Happy New Year to all our customers! We finished off 2013 with excellent sales in December. As with many retail businesses, November and December are critical to our financial well-being. Many “Thank you”s to all our customers. We hope that we solved a few gift dilemmas for you and also that we provided a pleasant shopping experience in the process.
Now we come to a less interesting part of our business operations-assessing the inventory that we built up so as to provide enough choice during the Holiday rush and returning excess products to the respective publishers. We will be closed all day on Sunday January 26 to carry out a complete inventory check-individually counting about 5000 or so books. In preparation for that, we will hold an inventory sale in mid-January. Watch this space for details of the big event -coming shortly.
The two Book Clubs resume in January. On January 15th, the first group meet at the New Edinburgh Square Residence at 7.30p.m. On January 29th, the second group meet at the Edinburgh Retirement Residence also at 7.30p.m. The January book is “In the Garden of the Beasts” by Erik Larsen. Beginning in 1933 in Berlin, it tells the story of William Dodd who became the first American Ambassador to Hitler’s Germany in what was a critical point in history. “The book lends a stunning eye-witness perspective on events revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity”. The book is available in the bookstore at a discount during this month. We’ll have more book events to announce later.
Our December best sellers list is given below. We have the usual mix of non-fiction (Biography/Politics/History) and Fiction and the numbers are heavily influenced by book signing events and the word-of-mouth that follows. There are a few surprises. One is that Victoria Abbott made the list twice with her “book Collector mysteries”. It is interesting that both Joseph Bryden’s “The Orenda” and Charlotte Gray’s “The Massey Murder”, which have been on the best sellers list for several months, had a resurgence in December. A sleeper near the bottom of the list is “The Rosie Project” by Graeme Simsion for which we’re getting great reports back from customers as a feel good read. Maybe it will be this year’s version of “The hundred year old man who jumped out the window and …” which had steady sales throughout 2013 as word spread about it.
Good reading in 2014! Remember that one of the few guaranteed antidotes to brutally cold weather (that doesn’t involve long distance travel) is to curl up indoors with a good book.