Goin' South
- By Karen Wright
Albuquerque bookseller Jerry Lane in his shop.
By Karen Wright
Greetings from the road. We always celebrate the month of February and our favorite holiday, Valentine's Day, by taking off to a warmer part of the world. By February, we're pretty darned sick of winter up here on our mountain top. This year we decided to go visit friends in the southern part of the U.S. As it turns out, it's colder here, with the humidity, than it was in Northern Nevada!
Another pal in Biloxi, Mississippi asked my husband, the master boat carpenter, to do some interior woodwork on his boat, which was seriously trashed during Hurricane Katrina, so we'll be there in March and in the next two months, I'll impart some of our experiences. We'll be spending a month in Katrina country, so I will also do some follow-up on my earlier articles about Katrina vs. booksellers.
We left our home town of Virginia City four days later than we had hoped so we didn't really stop anywhere except to eat, sleep and let Ginger, the wonder dog, out for a sniff and a snack. We sped down highway 95 which has a speed limit of 70 mph which we stayed within, but we were often passed as if we were standing still. We stayed one night in Beatty, Nevada, and ate bad casino food for dinner. Beatty is three-fourths of the way to Las Vegas on the south end of the "Red Light Highway". One will be driving along admiring the solitary, elegant serenity of southern Nevada and suddenly there will be a red beacon and a gaudy, flashing neon sign advertising "The Playmate Ranch" or "Dorothy's Day and Night" (".... if you're old or mean or ugly, you'll have fun if you got the money," from a song by Will Rose, a Nevada song writer.)
As we cruised the desert on the way to our first night's stop, we passed the gov'mnt gunnery range where they were strafing the sand along the highway; not close enough to be too nerve wracking, but close enough to get our attention. Next we passed the yucky Yucca Mountain radiation dump and shortly thereafter breezed through Las Vegas.
We had not been through Vegas for probably twenty years, and the growth was staggering. There were a zillion ticky tacky houses that look as though some giant had vomited them out onto the beautiful desert landscape. You could tell that in fifteen years or so they would be falling-apart slums. Since we had to be in Albuquerque the next day, we decided to do a bookstore search in Vegas on the way back to Nevada in April. I don't really hold out a lot of hope.
We stayed in Flagstaff, Arizona the next night. We arrived too late to do any book shopping or interviewing but had dinner at a recommended place called The Cottage. It was vastly overrated, heavily saucy French cuisine and way too pricey for what we got, so we won't go there again. Flagstaff is a college town so there should be some pretty decent bookstores there; we'll put that on the "Come Back Through" list.
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Goin' South
- By Karen Wright
Booksellers in Albuquerque.
We hot-footed it to Albuquerque the next morning and arrived at our friend's wonderful house where we took a much needed break from the road and got oriented a bit. Albuquerque, according to our friend, was just voted one of the cleanest cities in the country. The architecture is primarily adobe and it has a terrific cultural community in which our friends are quite involved. Two of our kids live in Albuquerque; our grown daughter is about to graduate from University of New Mexico.
So where, we asked our friends who read a LOT, is the best bookstore? They gave us a whole list of the town's bookstores, but recommended we make our first foray to The Book Stop on Nob Hill. We called the owner, Jerry Lane, and he kindly offered to take us to coffee and put up with my tape recorder. Jerry is so typical of the really good bookmen I have known! He has been in the business for almost thirty years and knows his way around the crazy book business. In those years, he has moved six times and is getting ready to move again, just down the street, for the seventh time. The building in which The Book Stop is housed is being renovated for yet another spa.
Jerry's store is like most of our stores; so many books, so little space! And his books are high quality from mid to lower price all the way up to some wonderfully scarce stuff with a nice collection on Western History (well, he is in Albuquerque, after all).
I asked Jerry how he got into the book business. He told us that the Albuquerque store was related to one of the same name in Tucson which was owned for twenty-five years by his partner, Lori Allen. She sold the Tucson Book Stop to her employees and retired to California. Jerry and Lori were friends in the 1970s and he never finished college or had a specific career goal in mind so he and Lori opened the Albuquerque Book Stop and pulled about 10,000 books out of the Tucson store to start up.
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Goin' South
- By Karen Wright
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"It grew willy nilly for the next five to ten years," said Jerry, "but with this last generation the book business in Albuquerque has blossomed and now there are a half dozen reasonably big, well organized stores and people are getting used to us. Now, all of us are going through this next change, whatever it is." I asked him if he meant the Internet. "The Internet and increasing rents in urban areas," he said. "We are generally immune to the Barnes and Noble thing. A really good book to us is one that continues to sell year after year as opposed to selling 50 copies in a month."
Jerry noted that "The beauty of the book business is that there is no one right way to do it. If you find sought after books for your regular customers they will keep coming back. This is a fairly large area, about 500,000 people here, but about 200-300 people pay all of our bills every month. They use places like this for recreation regardless of what sells on the Internet. They enjoy the dust and the mold and the banter, and in that way I think there will always be stores like ours. The Internet has stolen those people from us that used to come to us by default because they didn't have anywhere else to turn for a used book, now they just ask their secretaries to get on Amazon and they get their book in two days. And that's all right. The flip side of that is access to customers for specialized books. It used to be that if we got a really scarce book like a $200 book on Stage Designs of the 19th Century we had to spend a fair amount of time to figure out what it was worth unless you spent the $2000 a year on an ABA dealer catalog. Now all that reference material is there on the Net. The market is there, it doesn't matter what happened last year.
"The market is there online every day for an amazing amount of stuff. In a way, there is a real irony to it. In the old days, the real cavaliers of the business were the specialists. They could come in and shop a store like mine, buy really weird books, take them home, and put them in a catalog, use a specialized mailing list and make a good living at it. But now, the entry level to the trade is so minimal and reference is so accessible that people who specialize are getting squeezed out. If we get a $200 book on stage design, we put it online and the next day the three people in North America who care about it see it there and buy it."
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Goin' South
- By Karen Wright
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We talked about finding books; how hard it is and how to price. He knew a book dealer in Kansas City who used to buy books from him in Albuquerque once a year. He used to buy strange things and be pleased with them. Now, he says it is almost impossible to buy anything on the road because even if he's never seen anything like it before, and he thinks it's a $20 book, he gets online and there are dozens of them and they start at $3.50 and go, maybe, to $10. His overall book adage is that it is a sad statement that we [independent booksellers] have become little more than warehouses for Barnes and Noble."
We talked about using Alibris, Amazon or ABE. He felt Alibris seemed a little bit more professional in general and that they took 2% less commission from their sellers.
We talked about book fairs and old school booksellers. Jerry is good friends with Robert and Dorothy Emerson; very knowledgeable, old-time booksellers. "One night I was in the Emersons' booth and watching all the dealers go around looking at different books. One buyer looked around for a long while, handled a book three or four times, and then turned to Dorothy and said "Can't you do a little better on this?" Dorothy, who was very old school; sensible haircut, sensible shoes and a wool suit, stepped up into his face like a basketball player taking a charge; nose to nose, and said 'Well, the thing is, Robert gives a great deal of thought to pricing the books, and if we changed them, it would somehow imply that...he was wrong!' And then she hard stared at him."
I noted that I had learned a lot about the book business from working at Powell's Books, but learned more about books and pricing from my friend, J.B. at Eureka Books in California. Also, I learned a good deal about books, pricing, points, and the like from John Dunning in Denver. We agreed that there is a huge difference between knowing books and knowing the book business. Knowledgeable booksellers are getting scarcer and scarcer.
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Goin' South
- By Karen Wright
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To close our conversation, Jerry told me a great story about a gentleman of his acquaintance who had written a memoir of his life. The man enjoyed talking to his public so he leased a tiny little shop and filled the shelves with his single memoir. Then he would sit out front and talk with people about the One Book Bookstore, and occasionally he would sell one. One day he was talking to a family; a husband and wife and kids, and he said "You might like to buy a copy of my book", and the man said, "You know we were here a couple of years ago, and we bought a copy of your book and it was fascinating. But that was fifteen years ago, and surely you've had some interesting things happen since then, you should write another book."
The author looked at the man, for a minute and said, "Well, you know, I've considered it, but I don't know if I could handle a second store!"
And with that little bit of bookman's humor, we terminated our lovely interview and the next day, went on down the road. Signing off in Natchez, Mississippi; more next month, y'all.
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