April 10, 2021 Bookstore Update

Hello Friends,

We are excited that Alameda County is now in the “orange” tier. With the opening of retail, restaurants and other businesses Oakland will be enlivened once again.

Naturally, we are receiving more questions about the reopening of The Bookmark Bookstore. In spite of the changes in city regulations, we have decided to continue our Virtual Bookstore with curbside pickup and in-store shopping by appointment for the time being. While we anticipate the day when we can welcome our community of readers back to browse the shelves of books, LPs, CD, DVDs and puzzles, we’re not quite ready, so have chosen to keep our limited in-store services for now.

Before we bring more customers into the shop, our goals are to allow time for staff to be fully vaccinated and to allow for all of our customers to have the opportunity for vaccination. Since many of our customers will not be eligible to make vaccination appointments until later this month, we will delay a full reopening.

As you know, due to the pandemic we have restricted our hours and substantially reduced our volunteer crew. Before we can fully reopen, we will need to refine our new schedule and engage our volunteers to fill it.

Reopening our physical store while still being able to effectively serve our expanding online customer base is both exciting and daunting. We aspire to create a shop that is accessible and welcoming to all without worry of line-ups and capacity. We’re not yet sure how this will all take shape, but we want to safely provide you with the full Bookmark experience.

While our reopening plan is a work in progress, we’ll continue to serve you via our Virtual Bookstore and in-store shopping by appointment. We are continuing to take donations by appointment through June (slots are filling up fast!) and then will take a break in July to process everything. Please read our donation guidelines on our website. Donation appointments will open up again in August.

And, don’t forget that you can shop for treasures on our Amazon and eBay stores. Finally, support the library by shopping for new books, note cards, calendars and puzzles at our Bookshop.org store.

Thanks for your continuing support and for your patience!