All posts by brendan

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What’s in a book?

Anyone who’s ever worked in a bookstore has stories to tell of the bizarre stuff they find in books. Sometimes you’ll find funny pictures of people in outdated clothing (usually stuck inside of yesterday’s bestseller thriller), receipts for the purchase of the book (boring), dollar

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Laying siege to your local library

Make no mistake, in the world of books, there is no idyllic indian summer. No lazy dog days’ afternoons. No sweet corn harvest. No last minute dash to the coast. For this is the beginning of the Library Sale Wars. This is the time that

Advice to a teenager… don’t read these books

As a teenager, I suffered from pretty severe iconoclasticitis. Most everyone else called it by its common name: rebelliousness. But, when I wasn’t staging some inane sit-in or walk out over a meaningless point of bureaucratic trivia, or heckling my calculus teacher (who liked to

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Look Homeward, Bibliophile

Not so long ago, I wrote about Asheville’s penchant for books. (For those who don’t already know, Biblio.com is based in beautiful Asheville, NC – home of Thomas Wolfe). Over the past weekend, our local newspaper, the Asheville Citizen-Times, just happened to run a story

Of Books and Backaches

Pazzo Books (a longtime bookseller with Biblio.com) has a great tipsheet for moving a bookstore over at the Bookshop Blog. Probably many of us in the book trade can sympathize with Tom, having endured this pain at some point, or at least dreaded it. Usually,

Declining economy = increasing readership?

According to a brief article in the Chicago Post-Tribune, libraries in Lake County and Porter County Illinois are seeing a surge in circulations and a rise in patronage, owing, in part to the current economy. Its terrific to hear news such as this, since libraries