Thanks for Many Things

Booknotes is thankful for many things.  In particular, we are thankful for being able to schedule this post to come up at its usual time on Saturday morning, even though it is being written days in advance.  We are doing this to save time, thinking we might not have that much of it over the Thanksgiving holiday.  We are also thankful that we can schedule much of our social media content in advance as well, and have it pop up at the right time.  It really is magnificent.  However, one thing we cannot schedule in advance is the update of the website.  It will not reflect the current season or holiday until after the weekend, at least.  We will have pictures up of the store's holiday decorations at about the same time.  Be on the lookout for both.  In the meantime, have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Time To Get Cooking

Although we haven't had much publicity about it online, the discounted Books of the Month for November are cookbooks.  This seems appropriate for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday.  As always, we try to get at least one new book in the category each time its month comes around.  This month, we are featuring the updated and expanded edition of Adriana Trigiani's Cooking with My Sisters.  We originally planned on having it at her book signing back in July, but it had gone out of print in preparation for this new edition.  In fact, we tried ordering it when it first came out earlier this month, but it hadn't arrived yet at our primary distribution warehouse.  We finally should be getting it in this Monday, just in time for the holiday.  As an Italian-American cookbook, its recipes might not fit in with everyone's plans, but you might fine something interesting.  It is a $19.99 paperback, but, like all recent arrivals, it is not covered in our Books of the Month discount.  Our post next week should be on time, even with hours being disrupted due to the holiday, so check us out then.

Countdown to Black Friday

In two weeks, the "biggest" shopping day of the year, Black Friday, will be upon us.  However, the weekend after Thanksgiving has never been that big of a deal to us.  It has actually been slow most years.  Much of this might have to do with the fact that our window display is almost never done in time for the day.  In fact, it it usually not even halfway finished by then.  This might be due to the fact that the person who usually does the display takes much longer than needed to do the work.  The inside of the store is usually done by Thanksgiving.  One year, when only one person was doing all the decorating, it was actually done in a few hours.  So, when Black Friday comes around, don't be too surprised if the window display isn't fully set up yet.  Just remember, we will be open, normal hours that day, even if it doesn't look like it yet.  See you next week, when we might talk about some special events coming that weekend.

The Perils of Dry-Erase Markers

In case you haven't yet noticed, we have gone back to using multiple colors on the Upcoming Releases board.  Check it out on the NEWS  AND EVENTS page (links don't work too well for this variety of Blogger, so you have to click it yourself).  We did this because of the new black markers we use last time don't mix well with our regular ones.  When we tried to erase the board this past week, everything just blurred together.  It was a mess, and it took an extra day just to get the right type of cleaner to get things fixed.  The new markers work find on their own, though, just don't expect to see much very dark black on the board for a little bit.  We can't figure out why the image is blurry though.  Other pictures are fine.  In case you can't read it, check our the BOOKS page for the upcoming week's releases, as well as the previous three weeks as well.  Note that this just represents the books available to order and not necessarily what we have in stock.  See you next week.

The Upcoming Dry Season

Recently, our blog posts have been a little shorter than usual.  Part of this is because we don't have as much to write about lately.  Another reason is that there have been many extra books to put down on our Upcoming Books page that there hasn't been enough time to write during our weekly site update schedule.  That is changing.  Starting in mid-November, there will be fewer big name titles coming out each week.  In fact, we are having a hard time in coming up with enough books for the end of next month, and it just gets worse in December.  When Booknotes first opened, we didn't realize how few books were actually released between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Over the years, it became quite obvious how few there were.  While some big titles are released, most authors wait until after the holidays to publish new work.  That being said, there will be less showing up on the BOOKS page for the next few weeks, but that means longer posts here.  So, it is kind of a win-win scenario.  See you all next week.

Drawing a Blank

To be honest, we have absolutely nothing to talk about right now.  The best we can offer is the upcoming new edition of Adriana Trigiani's cookbook Cooking with My Sisters.  It is completely revised with new recipes.  It had been out of print for a while now, but it will be back in early November.  We were planning to have it be a featured title at her book signing back in July, but we only found out it was out of print just before the event.  We are taking pre-orders for it right now, so come in if you don't want to miss out on it.  Anyway, that is all we can come up with this week.  We hope to have more interesting information next week.  See you then.

Boo! Who?

In case you didn't notice, we have changed the self-made logo over the main title on our pages to one for Halloween.  In fact, it was this very style of logo that started our trend for both our entry sign as well as our upcoming release board.  In our second year, we (and by we and mean I) wanted to change up our entry sign dry erase board.  We noticed that the first three letter of our name spelled B-O-O.  We decided to emphasize that fact.  We wrote out the name in black.  We added pupils to the first two O's.  We changed the K to an exclamation point and a carat like this <.  Some years, we even added eyes to the second O, making it a ghost thing.  The final addition was a crooked smile under the first two O's, to make it look like a ghost, or something, was trying to scare you.  At least it was doing it in a playful manner.  That is all this week.  See you next time.