The Pleasant Pheasant saw dozens of customers visit the Woodland bookstore Saturday to support the business and to find a “golden ticket” for a year’s supply of audiobooks during Independent Bookstore Day.
Emily Reinhart co-owns the store – located at 1059 Court St. STE 109 – with her husband, Elliot, and explained that the bookstore gets support through Libro.fm, an employee-owned corporation that shares profits from audiobook purchases with a customer’s chosen bookstore.
“The way it works is local bookstores get kickbacks,” Reinhart explained. “We don’t have to stock the inventory but we bring the business away from bigger corporate schemes. It’s a great way to support us.”
The golden ticket was hidden somewhere in the store and whoever found it got a year’s worth of free audiobooks from Libro.fm.
Reinhart noted that this along with occasional book signings or read-aloud events has slowly helped cement the bookstore’s place in the community since it opened in October 2022. She added that the bookstore has been trying to hold at least one adult and one kids event every quarter which often means bringing in local authors.
“We’ve done anything from World War II to crime and detective novels with Capital Crimes over in Sacramento,” she remarked. “We have had several different children’s authors do read-alouds and we’ve done fundraisers with Woodland Parent Nursery.
“We’ve had immense support from the community and we’re getting to know our readers.”
William Cuthbertson moved to Woodland three months ago and is a librarian at UC Davis. He heard about the bookstore before moving here and was excited to check it out.
“I came from Chico where they don’t have any independent bookstores so it was something I was really excited about,” he emphasized.
Cuthbertson explained that he worked at college and independent bookstores in Salt Lake City, Utah before getting into librarianship. However, most of them went out of business because of the impact Barnes and Noble, Borders and Amazon had on them.
He appreciates independent bookstores because they provide “uncorporatized access” to books “that are important to people based on different experiences and different backgrounds.”
“It’s so important to have a place that really gets how to build a community through shared stories and lived experiences,” he stated. “It’s what you want to have in your community.”
Cuthbertson also noted that although he works at a library, he doesn’t check out many books because he prefers to buy them at local bookstores.
Furthermore, the bookstore also held a Saturday morning book launch and signing event for local author Rachael Freeman Long’s book “See You Later, Alligator.”
Reinhart knows Long from working in the agriculture sector with her noting that Long helped implement hedgerows, cover crops and other conservation measures at a farm she was working at.
Long read the book to a group of children teaching them how to live with wildlife by explaining how they perceive the world.
“We’re so visual that we look at things from our viewpoint, but a lot of times animals are not perceiving the world that way,” Long stressed. “Mosquitoes are honing in on carbon dioxide, bats are foraging via echolocation and alligators are perceiving the world through sensory glands. If we can better understand how animals are sensing our world, then we can better work for coexisting together for everybody’s benefit, animals and people alike.”
Long said she’s working on another book in The Magic Tunnel series that focuses on the importance of bees and pollinators.
“One of the reasons that I’m writing this story is that I don’t think people realize how important bees are for agriculture here in our community,” she said. “They’re really important for pollinating a lot of our crops like Almonds and seed crops like sunflowers, carrot seed and onion seed.”
Long is a UC Davis Cooperative Extension Advisor, Emeritus and a UC Davis and UC Berkeley graduate. She has worked in agriculture for over 30 years in Yolo County focusing on habitat restoration on farmlands with a special interest in looking for ways to share the world with wildlife.
If interested in reading Long’s book, visit The Pleasant Pheasant or zamorastories.com.
