Fair’s Fair “For Book Lovers”

I am one of the many book lovers who dreamed of owning and operating his own book store.

During the 1950’s & 1960’s I became hooked on books and at that time there was one used books store in Calgary - Jaffe’s Books & Music, and I was a regular customer but with a very limited book buying budget.

By the time I was in my mid 20’s and living in the San Francisco Bay Area I found myself starting to say to the clerks, managers and owners of such stores “I would like to have a business like this of my own one day.” Judging by their lack of response I think it was a statement they heard many times from many people - now I and my staff often hear the same refrain.

I made one the most common mistakes a person with a raging passion but no real business sense often makes. I found a place with very low rent. Naturally, it came with all the nonassets a place with low rent has earned - the building and the site were in poor condition and in a location with very low foot traffic.

Blinded by the optimism of lucking into this huge space for such low rent -I committed to renting a 4000+ square foot space in the basement of a two story building. The main floor tenants were a tavern and a massage parlor (later closed when they were busted for sex trade offences) and there were six bachelor type suites on the second floor.

The basement was previously used as a woodworking shop and had an overabundance of fine sawdust everywhere. The pipes, ceilings, walls and the lights all had managed to gather their share. The sawdust on the floors combined with water leaking through the ceilings from the upstairs premises and the more repugnant water from the overflowing of the one toilet in the basement created muddy unpleasant smelling pools. Hmmm … now why didn’t I notice any of these defects before I signed the lease?

I was 47 years old, an unemployed electrician, when my brother Brian and I started to clean out one of the dirtiest, soggiest, stinkingest basements you can imagine. Several other friends and relatives pitched in with some of the work when they found some spare time but my brother was steadfast and reliable in his support (I didn’t find out until much later that he and my daughter had been calling my wife and telling her I was crazy and she had to make me stop this madness). I had tried to shelter my wife from my folly because she was a worrier but, to give her credit, she didn’t let on there was a great deal of concern about my mental health.

Fortunately, my back was to the wall and I had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. A fellow over 45 with not much more than a positive mental attitude going for him didn’t seem to very employable in Calgary’s depressed employment market during 1988. 

Two solid months of work later and on October 13, 1988 we opened with a party for 78 friends and relatives. My brother had pooped out just 3-4 days before and wasn’t there when the bookcases were delivered and the shelves were stocked by six other relatives, with the 7300 books I had accumulated at garage sales.

He came up to me during the party with awe written all over his face and said “If you would have told me how good this place was going to look - I would have known for sure you were crazy!”

All in all it was an amazing and gratifying experience but the poor location severely limited our sales! Many days I saw between one and three customers during an eight hour shift. It was only stick-to-itiveness and a foolhardy optimisim that kept me working hard - continuing to buy books, entering them in the computer, shelving the books and only taking a break when a customer entered the store.

Just six months later we had the first customer tell us “This is the best used book store I have ever been in!” We have since heard this statement, in each of our stores, many times by people from many different countries over the years.

It took many years for us to get a sense of what the customers who made the remarks were referring to, partly because we live with it everyday and to us the individual stores and the organization is a work in progress, but mostly because we think there are hundreds of ways to make this business better.

What did the customers see? - Our stores have always been bright and well lit and our books are in very good condition. The books are organized alphabetically, each within their specific genres, and the groupings of bookcases are laid out (using the Dewey Decimal System) to create a natural flow for the complementary interests of a  reader. Our stores are neat and tidy with wide aisles so the customers don’t feel uncomfortably crowded, endangered or infringed upon.  We generally employ more staff than is economically realistic because we know the work will never get caught up - no matter how hard we try.  

We, as an organization, challenge ourselves to become better at  what we do amd realize it will take many more years of continuous effort to have our stores become anywhere near the standards of the book stores we envision operating in the future.

What do I say when other people tell me they want to have their own store?

My response is almost always the same “Go for it! If you can survive for a few years going months at a time with very little, and sometimes zero, income there is almost no limit to where this business can take you. The people you will have an opportunity to serve will enrich your life in very important ways - but not necessarily monetarily.”

Operating a used books store is a labor of love – I have told my children “Never sell this business – it will provide a great way of life for you, your children and your childrens’ children and a used book store which seriously strives to improve everyday can’t help but be of great service to the population it serves.”