So You Want to Open Your Own Used Bookstore?

Getting started was the easiest part. In the spring of 1990, I was living in Connecticut After finding a space in Florence to rent, I set out to acquire a lot of books fast to add to my own substantial collection.

In two months time I haunted more than dozen Connecticut library book sales and bought hundreds and hundreds of volumes that I thought belonged in any decent bookstore.

The goal was to amass 4,000 to 5,000 volumes in order to get started. Cabinetmaker Peter Dellert of Southampton built some book cases and by August, 1990, I opened Bookends at 93 Main St., Florence. We had only enough books for the first floor even though there were two floors above, into which we eventually expanded.

I got a a big break that summer when by the circumstance of family relationships, the legendary literary critic Alfred Kazin gave me 15 or 20 cartons of review copies from his personal collection, which added a little tone to my modest enterprise.

The romantic notion of the used bookseller is that he or she spends most of the time reading, only occasionally dusting a few books or shelving some new arrivals. In truth, there is a good deal of physical labor required in the hauling and shelving of books, and the relentless quest to find and buy more and better books.

As with any delayed vocation, there is much that you can not learn in a hurry. You gain experience and knowledge by trial and error.

For example, when I first opened the store seasoned book scouts and wily book dealers swooped down to buy my best books at very low prices. These were my mistakes and a dealer with specialized knowledge and a life-long apprenticeship could capitalize on my ignorance.

Ten years later, they still have a knowledge of books that I will never possess, and I accept that reality. I rely on my gut feeling and personal taste in buying and stocking books, although I admit to have learned quite a few things in the last decade.

In the editing process, you stock books for readers, high-brow and low, for collectors, for specialists and generalists. You offer cheap paperback mysteries and science fiction, more expensive hard-cover books and you never can acquire enough books that have merit, that simply belong on the shelves. That’s the idiosyncratic part - how each of us defines merit. No computer books, no New Age, no romances, no Cliff Notes, no Reader’s Digest condensed books. The key is to keep out the junk, don’t become the waste management guy for people who can’t bear to throw away a book, however ratty.

Eventually my 4,000 to 5,000 books grew to 35,000 or 40,000 volumes, and I was joined in the enterprise by Jane and Austen, two black cats.

 Unlike a new bookstore which can return unsold books to the publisher for credit, I own each of my books in perpetuity. A scarey thought.

A common question is where do I get my books, which is the challenge and the creative aspect of the business. You hustle, you go where there might be good books at affordable (cheap) prices - library sales, tag sales, auctions, other book stores, and once you have a store people bring in lots and lots of books they want to sell, unwanted by them and (often by me), providing a steady influx of stock.

Best of all is being invited into the attics, basements and garages of people who are selling their house, or moving a parent into an apartment, or people who are leaving town. These are where the gems can reside, the long out-of-print books that are much in demand.

How do I price the books? Eventually that becomes instinctive, depending on the cost of the book, its intrinsic merit, its condition or scarcity. There are price guides and on-line information for books you have not seen before, but such research is time consuming. So, I rely on my instincts. Sometimes they are wrong.

A year ago, I ought a biography of James Madison at the South Hadley library sale for $1, put it on-line for $12.50, sold it at that price only to get a flurry of other inquires, some buyers willing to pay up to $200 for the book and one copy of it listed at $700 on the Internet.

Big deal. I failed to sell the book for the top dollar. You sustain a business by consistency, buying and selling books at reasonable prices, not expecting to buy endless numbers of scarce books for 50 cents and selling them each for $500.

Can you make a living running a used book store? That, of course, depends on your expectations. In my 10 years I’ve bought all the books I wanted, paid all my bills, put some money aside and had money left over at the end of each year, or made a profit if you will. It’s a very competitive business, especially in the Northampton-Amherst area where there are some dozen used book stores, although the concentration of stores has its advantages as well. Could I put three children through college on the income a used bookstore generates? Absolutely not. But then without two incomes we could not have put three children through college on what I was earning as a newspaper editor.

The reality is that about 2 percent of the nation’s population of 240 million buys all the books sold - new and used - that’s a tiny market but fortunately many of our regular customers are big consumers of books - this is what keeps most booksellers in business.

Like all retailing, we are undergoing a sea change with the onrush of E-commerce through the Internet. Books are almost the perfect commodity to be bought and sold on line.

Explosive Internet sales have come along at just the right time - they represented about 40 percent of my sales last year, up from zero percent three years ago. The original goal was to put 200 of our 35,000 books on line. Since then we have posted more than 16,000 titles on the Internet and sold 7,500 to 8,000 of those.

We are mailing books to customers all over the country and around the world. For example, not long ago in the span of a couple of days we sold a volume on Baroque and Rococco art to a student in Lawrence, Kansas; shipped "The Planning and Design of Bridges", to Rochester, N.Y.; a biography of Jean Paul Marat went to Milwaukee; Jacques Maritain’s "Art and Scholasticism" went to Otterville, Ontario; and the biography of Branwell Bronte was mailed to Ft. Collins, Colo. An inscribed copy of Susan Minot short stories was purchased by a customer in Westbury, N. Y. , a two-volume edition of Henry James "The Golden Bowl" went to Jackson, Calif.; a biography of "Byron, the Flawed Angel" went to Neuchetel, Switzerland; and someone in Hoshio, Japan bought a small volume by Cesare Parese, in Italian.

 This new aspect of the used book business is labor intensive. You have to type information on each title into a file on the store’s computer, handle the E-mail queries, track down the book, process the credit card sale, package the books, and take them to the post office.

As one used book dealer told me the other day the whole Internet phenomenon is like having a second job. I’m not complaining. We are selling books to customers we would not reach otherwise, but more important we can enlarge our perspective on what kind of books we buy because we are not solely dependent on the tastes of retail customers who may or may not walk through the front door.

As the Internet shrinks the globe, we are selling out-of-print books to researchers, scholars, libraries, students, people in small towns and foreign countries who have a real, even urgent, need for a particular title. Increasingly, I have a sense we are providing an essential service, which is in itself rewarding.

Ironically, as the Internet revolutionizes all aspects of our lives, I’m still encouraged, some 10 years into this new phase of my life, by the depth of interest in books, by the respect, even reverence, people have for books. The Five College area boasts a singularly rich book culture as reflected by the army of published authors and would-be writers, book designers, printers, illustrators, bookbinders, scholars, editors, reviewers, collectors, libraries, booksellers and ultimately readers.

Perhaps all of these activities are at risk because of the new technologies and all of us, including the book itself, are endangered and eventually made obsolete. I don’t expect to be around when and if that scenario comes to pass.

For now I feel good about what I’m doing and this is something I can continue to do for as long or short a time as I choose.

And, of course, I work for myself which is, I suspect, why I am doing what I’m doing.