Kathy from BermudaOnion shares this introduction to Hub City Books in Spartanburg – it’s love at first sight for me!  The building, the neighborhood, the philanthropy and involvement with readers and writers … oh, yes, and the coffee roasters next door!  I’ve started following HubCityBookshop on twitter, “friended” them on Facebook, and suggest you might want to do the same.  While you’re there, follow BermudaOnion’s tweets, if you’re not already doing so – she’s got her finger on the pulse of all kinds of bookish happenings.

Upstate South Carolina’s newest indie bookstore is in downtown Spartanburg.  This is an area that is in the middle of a  re-vitalization, so Hub City Books is a welcome addition.  Located at 186 West Main Street, in an old Masonic Temple, the bookstore is in a part of downtown Spartanburg that has been dubbed “the grain district,” since it contains a micro-brewery and will welcome a bakery/coffee shop (right next door to the bookstore) in the next few months.

One of the best, and most unique things, about Hub City Books is that it’s a non-profit bookstore.  It’s operated by the Hub City Writer’s Project which sponsors writing workshops, writers in residence and college scholarships for aspiring authors, among other things.  It’s one stop shopping – you can buy great books and support a wonderful cause all at the same time.

Most of the books in the bookstore are new, but there is a small section of value priced used books in the back.  The store features staff picks and picks from some community leaders as well.  They invite customers to write reviews for their blog – you receive a $1 discount for each review (up to 3 per month) they choose to publish.  

Hub City books just opened their doors for the first time on June 30th, and already sales have exceeded their expectations!  They have plans to host authors and other fun events and will eventually sell books online.  If you’re ever in the area, be sure to check them out.

Noelle Ryan works as a veterinary technician at a New England animal shelter, helping pets find the perfect homes. If only it were as easy to find the same thing for herself. After discovering that she can’t have children—and watching her marriage fall apart after a shocking revelation by her husband—Noelle feels as forlorn and abandoned as the strays she rescues.

She can’t seem to get over her ex, Jay. Unfortunately, all Jay wants from her is a whopper of a favor: serving as a caretaker for his elderly mother, who still blames Noelle for the breakup. While Jay heads off to Atlanta to live the life of a bachelor, Noelle is left with only her Great Dane, Zeke, to comfort her. But when a carefree musician named Jasper gives her a second chance at life—and at love—Noelle comes to realize that home is truly where the heart is.

Please check out Eve’s contest on her website for a chance to win a book club package of eight signed copies and a Skype call-in. Also, if you’d like to read a sneak preview, click here.  And now, Eve’s guest post:

For years now, my husband and I have spent our vacations exploring various parts of New England, our dream being to one day live in a cottage by the sea. During one of our explorations, we discovered the seaside town of Bristol, Rhode Island, and it quickly became one of our favorite destinations. Situated on the Narragansett Bay, Bristol is the quintessential New England village, complete with clapboard houses, brick walkways lit by old-fashioned gas lamps, a picturesque bike path that runs along the waterfront all the way to Providence, and rows of quaint restaurants and shops with panoramic views of the harbor. Incidentally, the town also boasts the “oldest, continuously celebrated Fourth of July Celebration in the country,” a claim to fame so unique that I wrote it into my first novel.

So it is fitting that the bookstore in this town also fits my ideal for the perfect New England bookstore. A Novel Idea sits at the beginning of Hope Street in a red brick Tudor-style building with green awnings, reminiscent of the shops on Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter books. And when you open the door, you do feel transported, surrounded by forest green shelves stacked with books, their covers facing out proudly—classics and new releases, nonfiction and bestsellers. They have an adorable, adopted Tortoiseshell cat named TJ that will happily climb into your lap if you sit down to read. A sunny table by the front window holds fresh juices, coffee, and snacks, and a children’s section in the back sports a cozy rug just perfect for a read-along.

The staff is incredibly friendly and knowledgeable, and the proprietor, Sue Woodman, strives to make her small niche of the book world warm, enticing, and relevant, selling both new and used books, renting out new releases for a nominal fee, and hosting book signings to entertain and enlighten her loyal and new customers. A Novel Idea is a bookstore where customers can browse or sit for hours, coffee in hand, bookstore kitty on lap, discussing recommendations with the staff or customers and reveling in the collective joy of fellow book lovers. 

A thriving independent bookstore is becoming a rare and special thing. Revisiting A Novel Idea reminds me how important it is to support our local bookstores and other independently owned businesses lest we lose the human connection that makes life worth living. What better place to celebrate that life than at a friendly neighborhood bookstore filled with stimulating reads and even more stimulating people. Enjoy your bookstore browsing this summer, and thank you Dawn for inviting me to guest post on “Spotlight on Bookstores”!!

 Eve, you are so very welcome!  And thank you for sharing the goodness of A Novel Idea with me and readers of my blog!  I love the idea of uninterrupted time in this store – with a hot coffee, a purring cat, and the company of other book lovers.

Savor is a great word to connect with this store, Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks in the West Village!   On the evening we visited, Candace and I met Swapna in the Village and walked to the shop.  Despite my reputation for getting lost in NYC, the store is very easy to find!  It’s on the first floor of a brownstone (163 West 10th Street), easy to spot with a nice display in the front window.

Walk up the steps and into the building, Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks is the first door on the right.  The owner (yes, Bonnie Slotnick herself!) has a Dutch door into the shop – I imagine it’s convenient to close the bottom if she’s working late, while still allowing the top open for ease of conversation if anyone comes to the door.  Of course, since her specialty is cookbooks, the Dutch door also reminds me of a place to set a pie to cool!

Step in to the store (what may have been a living room and dining room in the original brownstone?) and you’re greeted by floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with cookbooks – out-of-print, previously loved, and new editions.  Bonnie also stocks memorabilia such as vintage ads, postcards, restaurant and ship menus, etc.  And in the bits of wall and bookcase ends that are peeking out, she has strategically-placed crockery, cooking gadgets, and beautiful vintage linens.  I felt like I had stepped into my grandmother’s kitchen!

Speaking of Gram, remember I was trying to track down her recipe for hermits?  Well, I had emailed Bonnie before our visit, checking her hours for the week of BEA (she’s open 1-6pm 6 days a week; the day off varies, but is posted in the window and on the shop’s answering machine).  In her email reply, Bonnie encouraged me to stop in, saying “I’m sure I can find you 10 recipes for hermits in 5 minutes, and we can go from there (and find another 50).”

And she did!  She pulled one volume down from the shelf and we looked at the hermits recipe.  No, that one included nuts, which Gram didn’t use.  “I think I remember a red leather book,” I said.  Bonnie slipped Ruth Wakefield’s Tried and True Recipes out of a bookcase and flipped to the index, then then to the page with a recipe for hermits.  This one didn’t have nuts, but it called for some cold coffee.  I didn’t remember Gram saving the dregs of the percolator for hermits, but I suppose it was possible. 

I was getting cold feet.  I didn’t want to buy a book that had the wrong recipe, then claim it as Gram’s as I foisted false hermits on my friends and family!  I temporarily abondoned the quest for hermits and turned back to the shelves.

There was a book I connected with! Betty Crocker’s New Boys and Girls Cook Book!  Check out the retro (um, “new”) boys and girls on the cover art, the boy who’s not afraid to show his feminine side in the kitchen, and the girl who seems awed by his culinary prowess.  The groovy yellow and white striped background add to the sense that all good things happened in 1965, the book’s copyright date.

This was a walk down Memory Lane!  My first experiments in the kitchen were inspired by the New Boys and Girls Cook Book; dishes like Polka-Dotted Macaroni and Cheese (ingredients include a can of cheese soup and “two frankfurters” which are cut into coins and placed on top of the casserole), “Ham” Loaf Hawaiian (the “ham” is Spam!), and Bunny Salad (canned pear halves masquerade as bunnies with the help of some raisins, cinnamon Red Hots, almonds, and cottage cheese).

The recipe that had me on the phone with my sister (cuz, who wants to walk down Memory Lane alone??!) was Silhouette Sandwiches.  Nothing says loving from the kitchen like a heart-shaped piece of processed American cheese on top of “cold luncheon meat” (we used to make these with ”olive loaf,” a bologna with pimento-stuffed green olives in it.  I’m not sure if this wonder of the deli counter still exists!). 

The New Boys and Girls Cook Book is such a fun find!  I’m grateful to Bonnie Slotnick and her bookstore for bringing it back to me; do see what memories you can stir up and visit her shop when you’re in the city!  We’ve volunteered to bring Strawberry Shortcake to a friend’s house this weekend, and my kids and I will make the recipe on page 107.  And Gram’s hermits?  The quest continues …

As you’ll read in a minute, this is cool … today at SITFOB, Laura Morowitz, an art historian turned novelist, offers a post about a bookstore that changed her attitude and helped make connections that changed her life.  You may recall that last week Laura’s co-author of The Miracles of Prato

I was in exile. I had left behind the land of my upbringing, the culture I had known since childhood. I had moved from New York to New Jersey. 

(photo credit www.montclairbookcenter.com)

It was still the first few weeks of our relocation to Montclair and I could hardly think about Zabars without bursting into tears. On one of those nights, my husband and I took a walk to explore our new neighborhood, just a few streets from Bloomfield Avenue. Turning the corner of Glenridge Avenue, we came upon the Montclair Book Center and walked in. 

“This is cool,” I said to my husband. 

The store was long and narrow and just a little moldy, not unlike a New York City railroad apartment. This was no suburban mall book shop, with its piped-in music and potpourri scent. This was the real deal. Just aisles of books, on simple wooden shelves. No posters, no fancy giftware at the counter. Just books. Loads of them. The books themselves were arranged in horizontal stacks and you would sometimes have to move them to get to more books behind them. You never felt like you had to return the book exactly where you found it: close was good enough. Just like my own slightly eccentric bookshelves. There was plenty of hidden treasure there: new books, but also old, out of print copies, selling for practically nothing, a little “$ 3” or $ 1.50” marking the corner. And if you ever needed help finding something, Pete, the owner, or one of his trusty staff (all of them looking like roadies for the Grateful Dead) was always happy to help. 

When we had our children we moved to the nearby town of Verona but returned often to Montclair Book Center, especially on Saturday mornings after my daughter’s ballet class. They had opened a small café and Gina, with her long black hair, and her long black skinny jeans (10 years before they became fashionable) always had a cookie waiting for us. My kids always headed straight for the back of the store, with their slightly ratty little rocking chairs and fantastic kids books, old and new. One of the best parts is that we weren’t stranded in Children’s Literature; the other side of the cases held books on travel, quirky tomes on esoteric religion, or Marxist philosophy. 

I am grateful to the Montclair Book Center for persuading me that New Jersey could be funky and intellectual, too. And I’m grateful for more than that. Back in the early days, my husband and I decided we would start a book club to meet some like-minded folks. What better place to post a flyer about it than the Montclair Book Center? One of the first people to respond was a writer named Laurie Lico Albanese. So in many ways this bookstore not only made me a better reader, but helped me to become a writer as well.

Today’s Spotlight on Bookstores is written by

In this essay, Deb speaks of her fondness for Longfellow Books in Portland, Maine, and Harvard Bookstore and Porter Square Books (both in Cambridge, Mass.).  Porter Square Books is having a special author event on June 15, 2010 – the official launch party for Captivity! I haven’t yet visited this near-to-me bookstore, and I’m hoping I can make it in; by the way she describes the children’s department and café area, my brood will be entertained as well.  Here’s Deb:

Choosing a favorite bookstore is like choosing a favorite book. That is, impossible, at least for me. So I have to call out at least a couple of alternates.

One is Longfellow Books in Portland, ME. This is an intimate, quirky “fiercely independent community bookstore” where the owners and staff know their stuff and their customers and hand sell like crazy.

The other is Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, MA. Another post has them covered so I won’t linger except to say they’re a mainstay and terrific.

The store I most often haunt today seemed like a suspect idea when it first arrived in the neighborhood in early 2004 or so.

Porter Square Books is the centerpiece of a strip mall — with a Shaw’s supermarket on one end and a Dunkin’ Donuts on the other. I had my doubts that an indie-minded store could take root in such soil, but PSB, owned and run by a handful of bookish friends with long experience in the industry, transcended the generic surroundings immediately, making the most of a high-traffic location steps from the Red Line T and Tufts University.

Today it’s a destination store offering some of the best author and book events in the area. There’s something going on almost every evening — across a broad range of genres and subject matter — and the events are energetically promoted.

On any given afternoon, you’ll find the counter in the wide front windows lined with laptop coffee drinkers (the store’s Café Zing is a destination all its own; my daughter and I often stop in just for the Vietnamese spring rolls).

PSB stocks a great selection of speculative fare, short story collections, audio, graphic novels, and off-the-beaten track offerings, as well as a wide range of journals and lit mags, and the staff picks are always interesting. (One thing I miss — at least I couldn’t find it the last time I was in — is the “Best of Both Worlds” section, where young adult and adult books of interest to teens [“crossover”] were shelved together. )

For all its intellectual trappings, the store is kid friendly, too, with a large nook in the rear of the store where they can sit, sprawl, read, or play with wooden toys while their adults roam the aisles. And you can always, quickly, zip in and find the perfect card or gift.

Usually this type of post would be titled something like Spotlight on Bookstores:  The Spirit of ’76 in Marblehead, Mass. But, how could I argue with the title written by the author, Brunonia Barry?!?  Sock Puppets, Hedgehogs, and Full Time Writing certainly got my attention!  Brunonia Barry is the author of The Lace Reader (my review, author event, and tour of spots mentioned in the novel; can you tell I enjoyed this one?!).  Her recent novel, The Map of True Places, was published in May 2010; it is also set in Salem, which provides a fittingly quirky backdrop to this wonderful tale of a Hawthorne scholar, his grown daughter, and a mysterious family tragedy.  The Spirit of ’76 bookstore, in nearby Marblehead, is mentioned in the novel – read on to learn why Barry has given it this place of honor.

There are many reasons that The Spirit of ’76 in Marblehead, MA is one of the best Indie bookstores out there. Just last week, for example, they hosted a poetry slam that drew eighty local teens to the store, and held them in captive attention until closing, a difficult thing to do these days. This local bookstore regularly hosts all sorts of programs: from a writing workshop by Laurie Stolarz to previews of upcoming titles for the local book clubs, diverse groups with even more diverse tastes and names that range from The Goddesses Who Read to The Orange Fur Bikinis. This is the kind of store where the staff learns your tastes and often puts a book or two aside for you. They also know when to stretch your reading horizons, suggesting books you’ll love but might never have found on your own.

The manager, Hilary Emerson Lay, is a treasure. A visual artist and writer who adores books, Hilary creates beautiful sock puppets which she occasionally sells at the store and of which we have purchased several over the years as gifts for just about everyone we know. One of them is sitting on my desk as I write this, a short red-headed geeky looking puppet that bears a disturbing resemblance to me.

Hilary has a pet hedgehog named Stanley who sometimes visits the store. He has met most of the local children and has fans of all ages. Hilary regularly writes about life with Stanley, who disappeared the other day only to be found hours later sleeping in her purse. All of his fans can find out his latest escapades by following Hilary’s postings or listening to her stories which people stop by the store to hear. It was no big surprise that one of Hilary’s recommendations to my book club was The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

As you can see, there is a real sense of community in this local establishment. But all this description is simply to establish location. What I really want to tell you about is how The Spirit of ’76 helped me to become a full time writer.

I had just finished the third draft of my novel, The Lace Reader, and I knew that it still needed to be tweaked a bit, but I was baffled as to what elements needed work. So, on a whim, and because they had always been so supportive of my efforts, I walked into The Spirit of ’76, manuscript in hand, and asked for help.

They already knew I was a writer, I had written for a ‘tween series called The Beacon Street Girls and had done a signing at the store a while back. The night of the signing, the store’s owner, Bob Hugo, asked me what else I was writing. I told him about The Lace Reader, and he told me to make sure I brought it by when it was finished. On the day I took my “book in a box” into his store, Bob wasn’t there. But Hilary was, and we started discussing my next steps.

“Do you have one of those many book clubs who might be willing to help a fledgling novelist?” I asked. “I don’t want to workshop this anymore. I need some opinions from real readers, and a book club would be perfect.”

Hilary thought about it for the next few days. The following Wednesday, she called to announce that she had found me a book club. Three weeks later, ten women showed up at my door. I asked them to be brutally honest about the story, and they were. I took copious notes when they agreed on what needed work. When they disagreed, I simply listened to their discussion. At the end, I asked the requisite focus group question: “Would you recommend this book to a friend?” I held my breath waiting for their answer. Overwhelmingly, they agreed that they would, and that, in fact, several of them already had.

With the help of this local bookstore, I was able to repeat the process with two more book clubs. Their notes and insights helped me with the rewrite, and when the book finally went into publication, everyone involved was passing the word. At initial publication, there were thirty-seven book clubs waiting to read The Lace Reader.

I think the synergy between booksellers and book clubs is a strong one, and nowhere is it stronger than at The Spirit of ’76. The fact that they are also supportive of local writers played a huge part in what was to become a great success and ultimately fulfill my dream of being a full time writer. And when my second book, The Map of True Places, came out this May, The Spirit of ’76 was right there to celebrate by hosting a great event.

This week’s Spotlight on Bookstores is written by Robin Oliveira, whose debut novel, My Name is Mary Sutter, hits stores this week.  Set near Washington DC during the Civil War, the novel is the story of a young midwife’s struggle to become a doctor.  Is My Name is Mary Sutter on your wishlist? (head over to this post to enter a giveaway for a signed copy!).  Today Robin shares fact, not fiction, about Griffin Bay Bookstore, set in the gorgeous San Juan Islands.  If I ever get to visit the shop, I’ll take her suggestion to “throw yourself at the mercy of the staff.”  I’d be like putty in their hands, and my book bags might sink the ferry back to the mainland!

Most summers, my family and I travel to the San Juan Islands in Washington State to spend a week in a cabin on the northern tip of the archipelago’s namesake island, San Juan Island. The San Juans, as we Washingtonians call them, are made up of hundreds of islands, large and small, some of which are visible only at low tide. Three pods of killer whales cruise the tidal waters, and some people, including me, believe that the whale song invests the islands with their special ambiance; in the San Juans, everything falls away, and all that is left is beauty.

Part of that beauty is the chance to read, and from the time my kids were little, we have visited Griffin Bay Bookstore in Friday Harbor to find the perfect vacation book. The staff have the best taste. I can always count on someone to help me find me the perfect book, eliminating the need to fend for myself in a last minute dash before I leave home. All I have to do is walk into the store my first day on the island and ask what they might recommend. With a few deft questions, my literary predilections are deciphered, the shelves perused, and a volume is placed in my hands with assurances of satisfaction.  One summer, a staff member handed me Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee, turning me into the author’s lifelong, devoted fan. Another year, Possession, by A. S. Byatt.

These gifts of books (and untold others) have resulted in entire afternoons spent blissfully reading on the deck of the cabin as yachts, sailboats, and the occasional minke whale swim by in the tidal waters that surge in and around the island’s rocky shores. Beside me, my kids sprawl on their Adirondack chairs, immersed in the books they plucked from the kid-friendly shelves. I can mark the passage of their childhood by my memories of what they read: picture books, then YA novels, and later, with Walkmans plugged into their ears, (adolescence somehow necessitating an aural separation from their parents), devouring the latest Harry Potter volume, all purchased at Griffin Bay, all treasured for the places they took us, the alternate lives we lived, and, now that the children have grown, my enduring memories of those cherished afternoons.

I hope you have the great good fortune to visit the San Juans one day, and while there, to make your way to the Griffin Bay Bookstore on Spring Street, where I suggest you throw yourself at the mercy of the staff, who will find you the perfect book, thereby ensuring that you will return not only to the islands, but to their wonderful, personal store.