By Lynn What are you giving thanks for this Thanksgiving? At ABC, we’re thankful for our community of booklovers, both customers and staff. I’m also thankful for the Iroquois Confederacy—the model for our democratic Constitution. We have celebrated Thanksgiving at our stores since 1989 as a way [...]
Written by EmmaV As a bookseller, you see loads of books coming in and going out of the store every day. We can tell you with certainty: this is a good source for all kinds of contemplations and conversations! But also dealing with customers, or even plain equipment, has been inspirational for [...]
Written by EmmaV As a bookseller, you see loads of books coming in and going out of the store every day. We can tell you with certainty: this is a good source for all kinds of contemplations and conversations! But also dealing with customers, or even plain equipment, has been inspirational for [...]
Written 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, coarse [...]
Written by EmmaV As a bookseller, you see loads of books coming in and going out of the store every day. We can tell you with certainty: this is a good source for all kinds of contemplations and conversations! But also dealing with customers, or even plain equipment, has been inspirational for [...]
Written 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 [...]
When we started thinking about opening a store in the Westfield Mall of the Netherlands, it had been almost 20 years since we last had a third store (in Leuven, Belgium). The decision to start this new adventure was not an easy one. When we finally decided to take the leap [...]
written 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 [...]
written 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 [...]
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, and to [...]
