From the Office

by Jude Feldman

Thank you, everyone, for your sponsorships, your kind words, and for your absolute conviction that we should remain open!  We've been totally overwhelmed at the amazing response from all of you.  I'm thrilled and excited and so, so grateful!

If you know us, you know that normally, we plan things carefully.  This whole sponsorship thing, not so much.  It all happened so quickly, and we've gone from closing to not closing in such a short time that we're way, way behind on everything.  We want to reply thoughtfully to your emails, and we are working on it, but my current count stands at 300+ behind, and I expect Alan's is about the same.  We are making slow progress towards getting everything answered.

The flood of reporters has thankfully abated, so we can hopefully get back to something resembling normal pretty fast.

So! here's what we're doing now: a bit of reorganizing and moving shelves while we have the opportunity.  The store hasn't been this empty since we moved to this location in 2001, so we're taking the chance to move some stuff around, get rid of the blind corner, and make a few other subtle moves prior to re-ordering books and getting sections re-filled.  I'll be meeting with all of our publishers' reps to order the forthcoming titles for the current season, and also the titles we missed while we weren't ordering things over the past few months.  If you notice that we're missing something we should have, please do bring it to my attention.

Getting the sponsor database set up & figuring out the sponsorship benefits is also high on our list of priorities.  There is an incredible list of possibilities already, and we're still thinking of ideas and getting great suggestions.  We will need to do all the sponsor data entry, and then we'll get an update email out to all of our awesome sponsors shortly.

The other things we're doing are putting back together all of the elements we had begun to disassemble, like scheduling author events.  We have some fantastic events coming up that I cannot mention yet since they're not specifically confirmed, but I certainly hope you'll be as excited as we are about them.  We're basically just trying to get caught up as fast as possible after this complete 180 degree turnaround.  We had the plan all in place to close, but now we have to make a brand-new plan to stay open!  Please be patient with us while we deal with this very sudden and completely wonderful turn of events.