The Open Book
I love to read. Most vacations are my time to abandon earnings reports, spreadsheets, and PowerPoint and dive into fiction - historical fiction being my preference. Imagine my joy when my sister-in-law suggested a girls trip to a town famous for its book stores.
Add to the description that it’s in Scotland.
In a town with a scotch distillery.
Amidst pastures of hairy coos (no, I don’t mean the ‘Spare,’ but the adorable hairy Highland cows, or coos).
While we travel around the country using Outlander scenes as our guide.
Bring on my MacKay tartan glee!
What does one do when they base a vacation around Scotland’s National Book Town? You sign up to work in a book store. Yes…. You work for your vacation.
Perhaps you’ve read about the Open Book featured on CNN, the brainchild of ex-NASA employee Jessica Fox who fell in love with the quaint town of Wigtown and turned ‘running a used book store’ into an AirBnB success (currently booked - pun intended - through February 2025).
Our plot was simple. Rent the book store and the apartment above it (as well as a room at the lovely Craigmount Guest House). Run the store whatever hours work best during our stay. Create whatever displays suit our reading list recommendations. Greet customers kindly. Embrace the locals.
As a group of women from Chicago and DC, we decided in advance of our trip that our display theme would emphasize gangster and FBI stories. Ever excited for a theme, I arrived creatively prepared with crime tape, window paint, mystery invisible ink pens, and crime solver notebooks all packed for store decor and customer giveaways. Day one we combed through the shelves and piles of books to find those in our theme. We divided up the work to focus on the book keeping, decorating, and organizing (clearly type As: statistician, epidemiologist, program manager, and corporate strategist). As soon as our windows were staged - grateful for Al Capone biographies and Tom Clancy thrillers - locals greeted us with scones and invitations to tea. We handed out our themed-favors to kids, chatted with locals and tourists about their favorite reading genres, and managed to make a little bit of money for the store.
For the next six days our little group of bookshop staff balanced store hours with exploration across the surrounding region. We enjoyed our daily sips of lowlands scotch at the Bladnoch Distillery. We enjoyed tea with a retired Royal Navy sir and lady. And we learned and navigated much of the Scottish countryside, towns, and history with the reliable Historic Scotland app. We even got (too) close to the hairy coos, who tried to eat my dropped cell phone after a failed close up picture attempt.
The coos, much like everyone we met, seemed genuinely intrigued by us. Clearly we weren’t the first nor the last tourists to visit. But something about the town’s charm made us feel welcomed, valued, and genuinely appreciated for making this our vacation.
It’s been three+ years since that trip, yet I revisit the experience like a favorite book that I will reread over and over again. The setting was beautiful and the characters were charming. But as writers will attest, there are only a finite number of narrative plots in the world. So, too, are there a finite set of ways in which to ensure an organization’s success.
Empower your staff
Spotlight your team talents
Delight in customer experience
Embrace your broader stakeholders
Secure your technology
We were encouraged to run the shop how we saw best, with guiding parameters from the owner. This empowerment allowed us to each shine in our unique ways from creative marketing to accounting, further deepening our cooperation and camaraderie - essential in our down time as we navigated on the ‘wrong side’ of the road. We similarly found true joy in helping customers find their own vintage treasure, smiling just knowing that we played a small role in their vacation or retail experience. In addition to the customers, we learned that achieving our goals for a lively vacation required learning from and engaging with a much broader array of people who had a vested interest in the store’s contribution to the town. And in the pastures of modern corporations, remember to secure your technology from the threats of real-life hairy coos who threaten your communications data and infrastructure.
Our chapter at the Open Book was brief, but its impact is lasting proving that Dr. Seuss was right when he wrote, “the more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”