"We'll go to Greenwich, where modern men itch to be free..."

I love that Gershwin tune.

Today I met with Nancy Bass at The Strand, which is celebrating its 80th Anniversary year. Wow. Founded 1927 and stronger than ever. What an inspiring independent bookstore. Her dad Fred Bass at age 78 was standing at the front counter buying used books from walk-in customers. I tell ya, this gig is going to be so much fun for me. I now have an excuse for visiting dozens and dozens and dozens of fabulous bookstores. I cannot believe my luck at having stumbled into this project.

Nancy had lots of ideas for ways to make these trips literary and rich and fun -- walking tours, overnight at the Library Hotel, lunch at the Morgan Library, tour of New York Public Library, special events at Strand specially for the riders...

I'm thinking of creating three different tiers of tour -- an Inexpensive, a Moderate, and a Fancy plan -- sort of...

I also spoke with Peter Glassman, owner of the outstanding children's store Books Of Wonder. He had his own great ideas for extensions of the visits -- and he pointed out that for author events, I could pre-sell books to the riders, at the time of their bus-ticket buying, so he could know about how many books to purchase and be sure not to run out.

Both Nancy and Peter are quite high on the idea of many more bookstore tours coming their ways, and I was delighted that each of them said they would be happy to be involved in helping sell tickets for bookstore tours from New York up to Amherst/Northampton. I asked them this because as I mentioned in a previous post, I see this sort of customer-swap as a way to solve the biggest problem I'll face, which is simply finding the customers for these bookstore tours.

Also today I got some great help from e-Booksense and from Shelf-Awareness, two industry newsletters that promoted this start-up. Industry support will be critical, and it looks like a lot of people are enthusiastic about seeing Larry Portzline's bookstore tourism ideas enacted on a broad scale. So -- I'm very hopeful and grateful.