COVID marks new chapter for independent bookstores
Updated Feb 16, 2021;
Posted Feb 16, 2021
Zelmon Zee Johnson adjusts the shelves in her Olive Tree Books-n-Voices, a community bookstore on Hancock Street in Springfield. (Don Treeger / The Republican)
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SOUTH HADLEY For Joan Grenier, owner of the Odyssey Bookshop across from Mount Holyoke College, 2020 was a year of constant reinvention and gratitude.
With business interrupted by the coronovirus pandemic, Grenier said she was faced with the possibility of closing. The crisis prompted her to set up a GoFundMe online fundraiser seeking help from longtime customers and supporters of independent booksellers.
Grenier said she was overwhelmed when donors came forward with $70,000 to help the bookstore stay open and make payments on bills totaling nearly $150,000.
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Editor’s note: Why is she not writing a book?
This is a picture of my mother, Elizabeth Cannon Lowry, standing next to President John F. Kennedy at the White House, in January 1962. Here’s a bit of backstory:
In March 1921, following the inauguration of Warren Gamaliel Harding, the new President was wandering around the White House, unable to sleep and looking for something to read. He found nothing the Executive Mansion had no books!
Word of this reached the American Booksellers Association and they determined then and there to stock the WH Library with reading material for the President and the First Family. They selected 200 American books that had been published in the past four years, and in early 1922 they presented them to Harding in a low-key White House ceremony.
A UMass gradâs site is helping independent bookstores hold their own against Amazon
âI was waiting for someone smarter and with more resources than me to do something.it never happened.â
By Mark Shanahan Globe Staff,Updated February 4, 2021, 2:33 p.m.
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Andy Hunter, who founded Bookshop.org, is seen in his office in Brooklyn, N.Y. He created the website to help save independent bookstores from Amazon which has been taking even larger percentages of book sales.Jennifer S. Altman
Growing up in Winchester in the â70s and â80s, Andy Hunter had a complicated home life â he and his brothers were raised by a single mother who struggled with mental illness. Books
ABA Nominates New President, Board Candidates By Ed Nawotka | Jan 28, 2021
The American Booksellers Association’s board of directors approved the ABA Nominating Committee’s recommendations for changes to the board, all of which must be approved at the ABA membership meeting in May.
Current ABA vice president Bradley Graham of Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C., has been nominated for a two-year term as president. Kelly Estep of Carmichael s Bookstore in Louisville, and Christine Onorati of Word Bookstores in Brooklyn and Jersey City, were selected as ABA co-vice president/secretary.
The booksellers recommended to stand for election to three-year terms (2021-2024) are: