Susan Avery, manager & co-owner of Ariel Booksellers in New Paltz

Some will scoop up a best-seller or two at Walmart or the grocery store; others will type furtive Internet orders at three in the morning. But many—the ones who like holding a book in their hands and seeing what else might be on the same shelf—will head to their neighborhood bookstores.

"December is utterly lunatic," says Susan Avery, co-owner of New Paltz's Ariel Booksellers. "Everybody needs books by tomorrow, or yesterday. The store's rhythm suddenly jumps from largo to molto allegro." She sounds richly content. December is Ariel's best-selling month.

Avery's colleague Dick Hermans, who owns Oblong Books' twin locations in Millerton and Rhinebeck, agrees. "December is a gas," he says.  "It's always the busiest time of year, and also the most fun."

Hermans estimates that the last six weeks of the calendar year provide 20 percent of his annual sales, "so we can be a little more reckless about what we order." Shoppers may be more reckless as well, making multiple purchases under pressure of filling their gift lists.

Ariel Booksellers is a lively emporium wrapped around a Starbucks franchise on the corner of Plattekill and Main Street. A few weeks before "Black Friday" (the day after Thanksgiving, when the holiday retail frenzy takes off like a rocket), it's already humming with customers. Two clerks work the registers at a checkout counter laden with pocket-sized impulse-buying temptations.

Moving around the floor, a shopper takes in a display case of calendars, spin-a-rack carousels packed with journals and bookmarks, a gondola laden with gag gifts (Freud finger puppets, laptop Buddhas) and a boggling array of toys. Oh yes, and books. Nearly 25,000 of them.

There are eye-catching table displays for Art Spiegelman's graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers and Francisco Goldman's just-released The Divine Husband. A massive shelf unit for hardcovers, known in the store as The Whale, stands at a commanding diagonal. One side displays New Arrivals, the other Featured Titles; many flaunt Staff Recommendation notecards or Signed Copy stickers. A compartmented cardboard stand hawks "paperback dumps" (bulk orders of popular titles) beneath the unlikely duo of Jon Stewart and George Washington, side by side.

Independent booksellers like Ariel and Oblong perform a prodigious matchmaking service, which intensifies during the high-pressure holiday season. Some customers bring lists, some browse for hours till they find the right book. But how does that book find its way to The Whale? With hundreds of thousands of titles published each year, how do booksellers decide which to order and where in the store they should go?

Avery opens an unobtrusive door, backed with greeting cards, into the store's backstage. In a tiny office enlivened by a Yogasana postures chart and a screensaver slide show of Venice, she pores over publishers' catalogues, trade publications like Publishers Weekly, and countless e-mails from colleagues with book buzz. "We start placing orders for Christmas in August," she says. "We're always reading six months in advance. I read the new Philip Roth in galleys last spring."

Galleys are uncorrected proofs, some bound in plain cardstock, others (called ARCs, or advance Reader Copies) with cover art. Several months before a book's publication date, its publishers send press releases and galleys to potential reviewers and buyers. Most small presses do this by mail, but larger publishing houses have a staff of sales representatives who visit bookstores in person. "Having a personal relationship with a sales rep makes all the difference," says Avery. "They steer us towards books they know we'll like—plus they bring tons of goodies."

Rebecca Fitting has been a sales rep with Random House for five years. Her territory stretches from the Hudson Valley through Albany, the Berkshires and parts of Vermont; she works exclusively with independent booksellers, as do approximately 60 of her colleagues on Random House's 250-plus sales force. She describes herself as "the eyes and ears" of her marketplace, acting as a liaison between stores and publishers.

Random House is the industry giant. Its many divisions produce around 3,000 books a year, split between hardcover, trade paperback, mass market, and audio books. Three times a year, Fitting and her colleagues attend in-house sales conferences, bringing home synopses, excerpts, and selected full manuscripts for that season's list. Fitting peruses these, identifying a core list of key titles to hand-sell. She then visits each of her stores, presenting up to 350 new books in a session.

"Sales meetings are very enjoyable," says Dick Hermans. "We have a rapport with a sales rep like Rebecca—she knows our store, our community of customers." Oblong's strong suits are literary fiction and acoustic music. (Hermans hosts a weekly folk/bluegrass/Celtic show on WKZE.)

Ariel's strengths are diverse, says Avery. "We sell books about the outdoors and nature, fitness, yoga, Eastern philosophies, politics. And we're very strong in biography and literary fiction." In the holiday season, however, all bets are off about what people will buy.  So stores try to second-guess the demand, stockpiling titles they think will sell best as gifts. This year's bets are on Rizzoli's Historic Houses of the Hudson Valley, The Complete Book of New Yorker Cartoons, the Spiegelman book, and Bob Dylan's Chronicles.

Susan Avery's office adjoins the loading dock, where shipments arrive twice a day via UPS. The entire staff seems to enjoy unpacking boxes and seeing what treasures await. "Thirty years ago, as a new bookseller, I wanted to take everything home—I was like a chocolate addict working in a candy factory," says Avery, who still reads up to four books a week.

As books are unpacked, they're logged into a computer and assigned a "section code" by category. Shelving books properly is an art, and certain titles will be moved from one part of the store to another to see if it boosts their sales. Every time a customer buys a book, it's subtracted by computer at the sales desk, so there's up-to-the-minute inventory control.

Just beyond the loading dock is what Avery terms "our very sad returns department." One of the grim realities of today's corporate-mergerized book business is that titles which don't sell quickly don't last long on the shelf. "Books have the shelf life of yogurt now," Avery says, "The media conglomerates don't care about literary fiction. It's all bottom line. But we're not selling meatballs here. Certain books may start slowly, but build word of mouth."

Word of mouth is where independent booksellers shine. Ariel's 14 full- and part-time employees are all avid readers. They're encouraged to take home new titles and write up their favorites for Staff Recommendation cards and for Ariel's newsletter. Salespeople build relationships with regular customers, tailoring their suggestions to individual tastes. "Our staff lives here too," says Dick Hermans. "We're one of the links in people's community chain."

Both Oblong and Ariel host numerous author booksignings and other events, often attended by dozens of fans, though few have the crowd-control problems of Ariel's stroke-of-midnight Harry Potter release parties. "We were picking squashed jellybeans off the floor for days," moans Avery. "Never give sugar to kids after midnight."

Still, she is heartened by the Harry Potter phenomenon, with its promise of a new generation of bibliophiles. "I still think books are the best value for your dollar in the entertainment world. Books are forever. We're never going to be reading off a screen. You want to curl up in a chair with the light over your shoulder, a fireplace going. A book smells good, it feels good—it's a tactile experience holding it, turning the pages, feeling the weight of it on your lap. It's an incredible romance."

Hermans adds, "If people want their villages to be vital and to include a bookstore, they should patronize that bookstore, or they'll have no choices left but the mall. We have great independent bookstores in the Hudson Valley, and people should visit them all."