COVID Exposure Alert – We’ll be temporarily closing to in-store browsing

Hello my bookstore family,

I feel like it’s my duty as a responsible shop owner, as a responsible employer, and as a responsible friend to all of you to let you know that one of our beloved employees went to get a rapid test today for COVID and it’s come back positive. We’ve been following protocols and wearing masks, so I’m hopeful (of course I’m hopeful!) that this helped mitigate risk to any of you who shopped with us recently, but I would be remiss in not alerting you.

I was able to get an appointment in the morning to be tested, but regardless, I’ve made the difficult decision to close the store to in-store browsing for at least a week but my gut tells me to just close for the rest of the month (which is only two weeks) due to the increasing spikes. I was already toying with that last week, but settled on just cancelling our participation in artwalk Friday night.

I’m  not going to lie, this will affect my business. Of course it will. But, BUT, BUT I would much rather err on the side of caution and do the right thing for the community. The store will weather through this. We weathered through April, which was the worst month–we only made a quarter of what we normally would have made. By July we’d crept back up to 50% of normal and this Fall we’ve been just on par with last year at this time. If we can make it through April, we can do it again.

I’ll still be here to do contactless delivery and curbside pickup and will be wearing gloves when I pull books, but if you’d rather not take a chance, I totally understand. If you still want to support my store, I can ship most books to you by having them go to your home straight from my distributor–how that works is you order a book for shipping and I log into my distributor’s website and instead of having the book delivered here, I select Home Delivery and it just goes straight from the warehouse in Tennessee to you. If you want to save the step of ordering from me, you can just go to our Bookshop.org page and they’ll fulfill the order and ship it to you (and we’d still get a cut).

This is such an uncertain time and my heart goes out to all of you. I’m extremely encouraged, however, by the results I’m hearing about the Pfizer vaccine.

Together we can get through this. Thank you for your continued support. Stay safe. Stay healthy.

Love,
Angela Trigg
Owner, The Haunted Book Shop

Miss Downtown? We Can Bring Downtown to You! Introducing our Quarantine Care Packages for Book Lovers!

Are you and the kids stuck at home? Want to show some love to a housebound family member or friend? The Helping Haints Quarantine Care Package is perfect for them! Send books and gifts while also helping The Haunted Book Shop and other downtown local businesses until we can re-open our sales floor to the public.

Our Wine Lovers Care Package

You can either do just a care package, which comes with books and candy/chocolate, or start with one of the care packages and choose some of the add-ons from some of your fave downtown shops like Nova Espresso, A&M Peanut Shop, OK Bicycle Shop and more! Have someone who loves books and hot boiled peanuts? We can add-on some from the Peanut Shop!

How it works is that you can choose our Curated Package and fill out a questionnaire, and we’ll pick out books for you or for the person you’re giving it to. This is great for someone who wants to be surprised (a mystery package!) or would like to give a gift to someone based on their tastes. Alternatively, you can choose our You Pick Package and fill your cart with the items you want us to put in it and control exactly what goes in it.

Both comes attractively packaged with candy and a gift tag (our logo on one side and a small space for us to write your gift message).

To order, visit our care package page on our website and choose your package, add your add-ons if so desired, and we’ll take care of the rest!

We got in some board games, puzzles, and playing cards

We’d heard that folks were having a tough time finding games and puzzles, and the like, so we grabbed some from our distributor to help keep boredom at bay while you’re staying safe at home! We can do curbside or home delivery for these and are grouped under a new category on our website to make it easy for you to shop.

Delivering curbside and porch in my Ravenclaw robe!

It’s been a tough week keeping my spirits up while hanging out in my bookstore with my employees working at home and without y’all to brighten my day. Seeing upcoming event stuff now sitting forlorn in corners… Reading the news… Trying to get work done… Stressed and worried. Last night as I went up to the readers lounge to eat a frozen dinner I actually broke down and cried. This morning though, I had an idea — I’m going to do all my home and curbside deliveries wearing my Ravenclaw robe! Sure it won’t do anything practical to help fight the coronavirus, but if it helps lighten my customers’ day, in a time when we’re all hungry for anything bright, I’m all for it!

How deliveries work:

Go to my website and browse my selection of books and place your order into a cart. Before you hit checkout, choose whether you want to do curbside pickup or home delivery–if curbside, select “pick up in store” under fulfillment options; if home delivery, leave it at “ship order” and when checking out, use the Home Delivery shipping option! For more details, see my Ordering FAQs page on my website

 

Chat With Candice, Sat. on Twitter, 1:30 PM CST

Need picture book to teen and everything in between recommendations? Kidlit haint Candice will be taking over the Haunted Book Shop twitter account this Saturday from 1:30 to 2:30 CST. She’ll answer your questions, give personalized book recommendations, and, as a mom of two, offer tips on learning from home.

Boxes to unpack. So many boxes.

Soooo I’ve been swamped this week pivoting our store to online w/ deliveries and working on a shared doc for my employees to work from at home so they can still be paid and the deliveries have stacked up! This gives you an idea of how many NEW books arrive every week that we process and put on the shelves. Raided some today to get special orders fulfilled. Some are for a book signing that’s been cancelled. Some are new releases for this week and next week and some are for book clubs. Many are just restocking what’s sold etc. Also in these is that cute-as-heck Dogman standee that was for Independent Bookstore Day that has now been postponed. These are from since Monday