Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association members from Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia convened in Portland, Ore., September 29–October 1. Trade show director Greg Holmes told PW that attendance was the highest it’s been since 2019, with 240 booksellers representing 86 stores while staying at the Columbia Riverfront Holiday Inn, with its sweeping views of the river and Interstate Bridge.
On the show floor, 124 booths and spaces were staffed by 196 exhibitors, also up from last year and comparable to 2019’s numbers. Library participation doubled too, with 14 librarians representing 10 of the region’s libraries.
Each of PNBA’s education sessions for first-time attendees and new store owners attracted two dozen participants, with several bookstore-curious attendees—including mother-and-daughter pair Lisa and Rachel North of Snohomish, Wa., and Greg Baird and Joel McClanahan of Missoula, Mont.—making plans to open stores in 2025.
PNBA invited 71 featured authors, slightly fewer than in 2023 “because we redesigned our events and had fewer slots” to make room for an evening rep picks event, Holmes said. “We did get pitches,” and several more authors came to sign books and meet booksellers in the exhibit hall.
At PNBA’s annual meeting, not all the news was rosy. According to a report from PNBA bookkeeper Larry West, the organization was down $13,000 in 2023, having “budgeted a modest $800 profit” for the year. “There was no single outstanding cause of the loss,” West wrote in the report. “Our programs all made money, but some just not quite as much as we projected, and some of our expenses were slightly higher than projected.”
PNBA executive director Brian Juenemann noted that this year’s holiday catalog, a significant source of revenue, is short about $25–30K going into this season. “It’s a tough hit but nowhere near a fatal sign,” Juenemann said, attributing the lower revenue to “client anomalies. Some publishers we regularly counted on had a budget blip this year.”
“PNBA stores continue to prove the holiday catalog program is essential,” Juenemann said, so even if a publisher doesn’t participate for a year, “I don’t expect them to go away for good.” PNBA will discuss the timing for the ad campaign, “changes to the ad rate structure,” and paper choice and printing, Juenemann told PW, but he’s reluctant to downsize the 24-page circular.
West noted that PNBA is “still in a very strong financial position,” with total assets of more than $450K. The organization has “budgeted for a break-even year for 2024.” Members are in for a “modest rate increase” in annual dues, said board president Sarah Hutton of Village Books in Bellingham, Wa., while remarking that membership costs have held steady since 2008.
Pre-show gatherings
Some booksellers arrived September 28 for PNBA pre-show events. The American Booksellers Association held its Pacific Northwest launch of The ABA Right to Read Handbook at Powell’s City of Books, with ABA advocacy associate manager Philomena Polefrone in conversation with Ban This Book author Adam Gratz.
Polefrone told PW that the $18 handbook, available through Ingram distribution, IngramSpark, and Bookshop.org, is meant to move advocates from awareness to direct action. All of the handbook’s profits support American Booksellers for Free Expression, and Polefrone’s interviews with free speech advocates including Drag Story Hour executive director Jonathan Hamilt, Books & Books founder Mitchell Kaplan, and authors Malinda Lo and Maggie Tokuda-Hall introduce practical chapters on combating censorship.
Elsewhere in Portland on the day before the show, indie press Tin House threw a retirement party for W.W. Norton sales representative Dan Christiaens. Christiaens joined Norton in 1996 and moved to the Pacific Northwest in 2004, and regional booksellers turned out to wish him well.
Third places and ‘intentional interdependence’
PNBA’s gathering officially began on September 29 with a breakfast keynote talk about bookstores as “third places,” community locations where people find a sense of social belonging outside of home and the workplace. Ethicist Richard Kyte, author of Finding Your Third Place: Building Happier Communities (and Making Great Friends Along the Way) (Fulcrum), gave a short history of social organizations that promote common purpose and dispel loneliness.
In his research and teaching, Kyte has found that third places feel “ordinary,” promote “a playful mood” or make people smile, and are “conducive to lively conversation.” He argued that although technology promises to expedite common tasks, it “allows us to be less dependent on others. In most respects, that’s a good thing, but we become less interdependent.”
Third places, Kyte explained, often include such activities as book clubs and person-to-person games—such as that famous Bainbridge Island invention, pickleball—and promote “intentional interdependence.” PNBA’s trade show offered many amiable third-place opportunities to meet peers and hold conversations, from an afternoon of rep picks to mealtimes and signings with authors.
PNBA program support staffer Tiffany LaSalle and the PNBA Awards committee unveiled the organization’s shortlist of award contenders for 2025 on the show floor; a winner will be selected in January 2025. And in another annual competition, booksellers voted Kristina McMorris’s forthcoming novel The Girls of Good Fortune (Sourcebooks Landmark, May 2025) the show’s Buzzbooks pick.
A dinner emceed by Spencer Ruchti, events manager at the aptly named Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, introduced forthcoming work from Jonathan Evison (The Heart of Winter, Dutton, Jan. 2025), Eowyn Ivey (Black Woods, Blue Sky, Random House, Feb. 2025), Nnedi Okorafor (Death of the Author, Morrow, Jan. 2025), Karen Russell (The Antidote, Knopf, Mar. 2025), and Lidia Yuknavitch (Reading the Waves, Riverhead, Feb. 2025).
Ivey, a former bookseller for Fireside Books in Palmer, Alaska, has been running a preorder campaign; $1 from every preorder made through Fireside Books benefits the Palmer Public Library, which has been closed since its roof collapsed under heavy snow in February 2023; her book launch party will be a fundraiser for Palmer’s library as well. Ivey didn’t reference the campaign in her breakfast pitch, but she did thank PNBA members for their support of her earliest fiction: “I was in rural Alaska and had no idea how to get the word out—and you guys did that.”
Oregon author Yuknavitch, whose 2011 The Chronology of Water was a PNBA Book Award winner, delivered advice in the form of a personal story. Thinking about aging made her feel “frumpy” and ill at ease—"get out of my head, patriarchy!" she joked—and her response was to buy a wetsuit and go for a swim in the Salmon River near her home. When a seal bobbed up nearby, she imagined shedding her human limitations in the aquatic environment, and she observed that her narrative around her identity needed to change.
“The story can lock up in you,” Yuknavitch said, and it’s important to keep revising. “Shapeshifting is how we get unstuck.”
PNBA’s next fall trade show will be held in Spokane, Wa., September 28–30, 2025. PNBA last met in the eastern Washington city in 1999.
