In February 2001 Baker Books launched a series of author-and-reader book discussions called the Open Book Series. It ran for years and became the most distinctive thing on the store's calendar, largely because of an unusual two-part structure that solved a problem every bookshop event programme has.
The two-part evening
The problem is this. A small, seated discussion with an author is by far the best experience available to a reader — but it only works with fifteen or twenty people in the room, which means turning others away. An open public reading welcomes everyone but reduces the audience to spectators.
The Open Book Series did both, in one evening, in sequence:
- Early, small, registered: an hour-long moderated discussion with the author. Seats were limited and had to be booked in advance. Participants had read the book.
- Later, open, unbooked: a reading and book signing, open to the general public, no registration, first come first served.
Anyone who wanted the intense version could book it; anyone who saw a poster that afternoon could still come to the reading. In its later seasons the series moved to a straightforward reading-plus-questions-plus-signing format, with no reservations at all and seating first-come.
Who it was for
The programming brief was explicit and stayed consistent: debut and rising-star authors, with a focus on the varied and eclectic voices of contemporary New England writing. Not the touring bestsellers — those came to the store too, through the general events programme — but the writers on their first or second book, for whom a room of twenty engaged readers in a regional bookshop is a materially significant event.
The questions were structured to be about craft as well as content: what the author was doing and how, not just what happened in the book. That is the difference between an author event and a signing queue.
Why it mattered locally
New England has a dense literary population and a thin distribution of venues outside Boston and Providence. A series in Dartmouth meant that a reader on the SouthCoast could meet a serious writer without a hundred-mile round trip, and that a writer living in the region had somewhere to launch a book that was not two hours away.
The store put its own weight behind the framing, describing the series to its customers as their opportunity to lead the literary revolution on the South Coast — which is exactly the kind of slightly grandiose local claim an independent bookshop is entitled to make, and which turned out to be substantially true for as long as the shop was open.
What a moderated discussion needs
The word doing the work in the store's own description is moderated. An unmoderated author discussion collapses in one of two directions within twenty minutes: either three confident people conduct a private conversation with the writer while everyone else watches, or the questions drift into the audience's own writing projects.
A moderator — in this case a bookseller who had read the book properly — fixes both. The requirement that participants register and turn up having read the book fixes a third problem, which is that a discussion in which half the room has not read it becomes a plot summary. These are small procedural decisions and they are the entire difference between an event that people talk about for a decade and one they leave early.
The family of programmes
Open Book sat within a set: the Hot Topics non-fiction discussions, the Author Chats published interviews, the book groups that met in the café most months, and the annual Get Lit small-press promotion. Read together they describe a store that had thought carefully about the difference between an audience and a readership.
For readers looking for comparable programming now, the New England Independent Booksellers Association is the regional hub for author events across the six states, and the National Book Foundation runs public reading programmes nationally.