Best five bookstores in the U.S,?

By Ron Charles March 3 The Washington Post

The five finalists hoping to be named Bookstore of the Year look like impossibly unequal competitors. Located in big cities and small towns from Florida to Washington state, some of them are multi-store giants, while others are little sanctuaries. But each one has a chance of winning the title because size isn’t what counts in this annual competition conducted by Publishers Weekly. The judges — authors and publishing insiders — are looking for heart — along with excellence in hand-selling, community involvement, management-employee relations and merchandising.

Judith Rosen, Publishers Weekly’s bookselling editor, said this year’s finalists are “an eclectic list because it’s sometimes an author’s favorite store or sometimes a regional director executive’s hometown store, or it’s sometimes a great store that has slipped through the cracks. And even though the awards have been around for 22 years, it doesn’t seem like we’ve got to all the great ones yet.” (A store can win only once; Washington’s Politics & Prose joined this triumphant group years ago.)

As a St. Louis native, I was delighted to hear that my neighborhood store, Left Bank Books, made a strong showing in the early round this year. The staff members attracted national praise for their response to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August. “We got a slew of nominations for Left Bank Books,” Rosen said. “A lot of colleagues in the book industry agreed that Left Bank — in the wake of Ferguson — had gone above and beyond.”
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McLean & Eakin in Petoskey, Mich. (Courtesy of McLean & Eakin)