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 EmmaV It is almost Valentine’s Day! Need some 19th century dating advice? “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” Jane Austen taught us in her masterwork, Pride and Prejudice. [...]
by Lília With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, we thought we’d home in on screen adaptations of romantic fiction. Because who hasn’t heard of or watched – maybe many times! –adaptions of Jane Austen’s books such as Pride and Prejudice and Emma, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre or Emily Brontë’s Wuthering [...]
by Romy My name is Romy, and I am 13 years old. Me in a bookstore is like a kid in a candy shop—I adore reading. (I might even want to become an author later on...) I'm really into dancing, fashion and playing the saxophone, and [...]
by Natalia It is February, which means it’s Black History Month in the United States and Canada. Black History Month was first introduced in 1969 and has been celebrated nationwide since the mid-seventies. This month was introduced by Black educators as a way to celebrate Black culture, and the too [...]
by Lynn & Lília The book buyer: Lynn Kaplanian-Buller interviews Lília Visser Lilia is a seasoned ABC book buyer. Asked how she would define a good one, she says the most important characteristic for book buyers is listening to customers. Besides that, a book buyer must keep an eye [...]
It’s confirmed: our bestselling title at ABC Leidschendam in 2022 was the Blind Book Date! So what, exactly, is a Blind Book Date, also known as BBD? It’s a curated title we gift wrap with only a few clues. Just enough to get people interested in the story. It is [...]
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 [...]
Witches and the Folklore of Poisonous Plants by EmmaV Some of the most striking scenes of witchcraft in literature picture witches bent over a bubbling cauldron—from the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth tossing in ingredient after ingredient to cause “double, double toil and trouble”, to Harry, Ron and [...]
by Lauren The holidays are over, the kids are back in school and life for many is settling back into its less frenzied, everyday pace. With more time at hand and cold weather prodding us into a kind of cozy hibernation, January is the perfect time to dive into a [...]
