Melville House Books

Independent Booksellers

News and interviews from the wild, wild world of independent bookselling.

• Community Bookstore to open Terrace Books UPDATE: the new Astoria Bookshop

  Community Bookstore in Park Slope, Brooklyn plans to open a new store in Windsor Terrace. Called Terrace Books, it will carry used titles and occupy the space that used to… Read more »

• Dan Brown causes price wars, bookshops party like it’s 1999

  There are loads of things we predicted the new Dan Brown novel would bring: clumsy, soul-destroying prose, translators cast into working conditions resembling the pits of hell, Tom Hanks looking… Read more »

• Australian bookseller frustrated with Amazon declares “Kindle amnesty” days

  A bookseller in Australia has decided to act on his frustration with Amazon’s business practices, tax policies, and proprietary .mobi format. Jon Page, the owner of Pages and Pages, a… Read more »

• Literary L.A.: 72 suburbs in search of an author

  The L.A. Times just unveiled an interactive map of literary L.A., just in case you happen to be there for the L.A. Times Festival of Books. Or, if you’re not, you… Read more »

• Mississippi’s Square Books named Bookstore of the Year by Publisher’s Weekly

  Independent bookstore Square Books has been in operation in Oxford, Mississippi for more than thirty years now, and this week Publishers Weekly recognized it as its Bookstore of the Year.… Read more »

• Independent bookstores doing better than ever in 2012

  The Christian Science Monitor ran a cover story by Yvonne Zipp yesterday about the rise of independent bookstores in the U.S. Business is getting better! Zipp credits the fall of… Read more »

• The perfect (Irish) bookstore

  There’s been a debate brewing in the Dublin Review of Books and the Irish Times book section over the past few weeks about what constitutes the “perfect bookstore.” It began… Read more »

• Maine bookstore looking for help after being hit hard by blizzard

  While last weekend’s snowstorm wasn’t quite the apocalyptic event we were expecting here in New York, it did wreak some havoc further north in New England. Longfellow Books in Portland,… Read more »

• Hilary Lowe of Literati Bookstore on her transition from sales rep to bookseller

  Construction has begun in Ann Arbor as Hilary Lowe and her fiance Michael Gustafson forge ahead with their plans to open a new independent bookstore this spring. Having worked with Lowe… Read more »

• Connecticut bookstore in search of a new home

  Monroe Patch reported this weekend that Written Words Bookstore in Shelton, CT, is looking for a new location as the lease for their current spot comes to an end. They’ve… Read more »