Stocking Up

Please pardon our brief silence here at Malvern Books, but we’ve been terribly busy making lists. You see, while it’s possible to fill the shelves of your soon-to-open store by asking a friendly book distributor to send you their “starter kit”—presumably a bunch of bog standard* best sellers they ship to every new retailer—we decided we wanted to pick each and every title ourselves…

bookshelfYep. Every single book. Spreadsheets at the ready, book nerds! Making a list of thousands of awesome indie and small press books is immensely fun, of course (and there’s so much good stuff to choose from), but it’s also rather time-consuming. And we’re hoping to finalize most of our selections before we head to next week’s BookExpo in New York.

In the meantime, I heartily recommend you check out these fantastic presses we’ve encountered on our Excel(lent) adventures: Calamari Press for irreverent contemporary fiction; Ugly Duckling Presse for beautiful poetry in beautiful packages; Pushkin Press for classics from around the world; and Tam Tam Books for “lost masterpieces.”

* I was curious about the origins of this idiom and whether Americans use it, so I googled it and found myself at the website of this excellent campaign. Whoever came up with the name for this, ahem, movement deserves a medal.