Jessica Stockton-Bagnulo and Rebecca Fitting

After 12 years as co-owner of Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, N.Y., Rebecca Fitting has sold her share in the company to fellow co-founder Jessica Stockton-Bagnulo. In advance of this, they have been actively working on internal changes to ensure that operations will continue to run smoothly upon Fitting's departure. The ownership transfer, which has been in the works for some months, is effective immediately. Greenlight had recently announced changes to its managerial team and buying department. Fitting is also president of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association.

Founded in 2009, Greenlight Bookstore has grown to encompass two bookstore spaces on Fulton Street and Flatbush Avenue; a sister stationery store, Yours Truly, Brooklyn; kiosks at partner cultural institutions; and co-hosted events throughout New York City.

"This wasn't an easy decision," Fitting wrote in a letter. "I am looking forward to watching Greenlight, which I am emotionally and financially invested in, continue to grow, evolve, and prosper, and it is exciting and a relief to know that everything will be in the capable hands of Jessica's leadership, and the staff's stewardship.

"Greenlight has soul; it wouldn't exist without its communities and its customers. Back in 2009, we answered a passionate call from the neighborhood of Fort Greene, whose residents wanted a local, independent bookstore. With their support, we built our first beautiful bookstore on Fulton Street. Seven years later, again with community support, we built another beautiful bookstore in my home neighborhood, this time on Flatbush Avenue. We went on to launch a stationery store, Yours Truly, Brooklyn, that turned out to be a perfect complement to the bookstores. It has been amazing to be a part of creating, building, and growing each of these stores, and over the years I have loved seeing Greenlight extend its reach beyond the walls of our brick and mortar stores."

Fitting noted that while owning a small business has always been deeply rewarding, it is also challenging, and when combined with parenting through a pandemic caused her to rethink personal priorities and decide "to make this major life change as a sort of personal sustainability insurance policy so that I can be a more present parent during these unprecedented times, and while my son is still young. I like to think that we've reached an inflection point, where so many people are reclaiming this moment of adversity by making life-altering changes.... 

"So thank you, Brooklyn and beyond, from the bottom of my bookselling heart, for making Greenlight into the cultural institution it is today, one that will continue to grow and serve its communities for years to come. As for me, I am looking forward with excitement and my next chapters are wide open."

Noting that Greenlight Bookstore "wouldn't exist without Rebecca Fitting," Stockton-Bagnulo observed: "Her expertise, creativity, and passion have shaped the company as it has grown from one store to three, from seven employees to over 50, and as it has become part of the fabric of Brooklyn literary and neighborhood life. I have such enormous admiration for Rebecca as a bookseller and as a human being; I'm honored to have been her partner in this endeavor for over a decade, and grateful for what we've been able to create together. The book world is richer for her contributions--as a bookseller and a literary citizen. We all wish her all the best in wherever her future endeavors take her."

Stockton-Bagnulo added that the only reason she is not daunted by the prospect of going from being a partner to a solo owner "is that I'm far from solo in this venture now. The managers and staff at Greenlight are an incredible team, teaching and learning from each other and always thinking about how to continue to make the company better for staff, customers, and community; you'll be hearing more of their names and their voices going forward.... 

"As Greenlight moves forward into this next chapter in its existence, we have a lot of hope, and a lot of ideas. Our customers have supported us through all of our transitions, and we're continuing to find new ways to serve them, in our neighborhoods and in the digital realm of ecommerce and social media. We remain committed to our community partnerships, as we seek even more potential for collaborations to do good work. Greenlight's managers and staff are full of innovative and far-reaching ideals, and we'll discover together what an independent bookstore can be. And I'm looking forward to the chance to look at the bookstore from a fresh perspective, and renew my commitment to participation and contribution in the book industry and my own community.

"My goal is for Greenlight's evolution to be always in the direction of creating more welcoming spaces, and for its success to be always tied to the success of everyone in our communities. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to do this work, and I look forward to the future of Greenlight with you."

At Amazon, net sales in the third quarter ended September 30 rose 15.3%, to $110.8 billion, and net income fell 50.2%, to $3.16 billion. Both figures were below analysts' expectations of $111.6 billion in net sales and $4.6 billion in net income. As a result, in after-market trading, Amazon stock fell nearly 5%.

Andy Jassy, who in July took over as CEO from founder Jeff Bezos, said that "when confronted with the choice between optimizing for short-term profits versus what's best for customers over the long term, we will choose the latter--and you can see that during every phase of this pandemic."

To do so, the company "nearly doubled the size of our fulfillment network since the pandemic began," Jassy continued. And in the fourth quarter, as a result, "we expect to incur several billion dollars of additional costs in our consumer business as we manage through labor supply shortages, increased wage costs, global supply chain issues, and increased freight and shipping costs--all while doing whatever it takes to minimize the impact on customers and selling partners this holiday season. It'll be expensive for us in the short term, but it's the right prioritization for our customers and partners."

The company is now offering workers an average pay of $18 an hour with some signing bonuses of $3,000. It is also expanding educational benefits for employees.

Amazon said that in the fourth quarter, it expects net sales to be $130-$140 billion, up 4%-12% compared to the fourth quarter of 2020, and operating income should be between zero and $3 billion, compared to $6.9 billion in the same period in 2020.

The Midwest Independent Booksellers Association held its annual meeting Wednesday night, celebrating the association's 40th anniversary; the new member bookstores that have joined in the past year; and the anniversaries of member booksellers and bookstores. MIBA members also looked forward to resuming in-person events next year, and the night concluded with the presentation of the Midwest Bookseller of the Year Award.

"The last two years have been hard," said Carrie Obry, MIBA's executive director for the past 10 years. "It's been so hard to do virtual programming without our in-person meetings. I am filled with joy at the prospect of meeting again next year."

Obry told attendees to circle the dates for the upcoming spring meeting, to be held May 23-24, 2022, in Bayfield, Wis., and the next Heartland Fall Forum, scheduled for October 12-14 in St. Louis, Mo. She added that this was the year that MIBA expanded its board of directors from seven to nine people, adding Riley Jay Davis, events manager at Next Chapter Booksellers, St. Paul, Minn., and BrocheAroe Fabian, marketing manager with Sourcebooks. Obry said she now "can't imagine our board without Riley and Broche."

Kate Rattenborg Scott, president of the MIBA board and owner of Dragonfly Books in Decorah, Iowa, reported that despite the challenges presented by the pandemic, the organization is "working successfully within this new reality and doing very well financially." In the past year, MIBA invested in its new management platform, staff raises, and holding the venue in St. Louis for next year's Heartland.

Since its last membership meeting, MIBA has welcomed 30 new bookstore members, with 16 of them founded in the last year. "In my time I've been on the board, we've never had these kinds of numbers," remarked Scott. "This is extraordinary."

Angela Schwesnedl, co-owner of Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis, Minn., continued the tradition of the previous winner of the Midwest Bookseller of the Year Award presenting it to the new recipients. This year the award went to Gretchen Treu, Wes Lukes and their team at A Room of One's Own in Madison, Wis. Schwesnedl called the store "a staunch defender of trans rights and a vocal advocate for queer, trans and BIPOC people everywhere," as well as an inspiration "for how to handle everything life throws your way," while making it look like it's "still possible to have fun."

Treu noted that for a group of "mostly anxious, introverted Midwesterners, an award feels actively awkward and uncomfortable," but in this case there is a "really special feeling from a group of our peers and colleagues in our industry telling us hey, you're doing exemplary and important work." They've tried their best to "put good out in the world" whenever they can, and "having that best appreciated" by friends and colleagues is "immense." --Alex Mutter

Suzanne Droppert, a bookseller with about 25 years' experience who previously owned Ballast Book Co. in Poulsbo, Wash., and Liberty Bay Books in Bremerton, Wash., has founded an online bookstore called Lemolo Books, selling new and used titles. 

According to the Kitsap Sun, Droppert launched Lemolo Books as an online store this summer after selling Ballast Book Co. to former employee Kate Larson in June. Droppert sells books through Lemolo's website as well as affiliate pages with Bookshop.org and Libro.fm, and some of her inventory consists of titles she previously bought for Ballast Book Co.

Lemolo Books held its first pop-up event earlier this month, at Borrowed Kitchen Bakery in Kingston, Wash. Droppert told the Sun that having a predominantly online store has given her more time to travel and spend time with her family. She plans to hold pop-ups every two months or so going forward.

On Friday, November 12, from 1 to 3 p.m. Eastern, ReadingGroupGuides.com will host its 10½ Annual Book Group Speed Dating Event--virtually. Representatives from 17 large, medium-sized and small publishers will share selections from their publishing houses via video to give booksellers, librarians and book group leaders an inside look at new and upcoming titles that book groups will want to know about and discuss. Selected e-galleys will be available on request from Edelweiss and/or NetGalley, as well as print galleys. Leave behinds will be made available in Powerpoint and Excel formats.

Advance signup is required and can be done here.

Editor, novelist, biographer and journalist Arnold Hano, who was best known for his book A Day in the Bleachers, in which he recalled "what he saw, heard and felt at the Polo Grounds during a 1954 World Series game in which Willie Mays made 'the Catch,' " died October 24, the New York Times reported. He was 99. 

A Giants fan since he was four years old and living a block from the Polo Grounds, he retained his love for the team into adulthood. In 1954, "while working as an editor in book publishing and living with his wife, Bonnie, in mid-Manhattan, he plunked himself down on one of those planks to watch the Giants face the Cleveland Indians in Game 1 of the World Series," the Times wrote, adding that he "had long been intrigued by the aura of a Series opening game. He wanted to experience it and considered writing a magazine article about it, so he took notes in the margins of his game program and of the pages of the New York Times that he had brought along to read while waiting for the game to start."

Hano later expanded his notes into a 10,000-word account and tried to sell it to the New Yorker, but was rejected. He subsequently turned his experiences into A Day in the Bleachers, which was published in 1955 and "would become a classic, hailed as a forerunner of the subjective New Journalism that flowered a decade later," the Times noted. 

In the New York Times Book Review, novelist James T. Farrell wrote that Hano provided "vignettes of other bleacher denizens and writes us a dramatic account of the game itself--and, although we know its outcome, our interest is held here as it might in a novel."

And in 1985, legendary baseball writer Roger Kahn observed that "Hano's writing style was informed and unpretentious, and you could feel those splintery old Polo Grounds bleachers beneath you and smell the mustard on the hot dogs, which were usually served up cold."

Hano was managing editor of Bantam Books in the late 1940s, then editor in chief of the paperback line Lion Books before turning to freelance writing full time. He wrote more than 20 books, "including biographies of Mays and other celebrated sports figures as well as novels, and he contributed articles to major national magazines, touching not only on sports but conservation, racial issues and the plight of migrant workers," the Times said.

For all its modern travails, baseball "still remains our greatest game," Hano once wrote. "It is also the simplest. It often comes down to a boy, his baseball glove and a hero."

The California Booksellers Alliance (CALIBA) held its Fall Discovery Lab last week, a mix of in-person and virtual events that began Monday with a party on a stormy night at Books Inc. at Opera Plaza in San Francisco. Other events included author appearances, editors' buzz, California Children's Booksellers Alliance programming, a keynote with author Brendan Kiely and the announcement of the Golden Poppy Award winners. Last night, attendees gathered for an author panel and party at Vroman's in Pasadena (above). CALIBA's annual meeting will take place this afternoon.

Posted on Facebook by Atomic Books, Baltimore, Md.: "The Baltimore Museum of Art had a John Waters restroom dedication ceremony this evening. It was the most fun waiting to use the bathroom ever." Open to the public in December.

Posted on Facebook yesterday by Mondragon Books, Lewisburg, Pa.: "How It Started/How It's Going.... This afternoon as I was excavating layers from my desk, I came upon my first attempt at a store log started on our first day open: October 28, 2020. We are so very happy in this new location at 430 market and delighted at all the people and beauty and books and engagement that have emerged as we created our little spot just a few blocks up from our former home. It's been sustaining in so many ways. Thank you to everyone who helped make this happen! It's been an incredible year, and we are looking forward to poetry readings, book clubs, typewriter jamborees, art nights, and at least one dance party in the coming year. As always: if you have any good ideas for bookstore fun, do come talk to us! We love the love that loves to love."

"Our favorite place to be on a crisp Fall day? A bookstore!" Blue House Books, Kenosha, Wis., posted on Facebook yesterday.

New Year by Juli Zeh, translated from German by Alta L. Price (World Editions).

Tonight:
HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher: Sean Spicer, author of Radical Nation: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's Dangerous Plan for America (Humanix Books, $27.99, 9781630061715).

Paramount Players has optioned eight books from Gregg Hurwitz's Marked Man series, with a plan to make lower-budgeted, modern noir thrillers to be adapted by a diverse group of up-and-coming filmmakers. Scott Frank, the Emmy Award-winning producer of The Queen's Gambit, brought the project to Paramount Players and will co-produce alongside Hurwitz.

"These thrillers are about ordinary men and women finding extraordinary strength within themselves and our goal is to connect these stories with screenwriters who are early in their own journey to the exceptional," said Hurwitz. "It's so goddamned hard to break into screenwriting today, and Scott and I are excited at the prospect of finding new voices to collaborate with and support."

Hurwitz commented: "There is no talent I admire more than Scott Frank and no one I'd be happier to partner with on the adaptations of these books. I'm grateful to Paramount Players for giving us this opportunity."

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Universal Pictures has optioned The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch, illustrated by Michael Martchenko, as a live-action movie. Elizabeth Banks and Margot Robbie are producing for the studio, with Banks slated to direct. Partners in the option are WildBrain, which holds animation rights to the title. 

Munsch confirmed that The Paper Bag Princess "is going to be a movie! Yes, Yes, Yes!"

Published in 1980, the book has sold more than seven million copies, been reprinted more than 100 times, and been translated into more than 20 languages. It is celebrated each year during Paper Bag Princess Week, leading up to Paper Bag Princess Day. Annick Press recently published a 40th anniversary edition with a variety of special features including an afterword by Ann and Robert Munsch, a preface by Chelsea Clinton, and foreword by Francesca Segal.

The winners of the 2021 Kirkus Prize in three categories were announced last night. The winners, each of whom receives $50,000, are:

Fiction: Harrow by Joy Williams (Knopf)
Nonfiction: Punch Me Up to the Gods: A Memoir by Brian Broome (Mariner Books)
Young Readers' Literature: All Thirteen: The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys' Soccer Team by Christina Soontornvat (Candlewick)

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A shortlist has been released for the 2021 Waterstones Book of the Year that includes 13 titles nominated by the bookstore chain's booksellers. The winner, chosen by a Waterstones panel, will be named December 2. This year's shortlisted titles are: 

Around the World in 80 Plants by Jonathan Drori, illustrated by Lucille Clerc 
The Appeal by Janice Hallett
Greek Myths by Charlotte Higgins, illustrated by Chris Ofili
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Storyland by Amy Jeffs
The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present by Paul McCartney, edited by Paul Muldoon
Julia and the Shark by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, illustrated by Tom de Freston
Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson 
You Are a Champion by Marcus Rashford and Carl Anka
Ariadne by Jennifer Saint
They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera
Amur River by Colin Thubron
British Museum: History of the World in 25 Cities by Tracey Turner and Andrew Donkin, illustrated by Libby VanderPloeg

photo: Caroline Quinones

Sam Quinones has been a journalist for the Los Angeles Times and other media for 34 years, including a decade that he spent living in Mexico, which inspired his first two books: True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx and Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration. Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic was nominated for a National Book Award. His latest book is The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth (Bloomsbury, October 12, 2021). It continues Quinones's exploration the national epidemic of addiction.

On your nightstand now:

Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell: Who knew an account of New York Harbor sludge could be so engrossing? Makes you treasure our environmental laws. Great profile of the owner of Sloppy Louie's restaurant.

The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante. The final book in her Naples quartet about two women who are friends from childhood. Just great storytelling with characters of flesh and bone. Working-class Naples reminds me of a Mexican rancho.

Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763 by Henry Kamen. How a minor kingdom leveraged world talent and finance to become the empire of the time, transforming countries that existed then and countries to be.

Johnny Cash: The Life by Robert Hilburn--terrific account of a great American creative spirit. Cash ended up doing matinees at Wayne Newton's Branson theater and was then rescued from this ignominy by a hip-hop/heavy metal producer and spent his last years creating some stunning music. Combine that with Your Cheatin' Heart: A Biography of Hank Williams by Chet Flippo to understand the grueling, grinding life of early country stars. No wonder they were all on pills. The only way they could drive all night to get to the next gig.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Instant Replay by Jerry Kramer (former Green Bay Packers offensive guard). I was a big Packers fan back when I was seven or eight. Strange, because the other favorite book of mine was Harriet the Spy.

Your top five authors:

Calvin Trillin: The best narrative nonfiction I've ever read, which I encountered as I was starting as a journalist. The Casa Blanca neighborhood gang war in Riverside, Calif., a teenage girl's death in Knoxville, Trillin's friend Denny's suicide, Ben and Jerry's, the death of a Las Vegas attorney, and Trillin's dispatches from the civil rights movement in the early 1960s--a wonderful and surprising array of great American stories.

Alma Guillermoprieto: I read her Heart That Bleeds before I ended up living in Mexico. The whole book was powerful. But her story on the trash boss of Mexico City I've never forgotten. The book was a guide for my own journalism that expanded into longer form as I lived in Mexico.

Kazuo Ishiguro: Wrote the best novel I've read in many years, see below.

A.B. Spellman: Mr. Spellman wrote Four Lives, profiles of four jazz musicians from the be-bop years in Harlem. Terrific narrative storytelling, especially his piece on pianist Herbie Nichols, who died young having recorded only one album. This book offers a great view of the be-bop era, which Mr. Spellman says was the first expression of the Black ego in America.

William Zinsser: If you only read one book on writing, On Writing Well should be it. I've read it many times, especially the first six to eight chapters.

I'd add Joan Didion, David Halberstam and historian David McCullough just for sheer reportorial/narrative virtuosity.

Book you're an evangelist for:

There are two. First is Killings by Calvin Trillin, which is just great narrative nonfiction. I read this first just before I got a job as a crime reporter for the Stockton Record. Every murder, of dozens I went to, I knew my job was to tell the story of how the person lived. Second, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. What a novel! Amazingly creative and well told. Won't say more about it. Don't ask. Just read it.

Book you faked reading:

In AP English, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, which I did battle through, but understood not at all.

Book that changed your life:

On Writing Well--the Zinsser approach to writing is something I've tried to absorb for years. It gave me another route toward writing, one that was about creating inspiration from daily work. Crucial because I was not one of those who "just had to write," as so many authors profess.

Most memorable character in a book:

Edna Buchanan, Miami Herald crime reporter, as profiled by Calvin Trillin in American Stories. This made me want to be a crime reporter. Her story is of a person who has lived a life of her own design. Great lede to that story, too, by the way. I loved her book, The Corpse Had a Familiar Face.

Five books you'll never part with:

All the books I've mentioned above, plus:

The King James Bible

Roget's Thesaurus

The poetry of my mother and father. My mother, Lolly Quinones, died at 44 and we published Midlife Lines, a collection of her poetry. Decades later, my father, Ricardo Quinones, retired from a career as a comparative literature professor and, though afflicted with Parkinson's, wrote five books of poetry before he passed on in 2019, including A Sorting of the Ways.

All the President's Men: The Watergate saga made me want to be a journalist, though it took many years for that to happen.

The Genius: How Bill Walsh Reinvented Football and Created an NFL Dynasty by David Harris--the only sports bio I've read since Instant Replay. A big 49ers fan, I loved the story of Walsh, the greatest coach of his time, who transformed a sport and how it's taught. He left the screaming for other coaches and instead understood how to recognize, respect, hone and deploy the talent of the men under his tutelage. Haven't been able to get rid of this book.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

Smiley's People by John le Carré. He was never quite as great as when he had Smiley for his character.

Mads Nygaard's When Me and God Were Little, translated by Steve Schein, is a stark portrayal of a hardscrabble childhood in a blue-collar, small town in Denmark, on the coast of the North Sea. Its narrator is seven-year-old Karl Gustav (who would rather be called Big Ox), and his distinctive point of view is filled with preposterous details that make perfect sense to him. "In our town you couldn't drown barefoot," he begins, and yet his big brother, Alexander, has managed to do just that, permanently upsetting Karl Gustav's worldview.

His father is a drunk, but owns his own business building houses, and "Our house was so big that Mom still hadn't gotten around to vacuuming all the rooms." "Dad weighed 250 pounds and it was all muscle, except for the hair," but then Dad goes to jail (something about the papers in his file drawers; the young narrator isn't concerned with the details), so Karl Gustav and his mother move into a county-owned house in a new town. Unperturbed, the child carries on obsessing over soccer (he plays alone over four fields through the winter) and terrorizing his teachers. Years pass, very few friends come and go, and readers follow Karl Gustav's experiments with porn, disastrous employment, grifting, a doomed love affair with another damaged young person and a developing relationship with his father. The loss of his brother will always loom large, for Alexander was a hero: "He just smiled, knowing everything." But other losses accrue, as Karl Gustav learns more about the wide, perplexing world. By the book's end, the narrator is a teenager, perhaps still ungainly, but wiser for the trials he's seen.

This is an unusual novel, its narrator's voice colorful, unpolished and unforgettable in Schein's gruff translation. It is Karl Gustav's singular perspective that makes When Me and God Were Little the memorable, bizarre, poignant adventure that it is. It's absurd and often fantastic, as this narrator delivers an earnestly nonsensical account of events that readers know to be impossible. And yet it rings true, because what is childhood if not nonsensical? Karl Gustav is all bluster and pain, bluffing in the face of forces bigger than he is. His story is gritty, messy but real, and there are no happy endings on this harsh coastline. The novel is filled with cigarettes and swagger and masturbation literal and figurative, often unbeautiful but somehow still lovely in its authentic, unvarnished view of a difficult coming-of-age. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Shelf Talker: A rocky childhood on the Danish North Sea is rendered in weird but apt terms by an extraordinary young narrator.

Halloween is nigh, but fear not. Last year, when vaccines were still a dream but lockdowns weren't, I asked: "Will this be the scariest Halloween ever, given that the most frightening people out there won't be wearing masks?" In Salem, Mass., arguably the Halloween capital of the U.S., a surge of weekend tourists had forced Wicked Good Books to tweet: "Due to lack of compliance with mask and hand sanitizing requirements, putting the health of our staff, patrons and community at risk, we are now open on weekends by appointment only during October." 

As it turns out, Halloween is still pretty scary in the streets this year, too, even though many of us are vaxxed and even boostered. But we're book people, so we have special powers, and focusing on the spirit world seems like a welcome alternative as Halloween approaches. Here's some good news that encompasses both realms:

As we noted last week, Books Around the Corner, Gresham, Ore., has opened in its new space and shifted from being a general-interest bookstore to a genre fiction shop with a year-round Halloween theme. The store will also carry "spooky and bookish" candles, bookmarks, gifts and more. Also on scene is the bookstore cat, six-month-old Spooky.

"This is the dream for me, seeing all this every day," said owner Stephanie Csaszar, who noted that within days of her October 8 reopening, customers showed up who had driven three hours from their Washington home for the Halloween bookstore experience. "They loved it.... I thought opening a bookshop would be a dream come true, but it was actually this Halloween-themed genre fiction bookshop that is the real dream come true." 

In Chicago, the Occult Book Store, which opened on the Near North Side under occultist D.G. Nelson in 1918 with a mission to serve spiritualists, occultists and shamans, recently announced it is expanding to create a permanent sanctuary for the Occult Spiritual Society, Block Club Chicago reported.

Occult's mission is to be a magical and mystical resource, according to the Rev. Bishop Lisa Gruber: "Everyone who's associated with the Occult Bookstore and with the Occult Spiritual Society is a practitioner along the path. If you come in and speak to somebody, you're speaking to somebody who's a co-traveler along the spiritual path." Gruber and the current primary owner, the Rev. Bishop Louvel Delon--who began working at the store as a teenager in the 1980s--are looking for a permanent sanctuary location near Wicker Park.  

On Saturday, the Occult Book Store is hosting an All Hallows' Eve Bonfire, "a night of fire and revelry to celebrate the ancestors and our beloved community," with proceeds going to help fund the new community sanctuary. "We've missed our community through the pandemic and we're excited to hold space with you again," the bookshop noted. 

For obvious reasons, this time of year "is particularly busy for the store as regulars pop in and others visit for the first time, celebrating Halloween and Samhain, a pagan holiday marking the end of harvest season," Block Club Chicago wrote. Customers come in to learn about witchcraft and explore their more spiritual side.

"A lot of times during this time of year, we specifically will have parents come in because their children will be experiencing metaphysical things or having dreams or some sort of activity," Gruber added. "We're a really good resource for those parents, to be able to give good advice or hold space for what their child is experiencing.... No matter who you are, if you come in, you're going to get individualized counsel and attention. It's just what we do. We're very dedicated to the people who walk into our doors, especially when they're coming in from a place of genuinely seeking knowledge and guidance."



Speaking only as a reader, I believe we're all haunted by the works we've encountered and authors who have possessed us. We are mediums by profession and obsession, channeling the eloquent dead. Halloween seems like our time, too. In Christopher Morley's classic novel The Haunted Bookshop, we learn that the Parnassus at Home bookstore features a "large placard in a frame," which reads, in part:

THIS SHOP IS HAUNTED by the ghosts
Of all great literature, in hosts;
We sell no fakes or trashes.
Lovers of books are welcome here....

We have what you want, though you may not know you want it.
Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing.
Let us prescribe for you.

As Mr. Roger Mifflin, the proprietor, observes: "My pleasure is to prescribe books for such patients as drop in here and are willing to tell me their symptoms. Some people have let their reading faculties decay so that all I can do is hold a post mortem on them. But most are still open to treatment. There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it."

It will soon be Halloween, but fear not. You are a reader, and that is powerful magic indeed, even in frightening times.