We sold our first Blind Date With A Book on October 9th, 2014. In celebration of our 10th anniversary, we hosted a “Blind Date With a Book Speed Dating Night” with never-before-seen Blind Date books made with books from the high-demand bookcase.
A Blind Date With A Book or a mystery book are books that are wrapped in brown craft paper so you cannot see the cover. On the outside of the books that were wrapped for our “Speed Dating Night,” we wrote the genre of the book found inside. A variety of genres were selected such as thriller, fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, historical romance, romance, Nordic crime, and mystery. Of the 16 wrapped books, 7 were written by local authors.
The opening sentence of a book is very important; it must grab the reader’s attention, enticing them to continue past the first page and keep reading. The first sentence also allows the author to showcase their writing style, introduce their main character, or establish an event that upsets the status quo. For our Blind Date with a Book Speed Dating night, the opening line or two served as the Blind Date’s “Pick-Up” line.
The format of the night was as follows;
• Participants were given 30 seconds to flip over the Blind Date in front of them, read the Blind Date’s genre and pick-up line, and decide if they were interested before the bell rang. If they were interested in the date, they brought it back to their seat and a new Blind Date with a Book replaced the one removed.
• If they were not interested in that particular date they just flipped it back over, for the next person.
• This continued until all participants chose their date for the night.
• Once everyone picked their date they unwrapped them and we took pictures of the lucky matches. Extra Blind Dates were available for purchase after the event was over.
Everyone had a great time! We had a participant travel all the way in from beyond the airport and one travelled in by bus from Halifax for this special occasion.
We had several people ask if we were going to this again and the answer is YES. Save the date, we will be hosting another Speed Dating night on Thursday, February 13th for Galentine’s Day. Advanced registration will be required so that we know our numbers. The event will be posted on Facebook in January.
