What Can We Say?

Dear friends,

We don’t want to write a hot take on what happened Tuesday, and you don’t want to read one, so let’s just acknowledge the horror and pretend we all still care about newsletters.

New Hours

So, wow, it’s November? The store has been open a month? Sounds fake, but here we are.

As of this weekend, we’ll be open six days a week, Tuesday-Sunday, 11-6, with the following winter holiday exceptions:

We’ll be closed on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday—but very much open on Small Business Saturday, November 30! (We’ll be going in with other businesses in the Square on some cool promotional stuff, which we’ll tell you about in our next newsletter.)

We’ll also be closed on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day, so please make sure you secure all your Jólabókaflód purchases by the 23rd. We’ll close again on New Year’s Day.

Also, We’ll Be Closed January 14-28

While we’re talking about the store being closed, here’s your first warning that we will be completely closed between Tuesday, January 14 and Tuesday, January 28. Why? Because they’re the deadest two weeks in bookselling, Kate’s turning 50, and now we’re going to need time to recover after the inauguration.

We’ll open back up on Wednesday, Jan. 29 and then resume our regular Tuesday-Sunday schedule.

Ordering Books

As gift-giving holidays approach, we know many of you will be looking for specific things. We’d be happy to place an order for you in-store, but the most efficient way to support us with your new book purchases is still by going to our Bookshop portal. You can also buy audiobooks for yourself and others at our libro.fm page. Or, you can buy…

Jarvis Square Books Gift Cards

E-gift cards are available here, and we have plenty of physical gift cards in the store! Our gift cards can be put toward new or used books in-store. If you’d like to send a gift to someone who lives too far away to stop in, we’ll direct you once more to our partners Libro and Bookshop.

Return Policy

We accept returns on new books, both full price and discounted. (In other words, books that came from the middle bookcase, or perhaps a display.)

We do not accept returns on used books, i.e., most of our stock. But if they’re still in readable condition, we’ll happily take them in exchange for store credit at our usual used book-buying rates.

The Way These Letters Will Always End for the Forseeable Future

As always, if you have books that would be a good fit for the store, we’d love to talk! Gentle reminder: Book trade is by appointment only. There are only two of us in a tiny shop, and we’ve already had days when multiple people show up unannounced with books. We love your enthusiasm—and your reading tastes!—but we need to be able to control the flow of incoming books. Please email [email protected] with a list of what you’ve got (or a picture of spines), and we’ll make an appointment to check them out.

Thanks again for your incredible support in our first month. We love being part of this community, and we hope to be a refuge and resource for our customers in the days ahead.

-Kate and Michael