Read All About It!

I know you are all out there muttering about these updates I keep promising. “Oh, yes,” you say to yourselves. “Updates. No doubt.”

Here you go.

- Effective next week, we will be moving out of my basement and into a glorious new office on Institute Place in River North. We’ll be there until our building is ready and our store opens in early 2009. The move happens next Tuesday and Wednesday.

- In preparation for the move, we fired up the van yesterday to go buy furniture and other necessities. The fire was short-lived, however: a dead alternator and shredded serpentine belt led to total breakdown on the highway (in the middle of morning rush traffic, naturally). Our lives were saved by Giovanni at Chromy’s Towing and Alfonso at Chicago Imports on N. Elston, who will forever be our knights in shining tow trucks and garages for getting us back on the road by early afternoon.

- The ‘we’ in the previous paragraph includes me, my mother, Becca, and the newest member of our team: Erin Walter, who first joined us as a book pickup volunteer and is now our official Literacy Director. You will recognize her rockingness if you have been fortunate enough to catch any of her Hidden Mitten gigs around town recently — or, if you are too young for those venues, you may have written books with her at 826CHI. In any case, Erin is a rock star in every sense and we are overjoyed to have her with us to oversee our literacy programming.

- Our new Web site is in final proofing stages and will be live for your enjoyment next week, which (as you recall from the above) is also our office move. It is also the middle of birthday bash, as all of us were born in the first week and a half of September. So there will be cake and celebrations aplenty on all fronts as well as infinite furniture assembly, moving heavy things, unpacking books, painting stencils, and generally revving ourselves up for an incredible autumn.

Those, beloved readers, are the updates. And now I am off to do some proofing, some packing, and some planning in response to them.

I’m officially back!

A few days this week and after the holiday, look out, Becca is back!

After a wonderful summer of hanging with Finnegan I look forward to getting back into the action of Open Books.

This time of year always reminds me of going school supply shopping. Getting your list, finding what you need and always buying something you really don’t need but want anyway. Trapper Keepers anyone?

So I am going to start back to work with a donated leather journal/notebook that someone so kindly dropped off to us! It will be filled with ideas and strategies in the months to come as Open Books continues to grow.

When opening it to the first page however I found this written inside.

12-28-2005

“The days grow longer with each passing minute I cannot be with Steve Gargoyle. I wish he was mine. His rippling muscles shine like the hot white sun.”

Whoa.

Awesome.

So there is lots of good stuff happening at Open Books: a new office starting in September, a new addition to the team at the same time,  the renewal of book pickups, the beginning of book sorting, and the demolition of our building in preparation for putting up the new one. In a week we will be a team of three in a brand-new space. And being three seems somehow significant in light of last week’s AP poll:
One in four adults say they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday…

This is a sad and somewhat scary statistic.

We are very lucky.

I am in Edinburgh, where the internet access is sporadic and the books — and authors, and events, and general literary abandon — are glorious.

More on this — and some other exciting Open Books updates — when I land back home next week.

So now that Blogathon is over, we’re finishing up some of our own Web projects that have been lingering for a while. The redesign is coming along nicely, and we’re working with Z2 to add massive new sections of functionality to it before we launch — online donation history, event registration, volunteer profiles, and much, much more. Exciting! Just wait till you see it.