my "closing the bookstore" blog

hi everyone, i was thinking this morning about everything that has been happening at the bookstore and thought it might be a good idea for me to actually blog about this process and our day to day going-on's at bsb. i also wanted to write out some of my memories as i still have them of the unique experiences that we've had here on 21st street in ghent.

so, eleanor is still hand-selling books today. it's been four days since we decided to close the store, and people are still coming in and asking us to hand-sell them on titles, which, i personally think is AWESOME. i had a lady ask me yesterday to suggest one good fiction title for her to buy and so i threw her a stack of four books and in the end, she bought them all. she said that she had loved every book that she'd bought at bsb that was suggested to her by our staff and that was so bitter-sweet. after all, if she had asked us for suggestions more often we would have handed her even more good books and we maybe could have stayed open.

i also flipped out on a little old lady yesterday...well almost, eleanor controlled me a little bit, as always. she was so upset when she came in because she thought our "sale" prices (which by the way are LESS than we paid for most of the books!) were too high, she was looking for much much better deals. eleanor guided her towards our fifty cent and dollar book table, where she purchased five books. she wasn't willing to pay more than that though. the funny thing about that is that we didn't ever want to sell these books, they were books that we were going to donate, damaged books, out of print books, etc.

well...i guess in the end we win, even though this horrible woman had no clue how much this store meant to us, how for the last five years it was my entire life and the past two was eleanor's. how we wanted to actually make a difference in the community and that really, we're both struggling with the thought that we're not really sure if we did any good, if we made any difference. but we did get our five bucks out of her that may help us pay the last electric bill!

i'm almost done rambling. hold on one more minute. i swear i'll stop complaining.

a real fact and struggle with closing the store is what we do with the books. of course, we have been inundated with business, which is great, but the books that people are buying, they are paying less for than we did, so it's helping, but not much. (yesterday was our busiest non-event day ie. booksigning in the history of being in ghent...not portsmouth, but ghent). it sucks you guys. it sucks that most of the people that are in the store now have never been in the store but they're still complaining that we're closing. off subject again....anyways we can send the books back to the publishers, but that costs money, and we can sell them, but essentially that costs money. if anyone out there wants to buy books at full price, that would be helpful, just let us know!

in future editions of "closing the bookstore" i will tell you my funniest bookstore story ever...about mr. bates, one of our favorite customers, and bring you up to date on any plans that eleanor and i are making to go on with our lives trying to make a difference in something, we're not sure if it will just be contributing to the local bar scene but it will be something.

-susie