‘Our business has managed to weather the storm’

Closing the doors of our bookshop due to a rampaging global pandemic felt like the plot of a terrible science fiction novel, until we actually had to do just that on March 20.

When I locked the doors that night, as the state issued the stay-at-home mandate, my level of depressed uncertainty was incredibly, uncomfortably high. I was worried about the safety of my family and wasn’t entirely sure if we would ever be able to reopen the shop again.

Would our customers switch to shopping from us online or would reading books be considered too frivolous in the face of apocalypse survival? Books are an unusual sort of retail item in that they provide an escape, a comfort, an education, a solace. Never more in most of our lifetimes have we needed that escape, comfort or solace than during these dark days of COVID.

The most wonderfully surprising thing for me during this challenging year has been seeing the resilience and faithfulness of our community of readers and their unwavering enthusiasm for the printed word. Even more so, seeing their enthusiastic support for an independent, familyowned, local bookstore.

That enthusiasm has been the reason for us to keep going every day throughout these nine long months. As we were forced to pivot into a primarily online bookstore, we lost much of the human interaction we normally thrived upon. The lifeblood of a bookstore flows through the conversations, the debates, the discourse, the discussion of a shared love of reading. All of that fades into the background when the whole world switches to shopping online from home in their pajamas.

It fades, but doesn’t disappear, as it turns out.

As tedious and terrible as it has been to process website orders for eight hours a day, drive packages of books and puzzles all over town, and turn the shop into a warehouse and shipping center, our business has managed to weather the storm and come out stronger on the other side. (Although, whether we’re on the other side of anything at this point is up for debate.) The support of our community, our customers, and the hundreds of people who found us for the first time while looking for books on anti-racism this summer has made us a more efficient, more connected, community-focused bookstore.

We started offering front door and curbside service in May, which allowed a little bit of that spark back to the doorstep. And when we finally reopened to in-store browsing on the day after Thanksgiving, it was with a hearty mix of anxiety, joy and abject fear. People seemed bursting to be in the space among the books again, and the atmosphere was reminiscent of our best days, yet the finest moment was a quiet one just after the sun set. A young gentleman, maybe 6 years old, came in with his dad, and when he turned the corner into our new dedicated children’s book room, he exclaimed, “They have a whole room just for kids?!”

That right there is what it’s all about.

HOWARD LIPIN U-T