Though summertime means vacations and a break from the normal routine for many people, it is the busiest time of the year for seasonal booksellers. We checked in with four owners of five indie bookstores in popular vacation destinations around the Great Lakes region that are open only from late spring to early fall; all indicated that, while it’s hard work and long hours, operating a bookstore four months per year is a good way to supplement one’s income.
There are only 100 year-round residents in Copper Harbor, Michigan’s northernmost town, where Lloyd Westcoat has operated a 700-sq.-ft. bookstore, Grandpa’s Barn, since 2002. Since Copper Harbor, on Lake Superior’s south shore, is, she said, “at the end of the road, and tourists are there on purpose,” the number of summer visitors is limited. “Our customers are ‘cottage people,’ ” Westcoat added, noting that residents who live there year-round are likely to shop online in winter.
Grandpa’s Barn, which stocks one or two copies of each title in its 4,000-book inventory, opens each year on Mother’s Day weekend and closes the third week in October. Most of the inventory, one-third of which is children’s books, is fiction and nonfiction pertaining in some way to the Great Lakes.
Staffed by Westcoat, who has owned retail stores since 1981, and her husband, Clyde, the store has one other “very part-time” employee who works eight hours each week. “I make a profit, though it’s slim,” Westcoat said. “This would not be true if we had a mortgage, or greater expenses for employees.”
During the eight months the store shuts down, Westcoat lives 20 miles south, in Houghton, where she teaches full-time at Michigan Technological University. When not in class, she updates the store’s books and manages inventory with Booklog, peruses print catalogues, orders books, and “thinks about next year,” she said.
“A seasonal bookstore is as much work as a full-time bookstore, because it’s all condensed, and you don’t have a fleet of employees,” Westcoat noted. “Most probably, you are doing much of it yourself.”
Since 1989, Mary Jane Barnwell has operated Island Bookstore on Michigan’s Mackinac Island—an island on Lake Huron that forbids motor vehicles and can only be accessed via ferry or plane by its 500 permanent residents, as well as up to 15,000 tourists per day in summer. The 1,000-sq.-ft. bookstore was founded in 1975. It opens the first weekend in May and closes at the end of October.
In 1996 Barnwell started a second, slightly larger seasonal bookstore, also called Island Bookstore, in Mackinaw City, on the mainland, located near the famous five-mile-long suspension bridge connecting Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas. This location opens the second weekend in May and closes the third Sunday in October.
Keeping the doors open only during the summer and early fall works well, Barnwell said. She admitted that “it’s crazy, but we love it,” adding that there’s not a lot of downtime for her during the rest of the year. Relying primarily on Edelweiss and phone reps, Barnwell spends the winter months ordering frontlist and sidelines that, due to the difficulties of fulfillment on the island, can take “a couple of weeks” for delivery, as they must be transported by horse or be hand carried by a UPS driver.
Barnwell reported that both stores are making “a little profit.” There are a total of 11 employees working at the two stores who are laid off in the fall and rehired in the spring. Despite the vagaries of their employment status, there is little staff turnover. “By some miracle, they want to come back every year,” she said, noting that Island Books’ manager, Tamara Tomac, has, for the past 25 summers, taken the Mackinac Island ferry daily to work at the store.
Asked about the difficulties of operating two seasonal bookstores, Barnwell insisted that the biggest challenge lies in opening and closing the store, “unpacking books [in May] and then sending books back [in October].”
“July through October is my Christmas,” said Deb Wayman, the owner of Fair Isle Books in Door County, Wis. The 550-sq.-ft. store on Washington Island on Lake Michigan is open from Memorial Day weekend through Columbus Day. Wayman, who started Fair Isle Books in 2015, said that she has been making a profit since the first year but is not paying herself a salary; there is only one other employee. Instead, she puts the proceeds back into the store, which also sells fair-trade products.
Her customers are primarily the 4,000 summer residents, who “have a lot of money and a lot of education,” she explained, although some of the 10,000 day-trippers who visit the island stop in at the store as well. The 700 permanent residents buy books too, but more as gifts, she noted, as they typically rely on the public library for their reading needs.
Wayman said that during the months the store is closed, she sells books and other products at a church in Lombard, Ill. (where she lives when Fair Isle is closed), manages the store’s inventory, and reads ARCs.
Fine Print Books in Lakeside, Ohio, where there are 150,000 summer visitors but only 300 year-round residents, typically has an even shorter selling season: the 500-sq.-ft. store on the shores of Lake Erie opens its doors on Memorial Day weekend and is open every day until Labor Day, after which it is open only on weekends into October. Last year, Fine Print stayed open through December but, co-owner Joan Price said, “it didn’t work out as well as we’d hoped.” A decision has not been made whether or not to do that again.
Established in 2010 and operated by two retired teachers, the store has been making a profit that is “going up a bit every year,” with $110,000 in net revenues last summer, Price said. The co-owners order directly from publishers in the spring and then reorder on a daily basis from Ingram and Baker & Taylor throughout the summer, because “they can ship [STOP orders] quickly.”
The inventory of 4,500 titles is almost equally divided between adult and children’s titles, with one copy of each in stock, unless the local reading group requests more. “For such a small store, we pack in a lot,” co-owner Beverly Bartczak said. “There’s not a lot of face-out titles. But we know where everything is.”
Michigan's Island Bookstore's two locations -- on Mackinac Island and in Mackinaw City -- were both incorrectly identified in the print version of this story and have been correctly identified on our website.
