Independent Bookstore Day

Griffin Bay Bookstore invites you to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day on Saturday, April 30 and enjoy a 10% Storewide Sale on all Books.

Join in the Fun at Griffin Bay Bookstore, Saturday, April 30 and help honor the rich and vital role that an independent bookstore plays in the social and economic life of our community. Stop in for cider and cookies, browse around and chat with staff and customers.

Griffin Bay Book Club members will set up shop with books they have read since the group first met in October, 2007. Enthusiastic and dedicated book lovers, they will share their passion for the written word, and discuss what they’ve read and enjoyed, what they’ve learned, and how being a book club member has enriched and enhanced their reading, not to mention their lives. You’ll get to hear first hand about the wide range of books and perspectives they’ve encountered.

Thor Hanson will be on hand to sign books for those of you who want copies of The Impenetrable Forest, Feathers, Seeds, and his latest book, Bartholomew Quill, a children’s book about a curious young crow.

April 30 is a day to honor the value of an independent bookstore in our community; all across the country indies are celebrating the incalculable role their bookstores play in the cultural, intellectual, and economic lives in their communities. Independent bookstores are beloved for not just connecting readers to books, but also to one another.

Yet many American bookstores, faced with dire economic and technological conditions, have folded, leaving communities without their unique contributions. Not to be undone, the survivors have banded together, and are now re-asserting themselves as a movement. And they are starting to rebound thanks to appreciative customers who walk in, who browse around the carefully chosen books on the shelves, who encounter knowledgeable and friendly staff, and, best of all, discover something unexpected, something new and different.

Bestselling author Ann Patchett (Bel Canto, State of Wonder, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage) felt so strongly about the value of an independent bookstore in Nashville that she jumped in to preserve one. Now the proud co-owner of Parnassus Books, she has written persuasively what it means to support an independent bookstore.

She says of her store’s success: “Maybe we just got lucky. But this luck makes me believe that changing the course of the corporate world is possible. Amazon doesn’t get to make all the decisions; the people can make them, by choosing how and where they spend their money. If what a bookstore offers matters to you, then shop at a bookstore. If you feel that the experience of reading a book is valuable, then read a book. This is how we change the world: We grab hold of it. We change ourselves.”

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