Welcome to bookstoremama’s mental ramblings of a bookaholic. After many years of threatening I am finally going to start writing about my reading. While in school I spent 7 years helping the librarians, being a guinea pig for speed reading curriculums, and having English teachers assign me independent research papers instead of having to learn to diagram sentences.
For almost 25 years I have worked in bookstores, hence the name “bookstoremama”. Initially I was at B.Dalton’s, just after they were acquired by Barnes & Noble. After they were unable to agree on terms in our local shopping mall, our community was without a bookstore for 10 months. Six months after B.Dalton closed, I heard that the yarn store owner was looking to add an independent bookstore to her shop. I stopped in to see let her know that I would be interested in helping any way that I could. She had been sent a Recommended Opening Inventory list that was $30,000.00 more than she could afford to start with and asked if I would be willing to take a look at it. I have had the supreme pleasure of picking the inventory ever since. We are nearing the end of our time together, she and I. She turned 80 this year, although you wouldn’t know her age by looking at her, and she’d like to retire. The store is up for sale. Changes in my life have put the possibility of my buying it out of reach. And I don’t know if I will be at the next version of a bookstore in our community, but after 25 years I think I’ve earned the right to keep the name.