Last month, the Mandalay Resort Group in Las Vegas, Nev., opened a 1,000-sq.-ft. bookstore in the 100,000-sq.-ft. mall bridging the Mandalay Bay and Luxor hotels. The Reading Room at Mandalay Place is the first general-interest independent bookstore in the city of two million, the fastest-growing city in the country.
The store was the idea of Mandalay Bay president and CFO Glenn Schaeffer, a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and literary philanthropist, who is also the founder of the International Institute of Modern Letters at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Schaeffer told the Los Angeles Times, "What could be a more obvious place for a bookstore than a destination that has nearly 40 million visitors a year? Plus, we have the community and intellectuals from the University of Nevada. If we open a bookstore, add a coffee place, a wine-tasting store and an art gallery, suddenly we've created a neighborhood, a corner of intimacy in a city where everything is on a grand scale."
Schaeffer recruited Irma Wolfson from Book Soup in Los Angeles to be the off-site book buyer. Wolfson in turn recruited Melony Vance as the general manager. Vance and Wolfson had previously worked together at the Lido Bookshop in Newport Beach, Calif. Besides Vance, there are six staff members. The store is open from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. on weekdays and until midnight on weekends.
With Brazilian cherry-wood parquet floors and a coffered wood ceiling, the Reading Room is designed to resemble "the library in an old English home," Vance told PW. "It looks as if Rizzoli had shrunk one of their stores and made it intimate." A connecting door leads to the Chocolate Swan, a small confectionery that serves as the bookstore's de facto coffee shop. The two stores have already collaborated in holding a book signing for Alice Medrich, author of Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales from a Life in Chocolate (Artisan).
The stock features an extensive selection of art books, many limited editions, a significant children's section, as well as general fiction and plenty of books about the history and culture of Las Vegas. Vance said that she and her staff have a "literary bent," and the books reflect this interest.
Though the Mandalay Place mall is only three-quarters occupied and won't be completed until January, Vance reports the community—including gamblers—have welcomed the bookstore. "The response has been amazing," she told PW. "People are thrilled to have a bookstore here, and even though Christmas is the slowest time of the year for Las Vegas, we're doing better than expected."
Opening a bookstore in Vegas may not be as high-risk a move as it seems at first glance. Vance noted that "in that recent poll from the University of Wisconsin about the most literate cities in American, Las Vegas was tied at #13 with Boston."
The Reading Room at Mandalay Place may be contacted at (702) 632-9374, or e-mail Thereadingroom@mrg.lvcoxmail.com.
