ABC’s co-director Martijn was a guest on the Bookshop Podcast! As an international podcast, The Bookshop Podcast has a wider reach than just the Netherlands, so it's a great opportunity for the world to know more about our small enterprise. With the title "Exploring the American Book Center: Martijn Meerts on Bookstore [...]
By Naomi When I tell people I work at a bookstore, their first reaction is usually: “It must be so nice to get to read all day.” That would be nice indeed, but that’s not what I actually do. Even though I don’t get to lounge around reading all day, I [...]
Written by Lynn I arrived in Amsterdam in 1972 with some history in the American women’s liberation movement, had even started an organization for equal pay back in the day, and sometimes collaborated with the gay liberation activists. But living my perception of a liberated life in a foreign culture was [...]
by Lynn While going through boxes of old ABC papers, I recently ran across a book review ripped out of a 1989 edition of the newspaper Het Parool. The reviewer, Johannes van Dam, saw The UnDutchables as a fresh take on Dutch life written by an American and British couple. [...]
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 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 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 [...]
Written by Lynn and 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 [...]
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 [...]
