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It's beginning to feel a lot like shopping season!

Life during a pandemic has brought many changes to all of us. Heeding those changes, leaders in the book industry are encouraging independent bookstores to reach out to their customers to shop early, shop local. Why are we doing this?

• Books will be in high demand for the holidays, as they have been since the pandemic started.
• We’re aware of the potential for paper shortages, supply chain disruptions, and delayed inventory shipment. (If you’ve seen empty shelves at your local grocery store, you’ve already experienced this.) It is expected that these problems will affect all businesses which sell books.
• Strong support during the fourth quarter will help keep independent bookstores in business.

We’ve slowly been increasing our inventory of both books and non-book items such as puzzles, games, and greeting cards to ensure that you will have a good selection when you shop. At this point, it will be possible for you to place orders for books we don’t have in the store and receive them in a timely manner. The later such orders are placed, the more difficult it will be to be confident books will arrive in time.

Our popular holiday catalog will be available in the store and by direct mail starting October 23. Books from the catalog are already arriving and will be on display beginning this month. We’ll have a link to the online catalog as soon as it’s available.

Remember, there are several ways to shop at Beagle and Wolf:

• At the storefront
• From our online store, beagleandwolf.indielite.org
• Every day, we take orders over the phone (218-237-2665), by email info@beagleandwolf.com, and by Messenger and/or Facebook. You may pick up items in the store or we will ship them
• We continue to offer personal shopping, subscription services, curbside service, free delivery within the area, and free gift wrapping

And here’s our pledge to you: we will not play holiday music in the store until November 27!

Shap Early Shop Local with Libro.fm!
Give the gift of audiobooks!

If you’re ready to get a start on your holiday shopping, audiobook memberships through Libro.fm make the perfect gift! You choose the membership (1, 3, 6, or 12 months/credits), your gift recipient picks their own audiobooks, and you support Beagle and Wolf Books & Bindery with your purchase. 

BONUS: When you buy a 12-month audiobook gift membership through Beagle and Wolf Books & Bindery we’ll get half of the retail price on those sales—that’s $90 from your purchase! 

Libro.fm audiobook gift memberships are available worldwide, and you can purchase them for yourself in addition to giving them as gifts. If you want to gift a specific audiobook, you can do that too!

Start shopping now!

We’re thrilled to announce our first virtual event:
An Evening with Lin and Tom!
November 12 at 7:00 pm

Minnesota authors Lin Enger (Undiscovered Country and The High Divide) and Tom Maltman (The Night Birds and Little Wolves) both have new books out this fall! The books have similar settings—extremist religious groups in northern Minnesota—and we’re looking forward to welcoming them for a lively conversation. Lin’s latest book, American Gospel, will be released October 27. (See a review of the book and an interview with Lin below.) Tom’s book, The Land, will be released October 13. We’ll interview him and review the book in our November newsletter.

Interview with Jen and Lin Enger

Jen: How have events of 2020 affected your creativity?

Lin: I have been so taken up with the news in 2020 and with trying to acclimate to the new limitations (in the case of the virus) that I have not been writing. When my life is going along normally, writing is something I do when my teaching work is finished. Writing has always been the other thing in my life, thething I love most but often must push aside for lack of time. Then in March the virus hit and I found that all my extra time was sucked into the pandemic vacuum—reading news obsessively, following the ubiquitous charts and graphs, watching the talking heads on tv—and then on top of that came the protests this summer following George Floyd’s killing. So no, I can’t say the past six months have been a creative time for me. On the other hand, I’ve found that periods like this—when I step away from writing, fallow periods—tend to be followed by rich times of productivity. 

Jen: What are you reading?

Lin: Other than news, which I absorb in all formats and seems to have overtaken my life, I’ve been reading some nonfiction titles pertinent to the moment, including James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, written more than a half-century ago but addressing this nation’s racial issues as well as anything I’ve read. I am also reading The Death of Expertise, by Tom Nichols, published a few years ago but which offers insight into the strange, anti-science reactions we’ve witnessed as the pandemic surges. A novel I hadn’t read before is The Plague, by Camus, and I’m finding that it’s brilliant—rendering painfully and with acute psychological perception the stages of human response when a society is faced with a serious mass-health crisis. 

Jen: Do you plan to write about 2020 in future books?

Lin: My simple answer is: I don’t know. My experience as a writer is that subjects seek me out—I don’t generally go looking. But I do think the novel I’m publishing this fall, American Gospel, is about a psychic strain in this country that resonates with the current pandemic. People in America are obsessed with apocalypse in a way the rest of the world is not—in part because of how much of American religion has focused so pointedly on end-times doctrines. Every national crisis seems to induce predictions of imminent doom. In the last twenty years alone we’ve had Y2K, 9/11, the financial crisis, and now the coronavirus pandemic, each used by powerful voices as evidence the world is fast approaching a precipice. None of this, of course, is to say that our future is free of peril! Climate change, nuclear devastation, cyberterrorism—all kinds of real dangers exist and must be aggressively confronted. But often in this country, the belief in a religious apocalypse is used as a rationale to avoid addressing real problems. If the nature and timing of the world’s end is pre-ordained by a higher power, the responsibility regarding our collective future is lifted from our shoulders. How reassuring. And that, I think, is a danger. It’s a seductive message, when you think about it, a siren song—‘No worries—it’s out of our hands.’ It's a kind of mass-denial that has consequences. 

So yes, I guess I have written something about 2020—a novel about a family divided because of one man’s certainty that he knows God’s mind and God’s plan, much like our nation seems divided now between those with an almost fatalistic acceptance of what will come and those determined to fight our adversaries with every resource. 

Have you heard?

We have been accepting used books again. As a reminder:
       We’re looking for relatively recent fiction, mysteries, chapter books, and young adult books in good condition.
       We rarely accept hardcovers.
       We pay in store credit.
       Currently, used books are processed on Sundays and credit is placed on your account then.
       When your drop off books, we’ll ask you to fill out a brief form. If we are unable to use your books, you can pick them up or we’ll donate them to the Friends of the Park Rapids Library for their book sales.
       If you are interested in selling Classics, please call the store (218-237-2665) and talk to Jen about your collection.

New Logo Design Contest

What it is:
Independent Bookstore Day is a one-day national party that takes place at indie bookstores across the country on the last Saturday in April. Every store is unique and independent, and every party is different. But in addition to authors, live music, cupcakes, scavenger hunts, kids’ events, art tables, readings, barbecues, contests, and other fun stuff, there are exclusive books and literary items that you can only get at independent bookstores on Independent Bookstore Day.

What we’re looking for:
We are looking for a flexible design use that will work both horizontally and vertically and look as good on a large banner as it does on a bookmark. The logo should capture the spirit of independent bookstores and a love of books. It might also say something about the joy of discovery, book collectors, writers, and readers—we leave that part up to you. All logos should include the name of the organization.

Guidelines:
Please send us your logo design in jpeg form. 72dpi is fine for review, but the winning design must be available in hi-res for reproduction. Two–to five-color designs that also look great in b&w are ideal. The winning design will become the sole property of the American Bookseller’s Association.

Deadline: October 26, 2020 (winner will be announced by 11/15/20)

Page OneStaff PicksYouth YakBook Groups News