The Saturday festivities photo recap

My camera was passed around the store all weekend so when I finally got home and looked through all the photos from our Bookstore launch events, I had so many smiles on my face. Here for your enjoyment as well are a few photos from Saturday.

We started the day with a storytime where Michelle Knudsen came and read her adorable book Library Lion. Storyhour was super cute (all the kids roared on cue) and Michelle really knows how to work a crowd of kids, but the photos of parents reading with their children after storyhour are what make me happiest. To see parents fostering a love for books by sitting on a bookstore floor to read a book together is a beautiful thing.










And at the evening party, there was so much joy in the air! Or maybe that was champagne. Both! Either way, it was fun and we send a big thank you to everyone who trekked out in that weather! We have photos on another camera (with a dead battery and a MIA charger) of Letitia James, Marty Markowitz and us toasting the crowd, and some great crowd shots of all of you too, so maybe we'll post more later on. But for now...


There were the 'boys'



And the 'girls'



And our literary friends with adorable haircuts Jami Attenberg and Kate Christensen



And Touré , who gave a very nice speech for us. Thanks for representing Brooklyn literary culture to our crowd!



Esther and Dikko from Purgatory Pie Press



Alexis (drinking on the job...we all were that night) and Eleanor



And all the rest of you...



Thanks so much for making it a special special day.

Finally Open, and In the News!

On Saturday October 17, still a week away from our official launch party, Greenlight Bookstore had its soft opening. We chalked up our sidewalk sign, unlocked the doors, and notified our Twitter followers and Facebook fans. And it's been non-stop joy and energy ever since. Our face are tired from smiling, and we're losing our voices from saying "thank you" to all the congratulations and expressions of good will, and our throats keep catching with how beautiful it all looks. And even better, people are buying books!

Here's a quick rundown of just SOME of the places you can read about Greenlight in the last week -- they say it better than we could!

The Brooklyn Paper (October 14)

The Daily News (October 16)

The Fort Greene Local blog on the New York Times (October 17)

Time Out New York Kids (October 20)

The New York Press (October 21)

auk wrecks and ark larks (October 23) - this one has a bunch of great pictures of the store taken by our friend Megan Barron!

Brownstoner renovation blog (ongoing)

Yelp (ongoing) - add your own review!

Let us know if we've missed any -- I know there are some more great blog posts out there about the opening.

Okay -- back to bookselling! See you all in the store...

Greenlight Bookstore Launch Party Invitation!

Come celebrate the opening of Greenlight Bookstore and share in our excitement with a day of festivities at the bookstore on Saturday, October 24! We're still very new but we just couldn't wait any longer to open our doors to the book lovers of Fort Greene, Brooklyn and New York City.

At 10:00 AM, we welcome kids of all ages for a special inaugural Story Time. Brooklynite Michelle Knudsen, author of the beloved bestseller Library Lion (Candlewick Press), will read from her charming picture book, and will then sign copies of her books, which we will have for sale. Book-related treats and prizes will be handed out to kids, and parents can browse the store before the evening's festivities.

Then, at 7:00 PM, all book lovers are invited to join us for the Greenlight Bookstore Launch Party, complete with complimentary champagne for toasting (21 and over of course)! In attendance will be some of our favorite Brooklyn authors, as well as editors, publishers, writers, readers, neighbors, and friends.

Local literary magazine A Public Space will give away free copies of their most recent issue to the first 100 customers in the door after 7 PM, and other giveaways will be announced as well. Fort Greene author Touré will read from new work, and Fort Greene's own City Council Member Letitia James will officially commemorate Greenlight's opening. Greenlight Bookstore's owners Rebecca Fitting and Jessica Stockton Bagnulo will take a moment to say thanks to the people who helped them bring this new bookstore to Brooklyn.

This is the kickoff we've been waiting for - we're planning on some serious celebrating!

This invitation is open to all - feel free to pass it along. You can RSVP on our Facebook page and share with your friends there too.

We'll hope to see you at Greenlight Bookstore's Launch Party on October 24, 2009!

This weekend we started shelving books

Each step in the process of building our bookstore has been a revelation. When the space was raw it was a blank canvas and we felt like anything could happen. When it was a construction zone, we'd monitor the changes and watch as things began to take shape. It was literally different every day. When the ceiling went in, the space suddenly sounded different, and that was a joyous shock - the first auditory change we'd experienced. When the shelves went up, but weren't yet stained, we had our first three dimensional sense of what the store would look like. Up until that point, we only had paper plans and our imaginations and our vision. After the shelves got stained and finished, we stepped back and looked, and loved what we saw even more than we thought we would. We truly created a home for our books.

And then this weekend, the moment we'd all been craving: we started putting books on the shelves. The pile of boxes had grown so large; almost bloated and unwieldy, it was a relief to knock some of it out. It was also pure joy to shelve, and pure beauty to see the bookcases begin to fill up. The sound of books sliding against wood, the zen-effect alphabetizing has, the excitement you get when shelving a favorite book or author, and the connections you make with others when you find shared favorites. I especially loved breaking down the boxes as we emptied them onto the shelves, physical proof of our progress.

We started with fiction on Saturday. Fiction is the largest section you see (on the left side of the store) when you look in the front window. It spans one large zig-zag wall.

Before:


After:


Thanks to all the people who gave us 'thumbs up' as the passed by our windows that day - it was wonderful to see that you were as excited about seeing the books going up as we were. There's still a ton of sorting and shelving to do, but each day we get closer, and folks: we are so close to being able to open our doors. Thanks for being patient with us! We promise, we'll be open very soon.

Doing A Good Thing Right

As you may have noticed, we're not open for business yet. (Though we do have a really cool sidewalk sign -- check out our Facebook page for pics, or walk by!) The fantastic bookseller staff we hired is still spending their days on tasks related to building fixtures, cleaning, and receiving -- they haven't gotten to exercise their real skills on customers yet. The store is full of mountains of boxes of books, still waiting to go on shelves. The artisans are still working on completing our cash desk and the bench shelving in the front window.

It would be possible to get a little discouraged.

Luckily, we know better.

One thing that has helped is all of the fellow booksellers and other business people who have explained that this kind of delay is pretty normal. One veteran bookseller related the tale of how her bookstore was three months late in opening, because they lost their contractor halfway through the process. A local Fort Greene shop put it this way: "We worked and worked on buildout, and at some point we ran out of money, and then we had to open." The owner of my local wine shop admitted that his pre-opening process went on so long that he missed being open for Thanksgiving, a huge sales period for wine sellers.

It's helpful to note that all of these small business went on to actually open and become successful, profitable, beloved independent businesses.

It also helps to remember that this delay isn't happening because anyone has been negligent or lazy or dishonest. It's happening partly because 1) we're in a very unusual space that demands a lot of custom work, 2) custom work takes a long time, 3) because the building is very old, the floors and walls have settled and aren't necessarily parallel or plumb, so the custom work becomes even more customized to work around the unexpected angles. And it's happening partly because, it seems, everything just takes longer than you think it will.

But as Rebecca points out, "It takes a long time to do a good thing right." And every time a visitor comes into the space and exclaims over the beauty of the shelves, the lighting, the shapes and textures we've been working so hard to build, we're reminded of that. All the Fort Greene locals who walk by and wave or give us thumbs up remind us too. (I just said hi to a group of very small children and their guardians who are VERY excited to be able to come into the bookstore when it's open!)

We are still planning our Launch Party for October 24, wherever we are in the process at that point. (We've decided "Launch Party" sounds more accurate than "Grand Opening," but it will still be a very celebratory, very literary, very champagne-y event.) In the meantime, we're doing our best to do this good thing right. Thanks for continuing to share your enthusiasm and anticipation with us.