It's said that rainy Washington has the perfect climate for book reading. Whatever the reason, the state has a reputation for avid readership. Chuck Robinson, owner of the 27-year-old Village Books in Bellingham and a former ABA president, said that bookselling across the state has remained robust through the years, and, as Book Travelers West rep Kurtis Lowe put it, Washington claims “some of the strongest and most innovative bookstores in the country, with the customer base to support their good work.” This is particularly true of the western side of the state.
Washington is bisected by the Cascade Mountains, with the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metropolitan area (“the wet side”) lying to the west of the range; eastern Washington, the dry side, has roughly twice the land area and one-third the population. Seattle, the largest city in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, anchors the Greater Puget Sound region, the 15th largest metropolitan area in the country. Home to Starbucks and Microsoft, Seattle has experienced significant population growth over the past two decades; the region's economic health combined with a high per-capita education level has sustained three large independents (University Bookstore, Elliott Bay Book Company and Third Place Books) as well as a number of neighborhood stores in the city and in suburbs like Bainbridge Island, Mercer Island, Bellevue, Kirkland and Edmonds.
Seattle is still a city where people attend author readings. Elliott Bay, perhaps the city's most storied independent, does 40 to 50 events a month, sometimes up to three at one time. Rick Simonson, who runs the store's reading series, described turning hundreds away from an Oliver Sacks event. The newer Third Place Books, located in suburban Lake Forest Park, also has an extensive reading series, hosting 25 to 30 author events a month. And most of the time, there's little overlap between the two stores' lineups. In Bellingham, a college town 90 miles north of Seattle, Village Books has cultivated a program that now boasts more than 250 events a year.
Seattle is also something of a West Coast hub for the book business, with strong regional wholesaler Partners/West nearby, as well as Amazon and Costco headquartered in town.
Chain stores do have a significant presence in the area. But chains don't do as well with author readings, and independents are well enough entrenched in Seattle that chains can't really dominate the marketplace. Robinson said many stores in the Northwest had the advantage of well-established ties to their communities before chains arrived.
Outside of the Puget Sound area, there are fewer independents than there once were, though Lowe can name seven or eight stores east of the Cascades that are doing good business. One of these is a five-year-old store in Winthrop called Trail's End. Owner Brian Sweet said sales are up 75% just this year (a year in which Sweet acquired the store's building and doubled the store's size). Winthrop, three-and-a-half hours from Seattle and just over the mountains, is very rural; the highway out of town closes in the winter. Trail's End, the only bookstore within two hours in any direction, gets a lot of business from tourists visiting nearby national parks, but Sweet said the bulk of his business is with the “extremely literate” locals, many of whom tend to be telecommuters and early retirees from Microsoft (80% of houses there are second homes).
Further to the east, recent times have been harder for longtime Spokane independent Auntie's, which prides itself on being the biggest store between that city and Minneapolis. Owner Chris O'Harra said the past two years have been particularly hard. Spokane, a city of 200,000, is now dominated by chains, which have at least seven locations in town, and O'Harra also feels the pressure from Amazon. Auntie's has downsized this year, cutting about 5,000 square feet from the store, but O'Harra continues to maintain a full schedule of events, from book clubs to readings with local authors like Sherman Alexie and Jess Walter. “As long as those readers are out there,” said O'Harra, “we're going to be right here.”
Bookselling Health IndexHousehold Income: $46,868Population: 6,204,000Independent Bookstores: 116Chain Bookstores: 46Total Bookstores: 162Big-box Stores: 102Total Stores: 264Stores per Capita: 1 per 23,500Per Capita Rank: 29
