Button Sunday

This button was designed to celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit of Gary Hoover. Who’s Gary Hoover? Google would help you discover that Hoover, in 1982, founded BOOKSTOP, Inc., in Austin, Texas, with $350,000 in capital raised from 35 private investors. He and his management team built BOOKSTOP, the nation’s first book superstore chain (large selection, low prices), into the fourth-largest book retailer. In 1989 Barnes & Noble purchased the company for $41.5 million cash, and it became a cornerstone of Barnes & Noble Superstores.

It was a sad day for devoted Bookstop booksellers when the board fired Hoover and sold out to Barnes & Noble. In my less than three years with Bookstop, I developed relationships that changed my life, and I still have friendships that began there more than twenty years ago.

This was the last Houston Bookstop where Barnes & Noble kept the name; it closed in September 2009. Sometimes I think people forget that even the “superstores” can become their own little communities made up of booksellers, book buyers, and the books themselves.