Book Buying Tuesday Thingers
Today's question: Favorite bookstores. What's your favorite bookstore? Is it an online store or a bricks-and-mortar store? How often do you go book shopping? Is your favorite bookstore (or bookstores) listed as a favorite in LT? Do you attend events at local bookstores? Do you use LT to find events?
My favorite bookstore is .2 miles from my home and called Bay Book and Tobacco Company. Though its stuck in a stripmall, it's got tons of character -- right down to its special glass-enclosed room that sells pipe tobacco, cigars, and all other matter of smoking stuff. Funny thing is I've never seen one person in that little room and believe it's a complete throwback to 30 years ago when the store first opened. Anyway, they have an amazing collection of books, especially sci-fi, fantasy, and mystery -- they get lots of big writers from those genres coming through. Anne Perry has come through countless times. Though our town is small (15,000), it's about a half hour from San Francicsco and right off Hwy 1 -- what writer could resist stopping by for a vacation, I mean a reading?!
Besides Bay Book, our town is so lucky to have 4 other independent bookstores -- two of them used book stores. I've added all of them in to Library Thing Local, though I don't update them for the author events. One of the last authors events I attended was seeing Junot Diaz read from his first collection, Drown, at a now-closed book store in SF called Clean-Well-Lighted-Place-for-Books (may it RIP). Amazing reading -- only a handfull of us present, and I now have a signed first edition of a Pulitzer Prize winning author.
And finally, I do buy some books online. I use Amazon for kids audiobooks and new releases I've GOT to have, but otherwise it's Alibris for me. Love that site! And finally, there's the B&N in San Mateo near the kids' school. For every birthday and holiday, we ask for B&N giftcards then off we trot for a shopping spree and a great dinner at Macaroni Grill two doors down.
Great question, Boston Bibliophile! Thanks!