Happy first birthday to Phinney Books in Seattle!
They celebrated with an in-store sale their birthday weekend, plus a great display of their top 50 bestsellers since they opened.
Phinney’s Top 50
(I spy the covers of many regional authors in that window: Dan Brown, Anthony Doerr, Ruth Ozeki, Renee Erikson, Nicola Griffith, Charles D’Ambrosio, Cheryl Strayed, Molly Weisenberg, Hannah Viano, Nina Laden, Maria Semple, Katzu Kibuishi, Ivan Doig, and owner Tom Nissley himself! Who am I missing? Get out the magnifying glass or pop by the store and see for yourself.)
In their newsletter recap, they also shared this tidbit about the weekend:
And one more thing: we have a new toy. We were alerted recently to a new technological development: photographs on film! That develop themselves right before your eyes! We’ve acquired one of these new gadgets, and this weekend (or any other time), we’d love to take your picture along with a favorite book. (You can even bring one from home, if you’d like.) We’ll start posting them around the store, and we’d love it if the whole place became a gallery of beloved books and beloved customers.
Here are the book portraits of the owners and their family.
We were delighted by this idea. Tom shared the inspiration:
My first thought was to have some kind of a photo booth at the store during our birthday weekend or a similar celebration, where customers could pose with their favorite books, until I found out how expensive it is to rent a photo booth! But then Kim Kopetz, one of our booksellers, said that her dentist’s office takes mini Polaroids (or, rather, Fujifilms, since they are the ones still selling Polaroid-style instant cameras) of the kids who come in. So we bought a Fujifilm Instax Mini 8 camera (and a bunch of film), and we’ve posted a couple dozen photos in the store already. We’re still not sure if we’ll make a whole wall of them, or post them around the store on the shelves where the books are. But it’s been fun so far, and I guess the lesson for booksellers is, Pay attention to what your dentist is doing! Maybe we should try giving out floss samples next.
Oh Phinney Books, you’re fantastic! We’re looking forward to many more birthdays with you.
