Hello! We’re Jake and Kendall - resident Open Bookers from 2 June - 6 June, coming from San Francisco. While we didn’t post throughout our journey, we wanted to take the opportunity to summarize some highlights throughout the week. Reading through this Tumblr was one of the ways I got to know and get excited about our journey to Wigtown - so wanted to be able to share to pass it on to future Open Bookers!
We had a range of activity throughout the week. Mornings were generally less busy than afternoons… we often planned to close for lunch around 12 but often had people coming in right then and we couldn’t say no! Monday was easily our highlight - including selling 18 books in one go on day 1! A lovely woman came in on a mission to find some of her favorite crime novels. The success of the day was not to be repeated throughout the rest of the week but the satisfaction of being able to provide what a customer wants was immense!
Searching out new “blind date with a book” titles! These were very fun and popular with folks (one woman bought 4 at once!) We searched the shelves for interesting titles and were able to find a few for which we could provide interesting notes (the long descriptive / floral ones). Having a mix from past booksellers was also fun.
I’m not always a crafty person in my daily life but wanted to give it a go. We used a previous bookseller’s compilation of “childhood favorites” in the window display, made some tweaks for some of our found favorites, and did some decoration. Will leave the paper there for any future craftiness.
We had hoped to host an event for board games in the shop! Unfortunately we were not quite good enough at advertising so it was just the two of us - but we enjoyed a night of Bananagrams and Star Realms in the shop. Recommend following the advice of sending over a flyer in advance and also more aggressively marketing your event if you’re planning one!
Not all of our displays were a rousing success. We were quite entertained by our “judge a book by its cover” display (inspired by a previous Tumblr entry), but did not get as much attention as we hoped! Some of our favorite books we put up with recommendation cards unfortunately also didn’t sell. But we remain undeterred.
Some of my favorite moments in the shop were the quiet ones just getting to explore the stock. We had no restocking duties during our time, but touched on a little bit of organization in addition to window display making, better sorting the wine section and alphabetizing the biographies. It made for a great way to find hidden gems - and get to explore them for a bit! I enjoyed reading about the west highland way walk, pastimes and hobbies over the last 7 centuries, and this gem:
The hardest part of the trip was balancing between staying open to enjoy running the bookshop and getting out to see Wigtown and the surrounding area! We had planned to close at lunch for an hour or two to go through the other bookshops and to see stuff in the area. Thankfully everyone is super understanding - while you’re here to run the shop you’re also here to experience Wigtown and the Dumfries and Galloway area! We managed to hit up almost everyone of the shops in town and appreciated their own unique character and specialty - they’re all worth a visit and to be able to meet the lovely shop owners too! The people are what makes this town great.
And of course we managed to walk away with a book of our own at pretty much every store…
Other highlights were the cafes in town - Reading Lasses and their excellent cakes, Books and Bakes, and of course our daily latte from across the street at Cafe Rendezvous! Dinner was a bit trickier since many of the places were closed but we ventured into the surrounding area and had some lovely meals including the Harbor Inn In Garlieston and The Pheasant.
For other excursions - we hit up both the Bladnoch distillery and Crafty Distillery! At Bladnoch we did the full tour and tasting - the tour was fascinating to see and learn more about whisky production and our guide was full of historical knowledge. At Crafty we just snuck in right before they closed and managed a quick tasting of their gins - and walked away with some bottles!
We followed the advice everyone else had mentioned, but it bears repeating; please, do the tour of the Machars with Dave. This was an easy highlight of the trip. I’ll avoid spoilers in order to say - this is a must do.
We will leave Galloway with a long list of other sites to see - recommended by a mix of past Open Bookers, other tourists stopping in the shop, and locals in town. I guess it means we have to come back, right?
I write most of this from the lovely nook in the flat on our last day. We searched out the Open Book in January hoping to just put our names on a wait list - but the stars aligned to take us here this summer. We’re leaving with our hearts full of joy and our suitcases full of books. So grateful to all the lovely folks we’ve been able to meet throughout the week.