UW Book Store’s Brad and Nick of Breakfast at the Bookstore, tête-à-tête
Last week, Brad Craft and Nick DiMartino of University Book Store in Seattle recorded their 46th Breakfast at the Bookstore podcast, marking their one year anniversary of Nick eating maple bars, Brad enjoying more unpredictable treats, and the two sharing delightful book banter to get readers everywhere more excited about books new and old. Below is an excerpt from a recent blog post by Brad. Enjoy more of the banter of our favorite B&N, Brad and Nick, through this link. (Warning: May inspire craving for maple bars, mini quiche, and great books.)
…Bookselling is more questions than answers mostly, but Heaven help the bookseller with nothing to say.
A good part of what we do is talk amongst ourselves. This can look suspiciously like idle chatter, because that’s what it mostly is, but it is also part, and quite an important part, of the business of selling books. I don’t read what you do. I don’t know much about travel, or sports, popular music, raising puppies, contemporary Scandinavian mysteries, cryptozoology, children’s books, pie-baking, middle eastern languages. Sports, did I mention sports? What I don’t know, let me tell you, I could write a book on what I don’t know. Somebody does. Somebody knows. We get lucky, that somebody is on the Information Desk the same time I am, somebody walks up and asks about baseball, or football, or golf, soccer, lacrosse, marathons, fishing, bowling. (I include fishing because I know nothing beyond Izaak Walton and Tom Sawyer and I’m pretty sure there’s something called “sports fishing,” or did I make that up?) We talk amongst ourselves. That’s how someone like me knows who Peyton Manning is, roughly, or why Chloe Sevigny should have a new book of photographs, though I couldn’t tell you if she took any of the pictures in it. How I heard about Gone Girl before it was published. How I heard about coloring books for adults before we had dozens upon dozens of grown-up coloring books from which to choose.
For almost a decade now I’ve been having a regular conversation, every Thursday — barring illness, vacations and the like — with Nick DiMartino. Nick’s worked at the University Book Store since the first Nixon administration. Nick reads the way alcoholics drink. You can learn a lot from Nick. I have.
A year ago I started recording our Thursday morning conversations. After much struggle and the help of younger persons, I learned how to edit our conversations on my home computer and post them as podcasts to Soundcloud. We’ve recorded more than forty of these to date, more than forty Breakfast at the Bookstore with Brad and Nick…
To those that do, thanks for listening. Start your own conversations too, come to that. The more we talk books, the better some of us like it. So, let’s keep the conversation going, and as one or the other of us invariably says each week, “keep reading good books.”
These two AND a maple bar—too sweet!