    One of the definitions of the word “Conundrum” is “A question or problem having only a conjectural answer”.  Now you know why our bookstore in a small town we do not live in full time , in an industry some say is going the way of the dinosaurs, that was opened BEFORE we had actually retired from our long time careers is called The Conundrum. 

As you might imagine as word got out that we had opened a book shop and that we had named it The Conundrum the questions started flying from all directions.   The other day over lunch with a dear friend as I related the above story my friend asked “Are you writing this stuff down somewhere”?  She then suggested blogging on our new website.  She seems to think people may actually be interested reading about the trials, the tribulations, the successes and the sheer joy that we are experiencing as we embark on this journey to open and hopefully to succeed in the bookstore business.  If you are reading this perhaps she was correct.  If you want to read more check back soon. Till then I will share with you a favorite quote that sum up the beauty of Rob acting before I was quite ready  , the fact is I may have never felt truly ready and so I needed a little push to get started and I must say I am glad for the push! 

Quote of the Day:  “A real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken a new action.  If there’s no action you haven’t truly decided”.    by Tony Robbins