All those pretty little things

Merchandising is sort of an icky word as far as I'm concerned. We like to think that books can speak for themselves and don't need a lot of over-the-top pushing from our end. The reality, of course, is that we run a business and like all businesses we need to do some promoting of our "product."

One fun aspect of this is getting to put together some little displays for various books. Our front tables are generally a showcase of the new and notable. But we do have one small table near the front register that doesn't have a specific cause. At times we use it to display books for an upcoming event. Other times it has some kind of focus or theme. Come April, we'll have lots of poetry books out for National Poetry Month. Right now I've chosen to turn into a little curator's table.

What I mean by that is that it doesn't have one particular focus other than the books displayed are ones we find to be beautiful, eye-catching or otherwise visually notable. Make sure the next time you stop in to take a peek at the little table and see what it has to offer. Little treasures await.

Finally, as the Schwartz group of bookstores(in Milwaukee) get ready to close their doors as March comes to a close I wanted to post a quote from their founder that I found especially compelling: "Bookselling was and is for me a cultural and political expression, an expression of progressive change, of challenge to oppressive authority, of a search for community values which can act as an underpinning of a better world. The true profit in bookselling is the social profit; the bottom line, the measure of the impact of the bookshop on the community." A. David Schwartz

That quote really reflects what we hope to do day in and day out here at Micawber's.

Bookselling was and is for me a cultural and political expression, an expression of progressive change, of challenge to oppressive authority, of a search for a community of values which can act as an underpinning of a better world. The true profit in bookselling is the social profit; the bottom line, the measure of the impact of the bookshop on the community.

-A. David Schwartz (July 15, 1938 - June 7, 2004