by Lynn I remember meeting Joe for the first time during the summer of 1973 in Amsterdam. Mitch Crossfield, one of our two founding partners, had gone off for vacation. The next morning, a young American boy of about 22 with a full black beard and long, straight, black hair [...]
by Lynn One day in 1986, a man approached me at the cash desk and asked, “Wouldn’t you like to have a bigger store?” Well, yes. “The Mothercare company just down the street is pulling out,” he told me. “The man who agreed to take over the rent has backed out. [...]
by Lynn & Steve Malenka Steve Malenka, who worked at ABC in the 1970s—first as fiction and gay book buyer, later as manager of the Book Bar, which sold Sammy’s Hotdogs as well as remainder books for one guilder a piece—has some wild memories to share. Here’s a photo of three of [...]
by Lynn Of course, we had no idea when opening an English-language bookstore full of remainder books how vital freight services would become for our survival. (Just as most people didn’t think about logistics and supply chains until Covid hit.) At first, our books came from Baltimore on pallets by sea [...]
by Lynn Forty years ago this February, I landed at Baltimore airport in the worst snowstorm they’d had in 10 years. On the way to our host Larry Boltansky’s home, the freeway was closed and we had to shovel the station wagon out from under snow to get to a side [...]
by Lynn The ABC started in 1972 after Mitch Crossfield and Sam Boltansky, who knew each other from Baltimore, came to Amsterdam in 1971 and saw the lines of English-speaking tourists outside Madame Tussaud's on the Kalverstraat, then one of the busiest shopping streets in Europe. They went to the jewelry [...]
by Lynn ABC’s Christmas of 1973 was quite eventful. Mitch, who had co-founded ABC the year before, went back to Baltimore for the holidays and left me in charge while we were renovating. He and the landlord, Jacob Kroonenberg, had agreed to level out the ground floor, which had been split-level, [...]
by Lynn The wish to celebrate Thanksgiving with booklovers, staff and people homesick for that Thanksgiving experience springs from a homey image of people from sea to shining sea, from prison canteens to five-star hotels, all eating the same menu at the same time. There’s always room at the table [...]
by Lynn The mid-term elections in the US on November 8 will determine all kinds of policy changes over the coming two years. In anticipation of the books that will be written about the outcome, we have a couple of recommendations for you in the meantime: Read about the rule of [...]
by Lynn Following Oprah’s initiative, in 2003 we launched our first Community Read. It had been done before in Chicago, when the entire city—media, government, library and school system—got together to encourage everybody in Chicago to read the same book during the same summer. It worked wonderfully! People spoke about entering [...]
