Blacksburg Reads

Coffee With the Candidates

Join us for the third session of Coffee With the Candidates.  Cecile Newcomb will take your questions on Thursday, September 3rd at 7:00 PM.  Our sessions fill up fast, so please arrive a few minutes early so we have time for all of the important issues facing the next town council.  For Roanoke Times coverage of these events click here.  To read about it in the Collegiate Times, click here. (Psst, you can also vote for The Easy Chair for Best Coffee Shop in Blacksburg while you’re at the CT site!)

Our used bookstore project gained a ton of momentum from this Roanoke Times story by Allison Chopin.

Paige Poe has a post at IndieBound.Org about Independents Week (June 27-July 4).  This is a subject dear to us as we try to continue to serve book lovers in the New River Valley.  You can help us celebrate our “independents” by donating books to your favorite locally owned coffee shop (us!) and purchasing in-house roasted coffee from small, sustainable farms like Selva Negra, La Minita, and Leopard Forest.

On July 4th, The Easy Chair Coffee Shop will convert our reading room to a small, high-quality used book section. All “new” inventory will be reduced to used book prices. Liberate your bookshelves of any hardcover, trade paperback or mass market paperback books that are falling off the end of the shelf. Maybe you have old book club books or you just want to make room for great new titles that are certain to come out this year. Box them up and bring them to the Easy Chair from July 1 to July 5 and get a free coffee or espresso beverage of your choice.

When you register on IndieBound.org, make sure you become a fan of The Easy Chair Coffee Shop.  We’re listed in both bookstores and coffee shops.  You can also RSVP for our event on Facebook.

Madness

I took a long detour from a short trip out running errands the other day and landed in The Book Cellar, a used bookstore in Crossville, TN. I couldn’t pass up the huge billboard proclaiming “OVER 200,000 BOOKS!”  Walked out 12 dollars poorer and 3,000 pages richer after about 90 minutes of browsing.  In my excitement, I accidentally purchased 2 copies of Prague, by Arthur Phillips.  So I will give one away.  It cost me a dollar.

While I was staggering around the aisles and searching for Pelecanos among stacks (and stacks, and stacks) of Patterson, several people drifted in and out of the shop.  You would have to see this place to understand my bewilderment.  It is in an old shopping center that just looks tired and gray, home to a grocery outlet and an empty movie theater.

Yet I found more books than I will be able to read this year.  And the woman who greeted me and took my money was very friendly.  She tried to sell me a mystery bag of books for one dollar.  And I almost bought them.

So here I am, again, irrationally pondering the idea of a used bookstore in Blacksburg.  Maybe something to get people to wander back in from their forays into the wasteland of corporate coffee shops and “bakeries.”  Something to remind people that when a town supports a bookstore, it means that it cares about stories and has its own story to tell.

Yeah, I know.  We tried it once before.  Several others have tried it.  But the Easy Chair Coffee Shop wasn’t supposed to last this long in the face of this much competition, either.   Sure, we’ve had our share of struggles.  But as people continue to wake up to bad and worse economic news around the globe, maybe they will look to the neighborhood for solutions.  Or just for the sense of community that is still there, the faintest flame, waiting for somebody to breathe life into it.