Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Harvard Bookstore, Chester County, Politics & Prose

Continuing on my fact-finding and alliance-building tour, I spent the morning at Harvard Bookstore talking with marketing director Amanda Darling and owner Frank Kramer. The exciting new ideas keep on coming. My favorite was Amanda's notion of bringing professors on the buses to do the literary talking, instead of relying (solely, at least) on authors. She pointed out that a bus from Cambridge to Amherst could stop in South Hadley, pick up a professor from Mt. Holyoke College, and this prof could give a 20 minute lecture about Emily Dickinson and the bus continued up into Amherst to land at Emily Dickinson House! I love the idea of using college professors to provide the enhanced literary travel experiences of all kinds.

Tomorrow I leave Amherst at 3am to travel to Chester County Book Company, west of Philadelphia, where I'll meet with Joe Drabyak, current prez of NAIBA and a veteran of Larry Portzline's bookstore tour program (Larry brought a group to Chester County B.C. a few years ago). Then I'll continue south to see Carla Cohen at Politics & Prose, overnight in D.C., and return to Amherst Thursday morning.

At that point, I think I'll be ready to design the first batch of programs. While I still hope to have tickets for sale by the end of March, I now doubt that I'll really be running any tours in April. I think the first will be in May.

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