Bookstore tour lessons.

Linda and I were fortunate in the location and size and configuration of our space. The high ceilings, the open floor plan, and a whole lot of thought and planning gave us a nice flow.

One thing I noticed about all the used bookstores we visited is that their traffic flow somehow wasn't intuitive. Not easy to negotiate. A hodgepodge organization, dictated I suspect, by the mazelike floor-plans and the mix and match bookshelves.
Our white bookshelves really give a clean feel to our bookstore, that plus the constant cleaning and straightening. The shelves are modular, saving space. The wide corridors that Linda insists upon, and the little oasis' of chairs and tables, and a relative lack of knick knacks and pictures, puts the focus on the books and gives a cleaner, less cluttered feel.

We are complimented all the time for our organization. The irony is that we probably actually organize our books into less categories than most bookstores. We keep the divisions of books into as few categories as we can manage. By splitting, say, the health section into -- diet, medicine, lifestyle, etc. etc. we would really only add to the clutter and confusion.

We seem to have quite a few more hardcovers than most used bookstores, and we don't relegate them to the corners or the back of the store. We probably give a bit more space to non-fiction than most used bookstores we visited.

We give quite a bit of room to genres, just like everyone else, but not so it obscures everything else.

The biggest difference, and I'm not sure how this happened, if that we give much more room to 'literary fiction.' Current fiction. Hardcovers and trade paperbacks. We've separated out the older, and more beat-up but still worthy classics -- the Hemingways and the Steinbecks -- into our 'vintage' section.

It's not just Oprah books, either. Authors like Philip Roth and Salman Rushdie and John Updike and so on. Sell very well.

More than half the stores we visited didn't even have a distinct section; and the others put them in a back room and let them gather dust.

Yet in our store it is probably our most active section.

Hard to understand. We were told by our 'adviser' that current fiction "doesn't sell," and based on what we've seen elsewhere, I have to assume it doesn't sell for other stores, but our store does very well with them.

Could it simply be that we have given them due respect, and space and focus, and those who like those kinds of books come back? And bring in those kinds of books?

I believe there is an awful lot of interference on the part of used bookstores about what books to carry and what books sell and what books the owners likes or dislikes and how his organization reflects that.

We've tried very hard to be a mirror to what books actually come in and what books are actually bought. Instead of imposing our own tastes. Many of the bookstores, which are run by women a majority of the time, are pretty skimpy in their science fiction and their westerns and their war books, for instance.

Others have an overabundance of romance, or too few, or whatever.

Seems to me our trade policy of taking in most any book a person brings in (within the limits of one box or bag per customer per visit) reflects what those people actually read. Whereas the usual choosiness of most bookstore owners only reflects their own biases.

And finally, the biggest difference is that we make a constant effort to clean and straighten our books. For the life of me, I can't figure out why the majority of bookstores let themselves become messy and cluttered, especially when it would only take, say, five minutes out of every hour to go around and straighten.

I guess if I had to pick an element that separates our store, it's that we have tried to have a retail bookstore look. We look more like Barnes and Nobles in our displays and organization that the typical bookstore. Customers often come in and say, "Oh, we thought you were a 'used bookstore."

We are, Linda says.

"Oh, you have new and used?"

No, Linda answers. Just used.

We have a nice retail feel, and haven't allowed ourselves to look "Old".

No real reason to look old, except tradition. Used bookstores tend to follow the example of other used bookstores, instead of adapting to this new world of books.
Having spent 20 years selling books and comics out of Pegasus, we knew what kind of store we wanted.

I give Linda most of the credit for keeping it this way. I would've probably complicated and messed with the formula. The store has kept the fung shui that it had from the very beginning, that was almost a happy accident, except...well, it was our choices that made it so.