First Officer's Log - No 1

Greetings and welcome to the Haunted Bookshop of Iowa City's blog. I'm your secondary host, Ali Geraets; I'm around the shop five days a week, and Sundays I run the show. You'll almost always find me behind the counter going through stacks of assorted books and researching them for placement in the shop. I've worked here since June of 2009. The Bookshop has been a favorite haunt of mine for the past several years, even before I started working here, and despite the presence of several other used bookshops in Iowa City, I always found myself gravitating back here.

My experience in bookstores goes back to my childhood, when my parents took me to our neighborhood Waldenbooks every weekend. When I was 16, and old enough to have a job, I applied at that same bookstore, and thus began my adventures in book selling. All told, I worked for Waldenbooks / Borders for four and a half years, including three years while finishing college, and gained a great deal of experience in buying and selling books. Because my own personal interests were so broad, I knew a little bit about every section in that particular store, a good skill to have in any book selling environment.

I switched from working in the book store in early 2008 to working for a local Iowa City gift store which had been in business for over 20 years. While working for that store, I gained even more experience with buying and selling, and when that shop closed its doors in May of 2009, Nialle Sylvan, the owner of the Haunted Bookshop, bought a large amount of the toy inventory. She got me in the bargain as well.

Working for the Haunted Bookshop has given me lots of responsibilities. I run the shop on Sundays, and take care of processing incoming books from our most recent bookstore acquisition, the Bookery. I've gone through almost every single book in that collection, researching each book and determining its value and how we should process it. In doing so, I've become more acquainted with the internet selling process, and it's also my job to package books we sell on the internet every day. Because of all the books I process, I'm almost assured that I'll never see the same book twice. Book selling is not a boring business.

However, it's not all work. The shop has also allowed me to continue pursuing the book subjects I adore. Science fiction and fantasy, and mystery novels have always been favorite books, however I am also a rabid lover of non-fiction, and I'll devour just about any bit of history, sociology, religious study, psychology, science and current events as I can get my hands on. My current interests are World War I (since I don't know a whole lot about it) and contemporary political commentary from all angles.

In future posts, I'll try to keep you up to date on what's new at the shop, what sections we've worked on this past week and what you can look forward to in future months. As we switch into the Summer season, expect to see a lot of new things coming through the doors. If you read this and wonder about a certain section, leave a comment, and I'll let you know what you might like from that area. I'll also give a shout out to the authors whose work I admire, and what books I've been reading in the past week.

Until next week, fellow bibliophiles.