Book Shopping in the Pacific Northwest
- By Karen Wright
Karen Wright shares a moment with a fellow reader in Sydney, BC.
By Karen Wright
My husband and I finally got a chance to take a real vacation where we could do whatever we wanted for two weeks, our first in about 20 years. Of course we also needed to do our annual book buy for the shop, but we think book shopping is actually fun. Or at least, I do, and he puts up with me pretty well.
Let me just say this about book shopping. Most of you readers are related in some way to the book business so you already know a lot about this. You are aware that it has become increasingly difficult for a knowledgeable book seller to find good, high quality books at a price at which one can make a profit. If you are online AND bricks and mortar, the overhead is pretty high, thus you need to get really good deals on books or you can't stay in the business. Even if you are just online, you pay a pretty penny to ABE or Alibris, or eBay (which I don't think is very good media for selling books). So, if you find a good, high quality book for $15.00 at a book store, you can bet that it is probably pretty close to the high end retail price. If you buy it for more than a 20-25% discount, the cost of gas, the cost of utilities for your shop, and the hefty 20-30% you have to pay your internet service provider and your ABE or Alibris percentage more than eat up any profit. That means, to make a profit, you basically have to get the book for about $7.00 to make a profit of $2.00-$3.00. I get pretty annoyed when I see a book that is, at the least, worth $15.00 or $16.00 for sale on the net for $2.00 or $3.00. There is some consolation in that many of these cheap books are ex-library.
Anyway, whining aside, we left our little home, dogs & shop in Virginia City, Nevada, and headed through Susanville, California, where we discovered a nice little book store, Margie's Book Nook on Main St. I found a few reasonably priced books and she gave us a small dealer's discount. We headed to Yreka, California, and spent a couple of days at my husband's brother's farm near Fort Jones. We hit all the bookstores in Yreka, but they were pricey and disinclined to give us any discount until we found The Hospice Thrift Shop on Miner St., which was a tiny little store. They had quite a few overpriced remainders, but I did find a few nice books at quite reasonable prices and the woman was willing to give a dealer discount. There was also a pretty good thrift store on the main drag in old town and we picked up two boxes there. We were off to a good start!
|
Book Shopping in the Pacific Northwest
- By Karen Wright
Book town Sydney-by-the-Sea in British Columbina, Canada
We had brought 12 boxes of good books for trade purposes. Every year or two I take good quality, miscellaneous titles that don't fit in with our inventory to Powell's in Portland, so the next day we struck out for Portland, which is a fairly short drive from Yreka. It took us a long time, however, as we hit every thrift store, bookstore and junk shop along the way. It was rather disappointing as many of these places simply don't have the good, high quality books that they used to have. However, we did mine a few gems. A word to the wise, don't try to find a motel in Salem, Oregon, late in the evening. We ended up driving all the way to Beaverton and got there very late, but we found a motel immediately and crashed.
We lived in Portland for seven years and have lots of friends there. Everything was lovely and green, the flowers were still blooming everywhere (that is the land of roses, after all) and we ate several great meals at our favorite old restaurants. There is almost no end to the book and thrift stores in Portland, but with our prior knowledge of which ones had the best deals, we found a few more boxes of books.
We hit Powell's first with our trade books and were quite disappointed to find that they are not taking nearly as many books as they used to, and that they are not paying much for what they do take. I walked away with about three boxes, as opposed to my usual 10-12 boxes. I think it will be the last time I take any books there to trade. We stopped at Cameron's Books on SW 3rd downtown. Cameron's has been there for all eternity, I think, and it is funky and not too tidy, but still fun to rummage through. They took a few more of my leftover trade books and we found about half a box of good gardening books for very reasonable prices. One little jewel of a store in Portland that many folks don't know about is in North Portland on N. Lombard St. It is called Paperbacks, etc., but has a very nice hardcover, non-fiction section in the back where we picked up several good art technique books and cookbooks. Mark and Janet are very nice folks and he gave us a generous dealer discount. One of the better thrift stores in Portland is the William Temple Thrift in the northwest part of town. They often have some good books and at reasonable prices. In addition, there is a Goodwill on NW Burnside that usually has some good stuff, though this time was disappointing.
|
Book Shopping in the Pacific Northwest
- By Karen Wright
none
After several enjoyable days visiting pals in Portland, we were off to Washington State, a somewhat unknown region for us to book shop. We hit every second hand and thrift store along the way until we cut off at Olympia and went north to Port Angeles where we spent the night and part of the next day. We found one okay bookstore, Odyssey Books on West Front, but by and large the books in the thrift and book stores were high priced, the owners were completely disinclined to give us a discount, and the selection was poor. If you are ever in Port Angeles, however, we found a restaurant called Michael's Divine Dining, and they weren't kidding, it was divine.
The next day we went by ferry to Victoria. The ride was spectacular with long vistas of mist-shrouded islands, not too many people on the boat, warm temperatures, and just generally very beautiful. Now I know you probably won't believe me, but we made the whole two week trip without seeing any rain. It was misty and a bit foggy in the San Juan Islands, but no rain, sunny, and 70-80 degrees. We had taken our wooly sweaters and fortunately, some shorts and T-shirts as well or we'd have had to buy a new wardrobe. Astonishing!
We arrived in Victoria in the afternoon, went to our charming little 1918 hotel, checked in, and went walking. Of course, we had to go to the Empress Hotel for drinks in the Kipling Room. It is one of the grandest of the turn-of-century grand hotels in Canada. Besides beds of gorgeous flowers all over the place, there were two amazing and very rare weeping sequoia trees in front of the hotel that must have been at least 100 feet tall. They resembled very furry giraffes in that they were long and thin, leaned a bit in the center so as to appear to be moving in the breeze as would a giraffe, and the crowns of the trees had the shape of a head. The branches were long enough to make the trees appear to have on fur coats.
We wandered around Victoria, found a couple of book stores, but didn't have much luck until we went to Value Village, a very nice, clean (everything is in Canada) thrift store with a great selection of good, high quality books. It is nationwide and called Savers in Nevada. They give seniors 30% off on Tuesdays and we just happened to be there on Tuesday, and we just happen to be seniors, so yippee! We ended up with about four more boxes from there. On the advice of the very pleasant clerk, we decided to go to Sidney, a "Book Town" of about 11,000 people which is 20 km up the road from Victoria. Oh goody, goody, a book town! Most of you probably know that a Book Town is a small rural town or village in which second-hand and antiquarian bookshops are concentrated; for instance Hay-on-Wye in Wales or Wigtown in Scotland. Most Book Towns have been developed in villages of historic interest or scenic beauty. Since Beacon wharf in Sidney is the launching point for the Sidney Island Ferry and we were taking the ferry the next day to Bellingham, Washington, we spent a morning in Sidney and found the town extraordinarily friendly.
|
Book Shopping in the Pacific Northwest
- By Karen Wright
none
Sidney-By-The Sea has a charming little downtown area with 8 or 9 bookstores and an incredible number of thrift shops that, despite the number of book dealers in town, had a lot of pretty good books. I talked at some length with Ginny Porter, Manager of Beacon Hill Books and asked her how Sidney had become a Book Town.
She noted that the Tanner family, who owned a large bookstore in town, had always had a dream to create a Book Town such as Hay-on-Wye in Sidney. The area was not particularly economically viable at the time, and they felt that they could make Sidney a "destination" for book addicts and book buyers. It seems to have worked. They encouraged others, and soon more and more book dealers moved there and opened shops. "It is a passive industry," said Ms. Porter, "and it has helped the economy immeasurably." Each spring, Sidney has a 25% off all books in town sale which brings many book buying visitors. We found Sidney to be incredibly book-buyer friendly and every used book store offered a discount. The car was beginning to sag with the weight of our books and we had a week to go!
Our next stop was The Butchart Gardens, a 55-acre garden on the Butchart family estate just down the road from Sidney. It would take a whole 'nother article to give you the tour we took, but suffice it to say it was breathtaking, and the flowers, trees and shrubs were phenomenal, considering the whole place was once a quarry formed by the removal of limestone used in the making of cement. In the background, peeking through fifty or seventy-five foot tall trees, a tall kiln stack is all that remains of the cement plant.
The next day we took a long, leisurely ferry ride through the San Juans to Bellingham, Washington. We have old sailing pals in Bellingham or I have to say, we wouldn't have stayed very long. The book dealers we met were generally pretty cranky and the mantra we heard time and time again in Washington was "we don't give dealer discounts because our prices are so low." Sorry, guys and gals, but your prices were not so low; they were, actually, in general, pretty high. Now I have a rule, because I understand how difficult it is to make it in the book business, that I give all walk-in book dealers who have some sort of identification, a 20% discount on any book that I can afford to discount. If I pay $100.00 for a book and I'm selling it for $120.00, I can't afford to discount it, but most of the time I can and do. So, when I go to a store, I politely introduce myself, ask if they give a dealer discount, and if they decline, I check a few prices to see if, indeed, they are so low-priced that I won't need a discount to make a profit. One dealer in Bellingham - Henderson Books - had one of the nicest, best organized, best stocked bookstores I have ever seen. They had a plethora of high quality, non-fiction titles. But, he actually said that he not only wouldn't give a discount but that he "didn't want his books to go out of Washington, anyway." All I could do was stare at him in astonishment, thank him and walk out the door.
|
Book Shopping in the Pacific Northwest
- By Karen Wright
none
We stopped in Seattle on the way home, planning to spend a couple of days, but the traffic was fiendish and there were so many people, that we just shook our heads in weariness. Seattle is a trip on its own, I think. We were headed back to Portland, where we had left the books we bought the week before, when we made one more stop for iced tea in a small town called Mt. Vernon, Washington. We almost didn't go into the used bookstore as we were pretty well burned out with cranky Washingtonian book dealers and book shopping in general, but we were sure glad we did. Eaton's Books in Mt. Vernon is a used bookstore with friendly owners, a good selection of books, reasonable prices, and a good dealer discount. We loaded up three more boxes of books and zipped on down the highway to Portland.
There is a really great company in Portland, McMennamin's. They buy up historic building sites and reuse them for restaurants, B&Bs, hotels and theaters where you can eat a burger and have their own label wine or beer while you watch a movie. There are a number of them in Oregon and they have expanded into Washington. On the way back to Portland, we stopped one final time in Centralia, Washington, to have a glass of wine and a snack. What a fun little town; lots of restoration and rebuilding going on. Lo and behold, directly across the street from the McMennamin's restored hotel there, we saw a sign on the street "Book Sale, 50% off". Oh dear, I knew we were in trouble. We made a beeline for the place, went up a flight of steps and walked into a bookstore called Tilikum Books & Bindery. Geary Lockhard is the bookseller, a cheerful and pleasant gentleman who runs the bookstore, and his wife, Ronda Lockhard, owns the bindery and has been repairing and binding quality books for some years. If you need a binder, here is their email address, tilikumbb@hotmail.com. Well, you can guess, we came out of that store with about four more boxes of books and Blanche, our Subaru, groaned when we stowed them in back.
This time we meant it, no more book shopping. We went to Portland, stayed the night with pals, had dim sum for lunch the next day and headed home via a visit to friends near Cedarville, California, where our pal Michael has a bookstore called Floating Island Books. Next morning it was a short, four-hour drive home. It was a great trip; we took our time, had lots of fun, saw lots of gorgeous country, visited with good pals, and got home rested and relaxed. But then, we had to unload the car!
|