Pennie is a “true Seattleite,” born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. Pennie’s family loved books, paintings, and opera. She began her career as a book distributor at Pipeline Pacific before moving to Costco, where she has been since 1989. Pennie’s professional work gives her particular pride given that she has dyslexia. She also holds a B.A. in social work from the University of Washington.
Pennie loves traveling and delving into Renaissance art when she’s in Europe. She also enjoys cooking, gardening, and being entertained by her two dogs. She reads everything, from new authors to longtime favorites, and cookbooks to new nonfiction. What she loves most about her work is that she is constantly learning, whether it be about current events, hidden histories, or fascinating bits of trivia.
Pennie has served on the boards of the PNBA and the Red Cross and currently serves on the board of the King County Library System Foundation.
John is the son of an independent bookseller and founded Above the Treeline in 2002. Before founding Above the Treeline, he spent 10 years as a management consultant with A.T. Kearney.
The company’s first product, Treeline Analytics, was designed to help independent booksellers improve their inventory management decisions by better leveraging the wealth of information stored in their point-of-sale systems — thereby helping booksellers get “above the treeline.” The company was an early adopter of “software as a service,” an approach that has since become commonplace.
Leveraging the assets of Treeline Analytics and the trust it had built up in the market, John developed Edelweiss to allow publishers to stop printing tens of thousands of paper catalogs of new and already-published titles multiple times per year. Edelweiss has been the primary way that English language publishers communicate new title information to the professional book world for the last decade.
John is currently working on rolling out Edelweiss360, a mobile extension of Edelweiss that allows independent booksellers to efficiently create and send targeted messages to customers.
Journal Ad Deadline: Monday, June 7, 2021
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Have questions? Contact Adrienne Imprescia at or 212.836.1345.