The BYU-Idaho Bookstore celebrated its 100-year anniversary last week by providing food, along with an assortment of prizes and activities for students each afternoon.
The celebration started Monday with birthday cake and food-eating contests. On Wednesday Olympic wrestling champion Rulon Gardner came for a book signing. Hot dogs and soda was the flavor for the day. Thursday brought the ‘cram it and jam it’ raffle where one student won a JanSport backpack and then was allowed 60 seconds to cram anything from the bookstore in the backpack. She won over $300 worth of supplies, said Doug Mason, bookstore manager.
Joan Diamond, bookstore employee who headed up much of last week’s activities, feels the bookstore centennial is “a terrific milestone” for this university.
What started out as a small, one-room bookstore in the original Jacob Spori Building, now employs an estimate of 60 employees who serve over 11,000 students annually,
“Not much about the bookstore’s history was known,” Mason said, “until a few years ago when an employee was assigned to search the library and find as much information as possible. After extensive searching, the earliest record of a bookstore was in 1905.”
The first bookstore was not even a self-service store until much later when the location was moved to a larger classroom. The Spori Building was home to the bookstore until around 1963 when a move to the Manwaring Center was decided. For 17 years, the area that now holds the games and arcades, housed the school’s bookstore.
In 1980, the store transitioned to its current location. Only four years ago renovations were done in the bookstore, allowing more efficient spacing.
The bookstore is an example of continual change at BYU-I.
“With the addition to the Manwaring Center beginning in 2007, we are looking forward to having more space for product students need,” Mason said.
Learning about the people who have sculpted the university is the most amazing aspect of this Centennial, Diamond said.
“Hats off to the founders of this university,” Diamond said. “Their lives were hard, and their perspectives were different than ours.”
The bookstore has found its way into the history of the school.
“Looking at pictures of class officers, or reading articles students wrote for the newspaper, has increased my appreciation for those who started this university in a single log cabin,” she said.
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