Whither Children's Bookselling?

The late 1970s saw the start of an unprecedented surge in independent children's-only bookstores opening, just as the eight million boys and girls born during the so-called baby boomlet of 1971-1974 came of reading age. Among the pioneering ventures that sprang up across the U.S. as the phenomenon gathered steam were the San Marino Toy and Book Shoppe (San Marino, Calif., 1975), Cheshire Cat (Washington, D.C., 1977), Children's Book Shop (Brookline Village, Mass., 1977), Hicklebee's (San Jose, Calif., 1979), Blue Marble (Fort Thomas, Ky., 1979), Books of Wonder (New York, N.Y., 1980), and Red Balloon Bookshop (St. Paul, Minn., 1984). Remarkably, of this pioneering group, all but one-the Cheshire Cat, which Washington's general interest bookseller Politics and Prose absorbed in 1999-remains a going concern. As college-educated baby boomers made their own children's reading lives a top priority, the new stores prospered.