![]() Sophie Blackall’s charming Hello, Lighthouse (pictured at the top of this post) instantly became a staff favorite. This April brought a gorgeous new lighthouse picture book, which also happens to be illustrated by a Caldecott medalist. I miss the beautiful hardcover edition, but, happily, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt does keep the paperback in print. Customers who come into the store knowing the book are always delighted to see it on the shelf. It was a favorite of the children’s and mine back then, some fifty years after it was written, and I’m sure it is still a favorite at the school today. ![]() ![]() Hooray! I first discovered this book when I was librarian at the City & Country School in Manhattan in the early 90s. Written in 1942, The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge was a big hit, and when, just nine years later, plans were afoot to decommission the little lighthouse, fans of the book were outraged and the lighthouse was saved. Swift and Caldecott Award-winning artist Lynd Ward teamed up to write an endearing and enduring tale of the real lighthouse underneath the George Washington Bridge in New York City. In honor of the lighthouse school of bookselling, here are a few of my favorite lighthouse titles: (I feel it’s important to tell you that I am usually prompt with my bills and am foiled only when my revolving beam is snagged on a kraken or some such momentous distraction.) So I’ll reassure them, reminding them that we’ve been good, reliable, paying customers for 21 years and don’t plan to stop now, that I’ll pop their check in the mail pronto, and I thank them for their phone call, which is a helpful nudge to get the lighthouse beam trained once again on the check-drafting portion of my job. I suspect they don’t envision just how many hats (to switch metaphors) we wear at once. I have wonderful staff to help with these islands of store needs, but I have to gaze on all of them regularly in order to run a tight … lighthouse?īeing a lighthouse keeper is at odds with the way our vendors are set up, of course. The big publishers have entire departments focused on a single mission, such as collecting payments. We, on the other hand, have fifteen departments each managed by … us. If we are a few days late with a $27 payment and a credit rep calls in a panic, I chuckle to myself a little, because I imagine them thinking of a bookstore as a segmented business like a publishing house. Once, I was a kind of groundskeeper with four or five bookstore “gardens” to tend. I’ve now become a lighthouse keeper, needing to shine a beam on every aspect of the store in a never-ending revolution of shifting attention. My gaze is steady when it lands on an area: bill paying, event planning, frontlist buying, budgeting, customer attention, marketing, display, new programming, backlist restocking, returns, donations, and so on. But then the lighthouse beam must move to the next area, leaving the rest in the dark until the light sweeps back in again. A year and a half into sole ownership of the bookstore-after twenty years with a co-owner-I’ve found my business behavior transforming.
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