After a three year absence from Wesleyan, Atticus is back. The former campus bookstore will be merging with Broad Street Books to form BABS (Broad-Atticus Book Sellers) in an effort to raise sales at the currently desolate bookstore.
Vice President for Investments Tom Kannam made the announcement last Saturday in a video conference from Cancun, where he was filming an MTV spring break documentary on college students’ holiday behavior and investment patterns.
“[We] really thought that rearranging the bookshelves and constructing a ceiling-high wooden divider between the books and the café would give Broad Street Books the revamp it needed,” he said in disappointment. He declined to comment on whether the wooden divider was inspired by other plans to build a proposed wall between HiRise and the Traverse Square residences.
However, he did note that this divider was “totally different” because it contains square openings for books and overpriced letter writing sets to be displayed, while the HiRise/Traverse wall will have neither.
Other downers have included reports of lower class attendance due to students getting lost roaming the bookshelves’ bewildering new subject and book reclassifications, as well as an alarming spike in frostbite cases among students following the bookstore’s attempt to “do the Stanford” by selling Hawaiian flip-flops in winter.
BABS will make some important changes to the current book selling and buying practices on campus. Textbook manager Patricia Moody was dismayed to find that the prices offered by Broad Street Books are nowhere near the competitive prices offered by outlets such as Amazon, Ebay and getbookscheaperthanBSB.com
“[The publishers] assured us that their rates were the lowest ones going,” she said, while shelving a $360 used copy of Cliff’s Notes Quick Guide to Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
In future, BABS will purchase all new and used textbooks from Amazon. Students will be charged only the price of the book, plus a nominal $0.01 “surf-free” charge.
Doody explained the new pricing scheme. “We pay for the books and the shipping. Students should only have to pay for the book itself, no shipping. There will be a small penny charge for the time they have saved by not having to surf the Internet and place the orders themselves.”
In a radical shift, the end of semester book buy-back scheme will actually be buying books back from students, instead of the old practice of offering spare change for the books ‘sold’ back to them.
“The old scheme had its merits and we honestly thought everyone benefited from it. The bookstore needed books and a way to get rid of all the extra pennies in the cash register, and students had books and empty wallets— it seemed like a perfect fit,” said Moody as she rung up a $4,000 Wesleyan sweatshirt.
“The books will be bought back at full price now. If the price tag has been removed, students just have to write the no violation pledge at the back of the book and write down what they think its price was, rounded up to the nearest $50,” said Moody.
Finally, the café will change its pricing system and will open a drive-thru window for students seeking to avoid the hopefully long lines that the bookstore will be seeing. ABCD (Atticus-Broad Café Drive-thru) will make a small alteration to prices by shifting the decimal points on its prices one place to the left and bringing back waffles for breakfast.
As café manager Edward Thorndike Jr. commented astutely, “[the café] was originally going to change its name to Books & Bagels, but we realized that it would make it BAB, which would clash with the bookstore’s new name. Also, it would bring back less than fond memories by rhyming with Red & Black’s acronym, RAB. So we decided on ABCD, in keeping with the store’s educational emphasis and penchant for arranging books alphabetically.”
BABS and ABCD will be opening in Fall 2020, as it will take the university approximately 14 years to place book orders on the Internet and knock out a hole in the café’ s wall for a window.
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