"So, when is the opening, already?"

A fair question! If you've been following our progress online, or walking by our storefront at 686 Fulton (like this commenter), you just want to know when you can come in and buy books.

If we told you a date, we'd be lying. Honestly, we just don't know.

But here's what we do know about the schedule.

Construction work -- that's the ceiling, floor, and walls -- should be finished by the end of the day on Wednesday, September 9. We had originally hoped to be done before Labor Day, but with the delay in building permits we feel lucky to be finished this soon -- our contractor Hugo and his crew have been working like madmen.

The bookshelves that will line the outer walls are already made, and waiting in the basement to be assembled. They can't go in until the floor is done, though, and the floor is the last thing to happen with construction. As soon as the floor is finished, our trusty millwork genius Iris will begin the installation of bookshelves in the store. He thinks it will take 72 hours; we think he's on speed. (Not really -- but he does seem to work on very little sleep.) So that would put us at the end of the day on Sunday the 12th, using his optimistic estimate.

In the meantime, our tech expert Dan will get our computers set up and networked, and we'll install our inventory system, Booklog. That will happen sometime around the 10th or 11th. Then another friend, Cynthia (the owner of Archivia Books) will come in to train all of us on how to use it.

In the midst of all this books will be arriving, beginning on Tuesday the 8th. Some will come from UPS and FedEx; one giant shipment will come on its own truck. (Pallets and pallets of book boxes -- the mind whirls.)

Beginning on Thursday the 10th, our awesome team of booksellers* will be in the store: cleaning, painting, preparing. As soon as Booklog is set up, they'll begin cracking open the boxes of books that will have already begun to arrive, receiving them into our inventory system, and sorting them on to the appropriate shelves (assuming the shelves are there).

As soon as the shelves are installed (or perhaps concurrently), Iris and his fellow artisans will begin installation of the cash/wrap -- the counter where book sales will happen. That's mostly built already too, but it will take some time and care to assemble.

And at some point, we'll have the systems, inventory, and physical setup to be able to ring in a sale.


And then we'll open the doors.



Believe us, you will be the first to know when that moment arrives. We would love for it to be in time for those attending the fabulous Brooklyn Book Festival on the 13th to stop off at Greenlight on their way home -- but we don't want to jump the gun and screw things up, and we can't promise we'll be ready by then. We don't mind you seeing some chaos (we're having what's called a "soft opening"), but we don't want to risk a situation that might be precarious or unsafe, or that might cause us to make mistakes in receiving or sales that will haunt/nag us for years.

Even after we open the doors, there will be a long way to go. Additional shelving fixtures will be in the process of installation until possibly the end of September. Book shipments will be coming in on a rolling basis. Cards will arrive at some point, and magazines.

There's one date (or two rather) that we can tell you, though. Our Grand Opening Weekend will be October 24 and 25 -- by that point we should be entirely presentable, and in the mood to celebrate. We've got festivities planned all weekend long, for kids and grownups and everyone in between. You'll be hearing a lot more about that as we get closer, but you might want to save the date.

In the meantime, bear with us as we struggle toward that moment of the first sale. We're counting the hours!


* We hired our booksellers! We had our first staff meeting on Wednesday the 2nd, and man are they a great crew. We're totally looking forward to working with Alexis, Jesse, Natalie, Deborah, Brette, and Jasmine -- we'll take some pictures and introduce them as we go along.


Update: one thing we hadn't factored in time-wise: once the bookshelves are installed, there's still the staining and finishing to be done -- and then the shelves have to set untouched for a few days while the finish dries. So we'll be doing a lot of sorting books back into boxes by category, waiting until they can go on the shelves without getting smudged with wood stain. That pushes things back by another couple of days -- but we're still looking at what, maybe the weekend of the 19th/20th? Believe us, we'll open the doors as soon as humanly possible -- but you don't want smudged books, do you?