Life as a Bookseller Archives

Jitse: 25 years @ the ABC

by Iris While all ABC staff obviously looks very youthful and spry, some of us have actually been around for quite a while. Our Jitse is celebrating 25 years at ABC this year. A massive milestone! Read on to find out more about his highlights from the past 2.5 decades. [...]

Iris2025-09-22T19:03:03+02:00Tags: abc staff, interview, Jitse, life as a bookseller|

Bookseller life: Leidschendam edition

by Iris Our Leidschendam store in the Westfield Mall of the Netherlands opened its doors in 2021. It was pandemic times and the many extra rules and regulations didn't make for the smoothest of starts. But four years later we're still here, and it's well past time to bring you along [...]

Iris2025-09-15T13:53:26+02:00Tags: A Day in the Life of a Bookseller, ABC History, bookseller life, Iris|

What we’re reading, watching, and listening to

by Sophie Every so often we want to share what we're currently reading, watching, and/or listening to. We hope you'll enjoy our choices! Tiemen: Reading: I'm currently reading part 4 of The Dungeon Crawler Carl series to my wife. Every evening I read about half an hour of DCC before [...]

Sophie2026-02-11T18:17:36+01:00Tags: Bella, Damla, Else, Iris, Jilles, Jurgen, Klaartje, Lynn, Read/Watch/Listen, Renata, Sigrid, Sophie, Steven, Tiemen|

Book Review: Source Code – My Beginnings

Source Code is not about Microsoft or the Gates Foundation or the future of technology. It’s the human, personal story of how Bill Gates became who he is today: his childhood, his early passions and pursuits. It’s the story of his principled grandmother and ambitious parents, his first deep friendships [...]

Damla2025-07-06T14:34:11+02:00Tags: Autobiography, Bill Gates, Book review, Book Reviews, life as a bookseller, Lynn, memoir, Non-Fiction, Source Code|

Space is Gay* (*LGBTQIA+) – part 2

By Else Else got so enthusiastic about this theme that she created a list that was way too long, but in the end she did manage to whittle it down to 12 very interesting titles. Yesterday we presented 4 of those 12, and today we present the other 8. If you [...]

Lilia2025-06-13T16:48:41+02:00Tags: Arkady Martine, Elizabeth May, Else, Emily Hamilton, Emily Tesh, L.R. Lam, Martha Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Science Fiction, Simon Jimenez, Space is Gay, Space Opera, Staff Choice, Staff Choices, Tamsyn Muir|

Expecting a chill in publishing: Why it matters

By Lynn As booksellers, we are sometimes asked by customers to add or withdraw certain titles from our assortment due to hot social or political issues. Our browsers have even been known to turn some books face-backwards (including those on Trump, Musk, the Middle East and Korea). Someone even recently suggested [...]

Lilia2025-05-18T17:40:03+02:00Tags: Booker Prize, Booker Prize Winner, Current Affairs, how current times affect the big publishers, independent publishers, Lynn, offering a broad range of books, publishing|

Book review: The Reformatory

The Reformatory by Tananarive Due Winner of the 2024 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and Winner of the 2024 Shirley Jackson Award for Novel. A gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he’s sent to a segregated reform school that is a [...]

Lilia2025-05-11T12:17:06+02:00Tags: Book review, Book Reviews, Else, Horror, Prize winners, Tananarive Due|

ABC In the Wild: FACTS 2025 spring

By Else Two weeks after Made in Asia we traveled to another convention to set up our pop-up bookstore, this time in the lovely Ghent at FACTS, Belgium’s largest Comic Con. This means a group of four very nerdy booksellers (Tiemen, Sywert, Jonna and me) made a road trip from Amsterdam [...]

Sophie2025-05-11T08:43:31+02:00Tags: ABC in the Wild, convention, Else, facts, Jonna, klokke roeland, pop-up bookstore, Sywert, Tiemen|

ABC Interview: Mike

As a new colleague Mike didn’t have the chance to take part in our Q&A game last year. He was very interested in doing it anyway, so we asked him the same bookish questions and he answered them all. Mike is our Dungeon Master extraordinaire and part of the D&D initiative [...]

Lilia2025-04-03T16:48:27+02:00Tags: ABC interview, Dungeon Master, Fantasy, Fiction, History, Keith Lowe, Marcus Pfister, Meghan Hunter, Mike, Patrick Rothfuss, Picture Books, Plays, Self-Help, Sheldon Kopp, William Shakespeare|

ABC in the Wild: Made in Asia 2025

By Else Every year, the ABC does a couple events out “in the wild”; basically setting up a pop-up bookstore on location, be it a convention, The Next Web, or at a school fair. In the middle of March, we set up a pop-up bookstore at Made in Asia 2025 in [...]

Lilia2025-03-20T10:32:42+01:00Tags: ABC in the Wild, Else, Made in Asia, Made in Asia 2025|

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