Rick Simonson

August Report: Bookstores in Seattle

It was a week or so ago, one of those chance encounters on a downtown street which said something about the complex, often contradictory state of things in Seattle, if not elsewhere. I was on my way for a quick stop at a friend's restaurant - a popular spot which, from what I've heard, is having a good summer. A block away, I run into a columnist from one of the city's daily papers. A bit of banter: he guessed where I was headed. We both know the restaurant's owner. But to the usual level of food, drink, likely busyness assessment, he added, Do you know she's going to have to close?

I did: a popular restaurant, doing well it is, but the building it occupies was sold to someone who wants to run a big bar in it. In a month or so, my friend will have to close her place, gangbusters business be damned. She has plans - and momentum - to re-open elsewhere, but no commitments yet. It'll be a long, hard haul getting back to where she is now, though she seems game.

That jabbered about, my newspaper friend then asked, Well, how are things in the book business? Probably almost as bad as the newspaper business.

I had to smile. Much as the bookworld has its conversations about the drop-off in book coverage, it's pretty much all of newspapering that is getting run through a rough mill of layoffs, conglomerate ownership (and profit pressures), and competition with free content, ie, blogs and such, to say nothing of newspapers themselves being freely online. The economics haven't all been figured out yet, especially for newspapers structured on the old model. He talked about all the colleagues who are now former - one of the papers, especially, cashed a big chunk of its reporting staff out. Some good Seattle newswriters - Paula Bock, Florangela Davila among them - are no longer writing, poofed from print.

For my answer, the bookstore part, it was and is all more complicated. I muttered a few assessments - what part tourists are playing in things, especially those from other countries, shopping against the weak dollar. The affect of that is nice, but what happens when they go home? There are other issues, other concerns floating about, too.

Then yesterday's (Sunday, August 24)  Seattle Times (www.seattletimes.com) had a good-sized piece by book editor Mary Ann Gwinn on the current scene here, or at least on aspects of it."Tough Times for Local Indie Bookstores" focuses on the closing of the Couth Buzzard, a mostly-used bookstore of twenty years' duration that was losing its space for a grocery store expansion (indie grocery store, at least). Also a core part of the story are other recent closees: M Coy, All for Kids, and Jackson Street Books. In common with each was raised rent, lost leases, and/or the high cost of city living.

Mary Ann Gwinn does a nice job of sorting and sifting: the region's largest stores - University, Third Place, and Elliott Bay - get their mention. Statistical data - which indicates that even with the closures, Seattle has more bookstores per capita than elsewhere in the U.S. (a study by Jack Miller of Central Connecticut State University). For the sake of this piece's concerns, it's good she looks at what the smaller independent stores are facing. That Seattle has three large independents as it does is noted (and its good fortune in having such), but the larger importance and vitality of the region, to this participant, is always and also interdependent with having a good number of the smaller, neighborhood stores.

The loss represented by the closure of these four stores is conveyed in very human, personal terms.

And the vitality and vibrancy is not just pointed to in citing the larger stores: first out of the gate in saying things are going great guns is J.B. Dickey and his Seattle Mystery Bookshop. He has questioned other articles on bookstore's plight for not giving more nuanced, if not varied reports. If anything, giving voice to what Seattle Mystery is experiencing (the positive) and some of its concluding 'points,' gives the article a more varied tone than the headline conveys.

Possibly as key to this article's larger possible lessons as are to be drawn from closures, is the news of two new stores opening - one a children's store, Mockingbird Books; the other, Inner Chapters. Both have had nice press in their getting opened. Bravo to them ... and perhaps, more words here in the future. (Also good news as reported in this article is Michael Coy's getting fully back into bookselling. After closing M Coy books this past winter, he helped advise with Mockingbird's opening. Now he'll take over managing Third Place's Ravenna store come January.)

The last word to Mary Ann Gwinn's article comes online - where readers there are solicited for their favorite local stores. While the University, Elliott Bay, and Third Place get their mentions, it is striking the number, reach, and range of stores mentioned: Depot (in Snoqualmie), Tree of Life, Seattle Mystery, Island Books ('Roger Page is the bomb'), John Michael Lang Rare Books, Square 1, Pegasus, Leisure, Bailey-Coy, the Bottom Shelf, Sage Book Store (in Shelton), Horizon, City Books, Duvall Book Store, Fremont Place, Santoro's, and Cinema.

To their ranks now, these other new stores, Inner Chapters and Mockingbird. May the chapters get written, the birdsongs get sung ...

Posted by Rick Simonson on August 24, 2008 | Comments (0)