For most indie bookstores, stocking the bestsellers is the easy part of the job. Predicting—and stocking—the surprise hits, many from independent publishers and smaller presses, has been the bigger challenge. “You pretty much have... Read More

Late last September, without a ton of fanfare or to-do, Congress passed H.R. 5325, a continuing appropriations bill for Fiscal Year 2017. It included some Zika funding, some verbage covering veterans, and nothing at all about National... Read More

The Dewey Decimal System is a strange beast. Young Melville Dewey—and I do mean young, because he wasn’t even 25 yet—cooked it up based on the subjects of one of his general studies college textbooks. Previously, librarians had... Read More

The publishing industry isn’t uniformly kind to people who try to break into it. The first thing that comes to my mind is the dearth of LGBT thrillers out there. Until several years ago, if I wanted to read about a rogue agent rescuing... Read More

Public libraries have embraced some interesting ideas of late. Seed lending. 3-D printers. Kittens. Sometimes, it seems that we’re so eager to be trendsetters that we end up adjacent to a bullseye only five times out of a hundred. As a... Read More

Congratulations, Carla Hayden. Carla Hayden is kind of a big deal at the moment. If you’ve never heard her name, don’t feel too bad. You’ll know her before long. Until very recently, Hayden was the CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free... Read More

The Island Bookstore's Jill Sawatzki, Steve Hamilton, Tamara Tomac, and Mary Jane Barnwell on Michigan's Mackinac Island. Last month, just before the island’s season opened, a bevy of librarians from rural branches–and the two... Read More

Attention librarians: This is not a drill. The emergency is real and the danger imminent. Libraries, especially in rural areas, are at great risk. Due to a combination of cash-strapped local communities that depend on municipal budgets to... Read More