The Written Nerd

There is a joy in giving books. And if that joy can be combined with 1) getting rid of your old books so you can get new books, and 2) passing along the gift of literacy and literature to those who might not receive it otherwise -- well, that's some serious book giving joy. This year the church I attend, Old First Reformed, is holding a book drive for a community of West African refugees on Staten Island, many of whom struggle with English and therefore with school and employment. The organization, African Refuge , is a more than worthy cause to unburden your groaning shelves, especially if you've got some children's or YA books amongst them. Details are below. The ALP and I will be schlepping a couple of boxes over there on Sunday; hope to see you there! Book Drive! To Benefit African Refuge After‐School Please donate your ‘gently read’ or brand new books to help West African refugee children who are now living on Staten Island. For readers ages 5 – 17 Sunday, December...

On the Greenlight blog today we've posted a list of the people we have to thank for the opening of the bookstore. It's a very, very long list . Here on my own blog I wanted to say thanks to a few of those who helped me, myself, personally, get to this wonderful moment. These are the people I haven't thanked regularly in interviews -- the ones outside of the primary business development story, who nonetheless are the reasons I am here. To my mom, of course, for reading to me when I still just wanted to chew on the pages; for letting me check out the maximum number of library books every week; for telling me I could go to college anywhere I could get a scholarship, and sticking to that even when it meant going 3,000 miles away; for giving me a chunk of my inheritance early as seed money for the store; for talking to me on the phone every week, as I planned and cried and hyperventilated and obsessed and pondered and worked toward this dream; for being the first reader in my...

I don't often include pitches for others' events on this blog, but I've been thinking lately about the necessity of giving back, in light of all the support I've received for my own dreams. If you're a New Yorker, consider attending this event on Monday -- it's a great literary lineup, and a shot at hope for those most in need of it. The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space at WNYC Presents BREAKOUT: VOICES FROM INSIDE A partnership between PEN’s Prison Writing Program and WNYC’s The Greene Space Presented as part of “The NEXT New York Conversation” Series John Turturro, Lemon Andersen, Mary Gaitskill, Eric Bogosian, Jamal Joseph, and Sean Wilsey among others to read works authored by participants of PEN’s Prison Writing Program Monday, November 9 th , 2009 at 7pm For more than 30 years, PEN’s Prison Writing Program has been dedicated to helping make the harsh realities of American imprisonment part of our social justice dialogue. PEN’s p...

The NAIBA fall conference is a week away -- and lucky you, it's not too late to register. Stephanie Anderson ( Bookavore ) and I recently sent a joint open letter to NYC bookstores about the value of the conference -- it's reproduced below. Hope to see you in Baltimore! As two NYC booksellers just starting our careers, we've recently observed two things: 1) Attending the fall regional booksellers conference hosted by NAIBA (New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association) has been incredibly good for our professional development and for our bookstores. 2) Very few New York City bookstores ever send booksellers to the NAIBA conference. Why this contradiction? We speculated about the possible reasons that New York City bookstore owners have not been attending the regional conference or sending their employees, and thought about some answers. The result is an expression of what we've found worthwhile about the NAIBA conference, and a modest pro...

This is all related to Greenlight Bookstore, but it's more a personal observation than a business one -- and it's all a bit scattered -- so I'm relating it here. Greenlight Boosktore feels to me like the "next generation" of bookselling, in the best way. This is driven home by how involved the "parents" -- the generation that precedes us -- have been in helping the store come together. Over the last few weekends, Betty and John Bennett (formerly of Bennett Books) and Susan Avery (formerly of Ariel Booksellers) have come to the store to help us with painting, book receiving, etc. These are folks Rebecca and I think of as our "bookseller parents" -- they've mentored us, counseled us, taught us, and set us an example of what a great bookstore can be. Though both of their stores are now closed and the owners have moved on to other literary projects, it felt like a seamless passing of the torch. In addition, Cynthia of Archivia Books and othe...

Okay, so it's officially been over a month since I last posted here: my first and longest-running blog. I suspect anyone who's ever read The Written Nerd knows the reason why: my efforts have been shifted almost entirely over to the Greenlight Bookstore blog, and all the attendant activities and responsibilities of getting the bookstore off the ground. I thought maybe I'd have more time for blogging now that I don't have a "day job" -- but it turns out there's not a lot of down time in entrepreneurship. I haven't yet succumbed to the dreaded "bookstore owners have no time to read" syndrome (just finished A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book , now working on Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind and China Mieville's The City And The Cit y) -- but it does seem to be the case that bookstore owners have no time for personal blogging. For a little while I thought about officially retiring this blog. In a way, it's served it's purp...

* The Guardian notes various methods of organizing your bookshelves . (The ALP and I tend toward the author's own methodology, "according to where I can jam them.") (via Bookninja , who always leads me to the cool Guardian articles) * Literature In the Internet Age category, #1: I'd normally be skeptical of a trailer for a short story -- but the story is by Jim Shepard, the publisher is the very intriguing new multi-format literary journal Electric Literature , and the video itself is somewhat breathtaking. Watch. * Literature in the Internet Age category, #2: our Brooklyn visionary of the literary future, Richard Nash, writes in Publishers Weekly about Cursor , the new print/digital, publisher/community hybrid creature he's working on creating. I'm still wrapping my head around it, but it seems to come down to the fact that writers are readers and vice versa, and thus offering tools for refining and publishing one's writing while also selling the wr...