Rainy Day Books is an independent bookstore in Fairway, Kansas, a wealthy suburb of Kansas City, Missouri, and one of the leading independent bookstores in the United States. It was founded on November 4, 1975 and is owned and operated by Vivien Jennings.
Rainy Day Books is open 6 days a week, every day but Sunday when the staff "spends time with our families." The store has been nationally recognized for its author events, most of which are ticketed events hosted off-site at Unity Temple on The Plaza. Publishers Weekly says that "Rainy Day Books sets the gold standard" for author events.
Rainy Day Books began as a used bookstore, offering a paperback exchange program where readers could trade used books for credit and pay a small fee to exchange for other paperbacks. Unlike many other used bookstores, Rainy Day Books never purchased stock from customers. Within a year, the store moved to a new expanded location in the Fairway Shops and added a full line of new books. The store moved again to an anchor location in the same shopping center in 1998. Over the next year and a half, the store discontinued the used paperback exchange program and expanded the inventory of new titles specifically for book club readers.
Rainy Day Books is a member of the American Booksellers Association as well as Book Sense, a national cooperative marketing group of independent booksellers.
Read more about Rainy Day Books: Other Information
Famous quotes containing the words rainy day, rainy, day and/or books:
““Three foggy mornings and one rainy day
Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Here in the country it is only a few idle boys or loafers that go a-fishing on a rainy day; but there it appeared as if every able-bodied man and helpful boy in the Bay had gone out on a pleasure excursion in their yachts, and all would at last land and have a chowder on the Cape.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“She walks in Beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“All ... forms of consensus about “great” books and “perennial” problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of “what is already known.” Those great books don’t only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)