It's easy to apply for the Sisters in Crime We Love Bookstores grant! Here's a link: https://www.sistersincrime.org/page/WeLoveBookstores
How Did the We Love Bookstores Grant Start?
GM Malliet, author of award winning Max Tudor and St. Just mystery series, was instrumental in the founding of SINC's We Love Bookstores program. Here she talks about how the program came to be and how important it is to support bookstores.
The We Love Bookstores initiative was a natural follow up on SinC's hugely successful We Love Libraries program, and was started a couple of years later when the popularity of the WLL initiative became evident. I was the national board member at large in 2015, the year it all began, and I'm particularly proud that We Love Bookstores continues to this day.
The goal of both programs was to raise awareness of books by Sisters in Crime writers and of books generally in the mystery field, and to acknowledge the role booksellers play in creating the next generation of readers, who are so dear to all our hearts.
The first check was presented in person by none other than Sara Paretsky, founding mother of Sisters in Crime and the president of the SinC Chicago chapter.
The program was a big hit with booksellers and continues to this day. Imagine a bookseller receiving such a surprise message in their email queue!
Looking for a list of mysteries set in bookshops?
Janet Rudolph, Sisters in Crime's Queen of Lists, has a list for that. https://mysteryreadersinc.blogspot.com/2019/04/bookstore-mysteries-independent.html
Finding Book Treasure
By Robin Agnew
When you are looking through used books in a library or bookstore, you probably are either a reader or a collector. If you’re a reader, your main concerns are – is this affordable (i.e. cheap?) is this readable (i.e. not falling apart?) If you’re a collector you may have a different concern – is this valuable? These days, thanks to the internet, the bookstore or library is probably on it. But…not always….
There isn’t really a website where you can go to figure this out. Booksellers are usually knowledgeable – especially if they deal in used books – but everyone has their areas of expertise as well as their blind spots. What you would be alert to is: condition. Is the book uncreased, unmarked? Not water damaged or moldy? No mouse bites? If it’s a hardback, is there a dust jacket in good condition? Is the title and/or author scarce? Scarcity usually means value. The most expensive mass market we ever sold in our bookstore was a little known Stephen King title in mint condition ($800). But that’s a unicorn, frankly.
Edition is the other question. Almost always it’s the first edition that will be the most valuable. For a hardback, you’ll look on the copyright page. There should be a list of numbers – you are looking for the number 1. In older books, it might be letters – you are looking for the letter “A”. For old paperbacks you are looking for the “first paperback printing” – usually there will be a notation of this on the copyright page. For older juvenile series (Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames, etc.) all of this goes right out the window. These are notoriously difficult to identify. Arguments often ensue when discussing old Nancy Drew titles.
Like most things, collecting books is a matter of instinct as well as luck. We always told our customers simply to collect what they loved – as there’s never a guarantee of value. That said, if you stumble across a first edition of A is for Alibi go ahead and scoop it up…
Robin Agnew is the We Love Bookstores coordinator and former owner of Aunt Agatha’s Mystery Bookstore.
