Author of For the Love of Books and founder of Juniper Books Thatcher Wine returns to talk with Zibby about his latest book, The Twelve Monotasks, which encourages readers to ditch their multitasking habits. The two discuss the finer points of what it means to monotask, how Zibby has incorporated it into her work ethic, and which chapters of this book have received the most positive feedback from readers. Thatcher also shares how he learned the power of monotasking firsthand as he battled cancer and why the pandemic actually helped companies like his.
Thatcher Wine, FOR THE LOVE OF BOOKS
Thatcher: I never set out to start a book business. Even when I started selling books, I didn't consider it to be a business, really. I really considered it to be a hobby that I enjoyed. I had fun going to estate sales, library sales, antique auctions, things like that, coming home with a bunch of books, describing them, figuring out if they were first editions, if they were signed, if there's some prominence to who had owned them before, and putting them up on the internet in the early days, roughly, of books going online. One thing led to another. A few years later, I was still buying books in larger and larger quantities. I'd hear about a bookstore going out of business. I'd go buy their inventory. These days, we have about 20,000 books in stock. The business really transformed over the years. It was about rare books and first editions back then, very antiquarian, the older the better. Then made a couple shift in the 2000s. Some people asked if I could curate a library for their house. A lightbulb went off. Maybe this could be my niche, curating collections for homeowners and hotel lobbies and things like that when they needed books. Eventually, it shifted to more and more new books and fewer used books and old books, but we still do some of both.