Northshire/Food For Thought

Quick update: I had a great visit to Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, VT, on Wednesday. The store expanded a few years ago and it looks really terrific. (It looked terrific last time I was there too -- but that was 19 years ago!) I met with Chris Morrow and Marie Leahy, who both had a lot of great ideas, including drawing publishers in to this whole game as sponsors and providers of author events.

(Coincidence: Marie moved from Flatbush, Brooklyn up to Vermont this past year, and she used to be a customer at Vox Pop (the store I helped launch, with Sander Hicks and Holley Anderson, and which published my book)!)

Also, there will be a big meeting of tour packagers from Europe next month: people looking to understand the destinations in Vermont that they can build into their offerings to German and British travelers. I'll definitely hit that meeting!

It was fun to see Ed and Barbara Morrow, too -- I think it's been about 15 years since I used to see them regularly at American Booksellers Association committee meetings.

I'll have a meeting with the worker-owners of Food For Thought, in Amherst, next Wednesday. I'm hopeful that they'll agree to be the pick-up and drop-off affiliate here -- this would then permit me to start operating in Amherst right when the company launches, instead of waiting for an extra month or two, as I was beginning to fear I might have to do. What's funny and fun is that because I'm currently finishing up my B.A. through the University of Massachusetts' University Without Walls program, I am going to be able to get undergraduate credit for launching BiblioExpeditions. It's an Independent Study project! And my advisor is Sara Lennox, the director of the UMass program in Social Thought. Well, Food For Thought Bookstore as it turns out was itself a group student project that emerged from this very Social Thought department, back in 1981! Pretty amazing -- an employee-owned co-op bookstore, one of the leading bookstores in the Valley -- was a student project! And now I'm (hopefully) in the process of linking yet another cooperative-type bookselling company with it -- also emerging from the Social Thought dept.