Tag: bookstore

At the end of May, Ada’s Technical Books co-founder Danielle Hulton made a remarkable announcement: Ada’s would be taking over operations of local minichain Fuel Coffee. By any metric, buying three neighborhood coffee shops in the middle of a global pandemic and economic collapse is a bold move. Even more surprising, though, was Hulton’s announcement that the three Fuel locations will also become small indie bookstores, with each eventually carrying roughly 1,000 nonfiction, fiction and children’s titles.

Fuel Coffee seems like a wise investment no matter what the business climate. Owner/founder Dani Cone expanded Fuel from one location in 2005 to three beloved neighborhood hangout spots in Wallingford, Montlake and Capitol Hill. (Cone is keeping 10% of her stake in Fuel.) But conventional wisdom would argue that opening three small neighborhood independent bookshops in Seattle in the year 2020 is, to put it gently, a little bit of a risk.

Luckily, Hulton has never paid much attention to conventional wisdom.

When she and her husband David founded Ada’s 10 years ago, she had no bookstore experience, but coming in fresh proved to be a strength. While many new bookstores flounder around for a few years before honing their stock and discovering their audience, Ada’s almost immediately found its own rhythm as a scientifically focused bookshop, cafe and STEM community hub. Three years after it opened, the store expanded from a tiny annex at the end of Broadway to a lushly renovated house on 15th Avenue East, where it has thrived ever since.

“Ada’s is what I want to exist in the world, and I’ve gotten lucky that other people want it too,” Hulton explained on the phone in a recent interview with The Seattle Times.

With Ada’s firmly established, Hulton had been looking to expand into new businesses. When Cone asked if Hulton and her husband would be interested in buying Fuel back in January, they were enthusiastic about the opportunity. One statewide lockdown and two massive quarterly plunges in GDP later, Hulton found herself in charge of four independent bookstore/coffee shops and a staff of 20 bookseller/baristas…

(Keep reading at the Seattle Times.)

The coronavirus pandemic has made it almost impossible to operate the arts venues where people tend to gather and linger: galleries, arts education spaces and bookstores were all closed for months. For Ballard’s Push/Pull — a combination of outsider art gallery, small-press bookstore and education space — COVID-19 could hardly have been more devastating.

Director Maxx Follis-Goodkind says 2020 has basically been cursed from the start for Push/Pull: “There was major construction on the street for all of this year up until just a few weeks ago,” she says. “So we were already struggling and trying to figure out how to reach more people and establish different revenue streams.”

It’s not like it’s ever been easy; you don’t create an underground arts hub to get rich. Push/Pull was founded by Follis-Goodkind and her now-husband, artist Seth Goodkind, as a stall in the Greenwood Collective communal arts building. In Push/Pull, she says, “we wanted a space that was about art and illustration and comics and printing, encompassing the entirety of an artist’s career.”

(Find the rest, including links to three Push/Pull bestsellers, at the Seattle Times.)

In the late 1970s and very early 1980s, Capitol Hill was one of the few neighborhoods in the country where LGBTQ+ people could largely live out of the closet. To the young people moving to Seattle from more regressive parts of the country, the area around Broadway — with its openly queer arts organizations and its vibrant nightlife — felt practically utopian. (LGBTQ+ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer/questioning, with the + denoting everything along the gender and sexuality spectrum.)

For those transplants, Capitol Hill seemingly had it all: restaurants, arthouse movie theaters, dance clubs, drag shows, alternative media. But after they lived there for a month or two, they’d start complaining about one particularly noteworthy hole in the fabric of the community: Capitol Hill needed a really good general interest bookstore.

When Michael Coy moved to Seattle in 1981, he wanted to fill that need…

(Keep reading at the Seattle Times.)

Bookish people, the stereotype goes, are introverts who prefer to stay home. So you’d think the recent social distancing measures would be a bibliophile’s dream: An excuse to read alone for weeks on end.

That’s not the case for Queen Anne Book Company bookseller Tegan Tigani, who has been working from home since March 25. During a typical shift at the bookstore, Tigani would talk books with customers all day long. Pivoting to online retailing was not in her life plan, but she’s spent most of April and May processing online orders and taking phone calls from the many die-hard QABC customers who are sticking with their neighborhood shop.

The complicated logistics of shipping books to customers is stressful. “You’ve got to be super-careful and super-focused. If you screw the order up,” Tigani tells me, “people aren’t going to get their books. And you don’t want to be one more disappointment in their lives” in the middle of a pandemic…

(Keep reading the article, including three excellent book recommendations from Seattle-area book workers, at the Seattle Times.)