An Update about Life at the Bookshop
Dear Readers,
It has been such a strange week, hasn’t it? Here in Old Town we went from operating as usual on Saturday, March 14th, to being closed to the public indefinitely by the evening of the very next day. Ironically, we decided to close our sales floor last Saturday because it was so busy. We are a tiny shop - seeing the usual Saturday crowds here was heartening, but also a little frightening. We appreciated everyone stocking up on books for the recommended social distancing that is now in place, but we also worried that by staying open we’d not be doing our part to help flatten the curve.
That was more than a week ago. Since then we’ve flipped the store into all online-only sales, with an option for curbside pick up. We’ve seen so many orders come in we were overwhelmed the first few days. Thank you for your patience as our online orders might have taken a little longer than usual to ship out to you. Through some trial and error we got into the swing of it! Now we have new systems in place and new routines - all while keeping our staff and customers safe.
As hard as this week has been, I wanted to wrap up with some really beautiful things I’ve witnessed this week:
Our booksellers have rallied and are all doing completely different jobs than they were hired to do. They’re filling web orders and scheduling USPS pick ups, they’re taking calls and offering phone shopping sessions, they’re plowing through tons of emails and orders and generally just being so helpful, hopeful, and kind that it brought me to tears yesterday. They are working so hard, and I am so humbled and inspired by them to keep this shop going, no matter what happens.
Someone mailed Scout, our shop dog, a BarkBox!
When a local teacher learned that some of the kids in her class didn’t have access to books after the libraries closed and Am*z#n deprioritized shipping books she made a call for donations via social media. With those donations she started purchasing books for her students from our little bookstore. We’ve mailed out hundreds of dollars of books to kids in her classes. She helped our store, and those kids, and we are just so grateful to be part of that equation of goodwill and ingenuity.
I tweeted a call for authors to volunteer their time to teach online classes for us. So far we’ve had more than 1,000 offers! The tweet has been liked more than 10,000 times. We have a line-up of epic writing classes coming soon, folks, and this just might be how we save the bookstore, so I hope you will sign up when we post them soon. The writing classes will get their own blog post for sure! Til then, on deck to teach classes so far are: Susan Choi, Lily King, Jenny Offill, Alexander Chee, Emily Bazelon, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Sarah Gailey, and more! We have so many great authors, agents, and editors ready to help you get writing. Not a writer? Still sign up! There are q+a’s with every class. Now is a great time to try something creative, and this donation based fundraiser is how you can help keep Old Town Books running. Thank you!
