[FRIAM] The last bookstore

[Steve Smith]

Jochen -

Independent and Used bookstores definitely took a hit, first from the
Big Boxes like Hastings and Barnes and Noble and then a double-whammy
from Amazon.   I don't know how many more went down because of
COVID...   We have a very serious local collection of used/independent
stores whose flagship locals might recognize:  Op Cit .    They have two
satellite shops in Taos and Las Vegas, NM.   The Taos shop is in the
location of another well loved/known independent/used shop known as Moby
Dickens... I cant remember the new name, but I think it is more
interesting than "Op Cit Taos".   The Las Vegas branch is called "Tome
on the Range".   

When the COVID shutdown made me want to order books instead of browsing
for them as I usually do (even if I subsequently order because the store
doesn't have them in stock) my instinct was to go straight to Amazon,
but I also knew that OpCit (for example) was surely suffering mightily
from no walk-in business for months at least.   Even though I don't like
doing phone transactions, I gave over and quickly discovered that they
were hyper efficient if I just looked the book up and sent them a
link...   trying to avoid (ab)using *other* commercial sites for this
(only to not buy from them) but rather using publisher references,
goodreads, magazine/blog reviews, etc. to get the front/back matter,
excerpts and even reviews that I might otherwise get while browsing.

This is all somewhat ironic since I *literally* had a short back and
forth with Bezos by e-mail in roughly 1995.   I was a long-time
customer/friend of the very successful indie bookstore in Los Alamos, R
Books... which thrived on a combination of a literate professional-class
population,  a varied but generally generous policy on LANL Staff
purchasing from local stores for reimbursement (especially during the
Tech Boom) and a visiting population of international professionals who
for distribution/tariff reasons were motivated to buy US
published/distributed books from R Books (including ordering through
them) and hand-carry or even ship (overseas book rate) home.   It seems
like Aussies were the most prominent for some reason...   touting the
well-respected chain of Bookstores there known as Dymocks(sp?).    I
think this had quite a bit to do with the British Commonwealth
protectionism for Commonwealth publishers, supporting UK/etc editions
being published in parallel with US editions of many titles... but of
course not *all*, thus the international purchasers at R Books.  

All this background to frame my conversation with Bezos...  I was
negotiating with R Books to open the empty shopspace next to them as a
coffee shop, bust open an archway or two between them and share the
floorspace and possibly staff... mitigating some of their risk for
adding a coffee shop, and lowering the logistics-to-entry for an
(righteous?) entrepreneurial activity.    I pinged Bezos on a whim,
suggesting to him that small, independent bookstores like R Books might
make good "fulfillment" partners...  so when you browse for a book on
Amazon (they weren't heavily into used, yet, and R Books was strictly
new as well), you might have been offered the option of picking it up
in-person immediately at a local indie for a small discount from retail
(indies were not discounting books then, except to clear stock) and then
have Amazon score a small "referral fee"  and the bookstore make a
small(er) profit, but slow the leak from walk-in to online.   There were
lots of potential problems with this idea... or nuanced details to work
out so that it wasn't actually aggravating the problem for the indies...
but Bezos' answer was simple: "we don't need you, you are a thing of the
past, we are going to revolutionize bookselling, get out of my way".   

To add insult to injury, it was perhaps 2 weeks later that the
negotiations with the landlord on the adjacent space went crazy when it
was publicly announced that Starbucks was moving in around the corner (a
different landlord) and it turned out, that the landlord's delays were
all about them expecting to land Starbucks in *another* of their
properties.   They continued to try to court us to open the shop as
planned once they lost the Starbuck's deal, but naturally a Starbucks
within a short walk did not bode well for a local coffee shop, even if
we did have books too!   We backed off and due to other complications of
similar enough kind, R Books shut down maybe 5 years later.   Salt in
the insulted injury included Starbucks selling NYT paper (national
contract) in a manner which undermined R books roughly 40 papers a day
that represented 40 loyal customers who dropped in every day (or week
for Sunday only) with the residual value of them as likely as not to
spot if not buy on the spot, their next book read.   R Books had to
pre-purchase all copies and on Sunday, for example a few leftover copies
could negate or reverse any profits they might have gotten, nevertheless
they continued it as "a service to the community".  Recently I tried
buying an NYT at that very Starbucks and was told "I don't think we
carry them anymore, I haven't seen one in a while".   Now folks in Los
Alamos have to (I guess) try for home delivery or travel to Santa Fe.  
I hear fro Donald that it is "failing" anyway...

A good 10 years later I found myself opening a bookstore in Santa Fe
with my partner, Suzanne.   She was a rabid bibliophile, eclipsing me in
both quantity and quality by magnitudes (2^n or 10^n, i'm not sure)...  
Our home and expanding storage sheds, trailer, etc.   were overflowing
and we decided to take a swing at selling them (maybe?) as fast as she
could collect them.    It was called Hunt and Gather... and was right
next to the Aztec Cafe in Santa Fe, opposite Double Take and was a
fairly popular hotspot for Suzanne's large entourage of friends and
acquaintances, as the shop doubled as an art-space presenting almost
exclusively book-arts exhibitions.   We only stayed afloat for 1 year,
pretty much just breaking even on expenses, but including a shop-girl
salary to my daughter who maintained the front desk about half-time so
Suzanne could take care of other business (allowing my daughter to
finish her Bachelors without working at a *different* mcJob that
year).   It engaged us with a wide range of other bookstore owners, both
local and those traveling the country doing their own hunting and
gathering!

I doubt I will have a formal bookstore running when you visit, but I
*do* have a full 2 tonnes of books stored in a covered trailer from that
era you could peruse!  I've pared my personal collection down to what a
"normal" bibliophile's house might have which means about 1/2 are in yet
another storage location!  Unfortunately *those* are the ones you would
more likely want to see!

I'd recommend a leisurely drive through the US (if you can afford the
time), stopping at the myriad small bookstores and even larger
chain-complexes still afloat.  Albuquerque, NM has a few stores,
including ( think, the last instance of a former small-network of shops
) Bound to be Read,  Denver has a complex of bookstores named Tattered
Cover, and Portland has the famous Powell's group.    Cody's in Berkeley
was a major destination until it closed (5 or more years ago?) and City
Lights in San Francisco is a must-visit.   There have to be dozens more
of that scale and of course thousands in small towns across our 48
continental states!

I hope you can and do make such a sojourn!

- Steve 

On 9/5/20 7:53 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> Do you think bookstores may die out? They have become rare here in
> Europe. 
>
> In L.A. there is a nice used bookstore named "The Last Bookstore"
> http://lastbookstorela.com
>
> When Biden has won and Covid is gone next year I would like to visit
> California, including L.A. and San Francisco, before the last
> bookstore is gone.
>
> -J.
>
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