Jen sends in all the necessary info.

Click the image below to enlarge.  Click HERE to purchase tickets.  (Write “Art of Books” in the comments section of the general donation page)

Hip, hip, and hooray for Little Shop of Stories, which won a 2010 Women’s National Book Association Pannell Award recognizing “retail bookstores that excel at inspiring the interest of young people in books and reading.”

The award includes a $1,000 award, which might come-in handy when Little Shop Stories is forced to hire a cleaning crew to collect all the apple strudel crumbs, severed kitten whiskers and cream-colored pony droppings inevitably left behind by the notoriously rowdy fans of Julie Andrews.

(Post by Andisheh Nouraee, filling-in for Mr. DM, who has reportedly fled to Switzerland)

From the Little Shop website…

Rick Riordan not quite Book Release Party for The Red Pyramid on Friday, May 7th!

Rick is actually releasing this first book in The Kane Chronicles series in New York earlier in the week, but this is still pretty darn cool! The author of the phenomenal Percy Jackson & the Olympian books returns!!! This event is being co-hosted with the wonderful people at Emory University’s most excellent Michael C. Carlos Museum and will be held at Emory’s Glenn Memorial Auditorium.

Little Shop’s David Shallenberger tells DM that Riordan is “Little Shop’s best selling author in our five year history” and each time he makes an appearance “it just gets bigger, and this time it will be just plain huge.”

Little Shop of Stories is a DM sponsor

UPDATE: Post has been updated with a date and time, thanks to Little Shop’s comment below.  Note this is only a book-signing, no presentation.

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Since apparently someone (I’m looking at you Mayor Floyd) let the cat of the bag at last night’s city commission meeting, I guess I don’t need to keep this under wraps anymore.

Julie Andrews will be signing from her new children’s book at Little Shop of Stories on May 21st from 2p-4p.

Looks like LSOS is playing in the big leagues now, ever since their big Neil Gaiman “get” last year.

More details as they come in, but the event is limited to only 200 people.

Huge congrats to Little Shop!!

Little Shop of Stories is a Decatur Metro sponsor.

I hope Pete the Cat will like his black, ink-stained shoes, after he’s finished climbing the New York Times Bestseller list!

Dave over on the Little Shop blog notes that Eric Litwin and James Dean’s Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes is already #8 on the New York Times Picture Book Best Seller List after only a couple weeks of having gone national with Harper Collins.

In celebration, sing along with these girls!

Over on the Little Shop blog, Dave tells the story of how “Pete the Cat’: I Love My White Shoes” went from a local sensation to getting picked up by none other than Harper Collins.  Pretty sweet story!

Eric Litwin, a local storyteller and musician, had an idea for a children’s book starring Pete the Cat. A chance random meeting with James Dean, a local artist and creator of Pete, started the collaboration. Eric and James put the book together and published it themselves. Amazingly successful, the first printing sold out. Outrageously successful, the even bigger second printing also sold out.

In the meantime, multiple big time publishers began knocking on their doors.

Read the rest of the tale over on the Little Shop blog.

The Decatur bookstore will host a book release party for Dean and Litwin this Saturday, March 6th at 7pm.

Disclosure: Little Shop of Stories is a DM sponsor.

Beautiful wands for sale, for a good cause!  Audrey sends in this announcement…

Haiti needs a little magic.

A group of 3rd graders from Winnona Park Elementary have made some beautiful wizard and fairy wands and will be selling them on Saturday Feb 6th in front of Little Shop of Stories starting at noon. 100% of the proceeds will be donated to help Haiti. The wands will be $10 each.

Agnes Scott College, Little Shop of Stories and Daren Wang all have reason to be yelling “Squeeeee!” this week.

In an extensive article profiling the prolific, counter-culture, superstar author Neil Gaiman, all three Decatur institutions found themselves mentioned in the latest issue of the New Yorker.  After detailing Gaiman’s life-story and his unique fan-base in an elegant journalistic style , the article closes with Gaiman’s December trip to Decatur.

In December, Gaiman flew to Decatur, Georgia, the location of Little Shop of Stories, which he had picked as a winner of the contest. In tribute to “The Graveyard Book,” the store had transformed its basement into a crypt and led the children in a danse macabre, beating out a store in Larchmont, New York, that had brought in a live white pony, in honor of the preferred conveyance of the novel’s death figure.

It was a foggy day, with intermittent rain, and people started lining up before noon outside Agnes Scott College, which was hosting the event. The reading started at six.

Little Shop announced the news yesterday in a post on their blog, while Mr. Wang had a bit of an identity crisis over on Verb.

More great press for the little city of growing book fame!

UPDATE: Little Shop’s “Thank You” note to Neil can be found here.

Paula is good enough to provide a recap to last night’s Little Shop Neil Gaiman event.  (The AJC’s Jamie Gumbrecht reported on the event too.)

Report your own experiences in the comments below. If you have photos from the event, send ‘em in and I will post!

Just wanted to give a quick report on the Gaiman event last night. First of all, I am so incredibly proud of Little Shop of Stories. They did a great job all around – they put on a winning Graveyard Book Party, distributed a limited number of tickets in a fair and equitable manner, and did a great job corralling 1000+ anxious and cold Gaiman fans last night.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Little Shop blog has burped up more details about the “at least 100″ remaining tickets to the Neil Gaiman event on December 14th.

Unlike the previous set, some of these tickets will be available by phone, though it sounds like the rule for those is the same as the in-person tickets; essentially one person, one ticket. So, unless you’re looking to brave the Gaiman hordes alone, you better get your companion on the extension before Dave or one of the other Little Shop employees politely hangs up on your rapid explanatory sputtering.

Also, the shop is announcing a satellite, “overflow” location for the event, where Johnny-Comes can view the event going on in Presser Hall live.  But you’ll need tickets for that too.

To get the official, non-summarized scoop, jump over to the Little Blog.