More Than a Bookstore

On Monday, February 23, dozens of bookstore owners, booksellers, and
authors from as far away as Bellingham gathered at the wood-lined,
slightly claustrophobic pub in the basement of Ravenna Third Place
Books to raise a glass with former HarperCollins sales rep Seira
Wilson. Wilson, who promoted HarperCollins titles to independent
booksellers all around Washington State, was a victim of the latest
round of layoffs at the company, which reportedly lost over 75 percent
of its operating income in the last half of 2008. Brian Grogan,
HarperCollins’s senior vice president of sales, said by phone that
“some of the current sales reps will have larger territories than
before,” meaning that another salesperson will be absorbing the
Northwest into his or her territory. Over trays of hummus, sales reps
from other publishers quietly expressed concern as to who would be
downsized next, and John Marshall, the book critic for the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer,
wandered around the party with the specter
of the P-I‘s shuttering looming over him.

But here’s the thing: Even as people downstairs were fearing for the
future of Seattle’s bookstore industry, Ravenna Third Place Books was
thriving upstairs. Customers browsed the stacks contentedly; a group
that gathers monthly to discuss science-related topics was sitting in a
semicircle; and the store’s newest addition, a branch of the popular
Capitol Hill Greek restaurant Vios Cafe that’s within the bookstore,
was slammed—not an empty table in the place. It had been a while
since I’d walked into a bookstore and heard the steady murmur of people
in the background; I’d forgotten how pleasant that sound is.

Ravenna Third Place has always been a pleasant place to browse,
especially because of its skylight and large windows, but it’s had its
problems, too. The Honey Bear Cafe, in the rear of the store, took up
too much space. And walking into the building felt like entering an
enormous Hallmark store: There were massive racks set aside for cutesy
bookmarks and chintzy gift items. Robert Sindelar, the managing partner
of Third Place Books, acknowledges that the Ravenna branch (the other
one is in Lake Forest Park) wasn’t perfect. “The whole thing hadn’t
quite jelled. We realized that [the cafe] wasn’t quite a full-service
restaurant. It wasn’t quite a great coffee shop. It was doing five
things, and it wasn’t doing any of them really well.”

Last year, they closed the cafe, reached an agreement with Vios, and
started renovating the store to include the full-service restaurant.
When they started that process, Sindelar said, “We realized we had to
scrap the layout of the store as it was.” Vios’s tables now run along
one side of the store, and a wall was torn out and replaced with
windows “so people could see the activity from the outside.”

That’s an enormous change. When you approach RTP now, you can see
people sitting together at tables—eating, talking, drinking
coffee, and reading. That’s a much better advertisement for a bookstore
than a window full of books. (It helps that the food is delicious and
affordable.) Besides the aforementioned monthly Science on Tap lecture
series, book clubs and knitting groups meet on a weekly basis, and the
staff encourages this type of behavior by learning people’s names and
greeting them personally. Between the small, warmly lit pub and the
vivacious restaurant, the bookstore feels like a community center now,
a place where people meet and spend time. It’s already reaping
financial rewards: Sindelar confirms that RTP bookstore sales this
January increased by 5 percent over last January.

The restaurant’s expansion necessitated other changes, all handled
beautifully: The cash registers were made less conspicuous, the
bookshelves moved tighter together, giving a denser, more forestlike
feel to the browsing experience. And the store greatly cut the space
dedicated to greeting cards and other frivolous—but
profitable—gift items. “There are so many small quality gift
shops in Seattle,” Sindelar said. “We’d have to dedicate too much space
to do it really well.” Walking into RTP since the renovations
(completed in December) is like the scene in a movie where the heroine
takes off her glasses, lets down her hair, and is revealed as a beauty
queen. I’ve been there twice in the last month, and when I leave, I
immediately begin planning the next time I can go back.

This doesn’t have to be an isolated experience: Virtually every
neighborhood in Seattle could sustain this kind of community events
center. Before the deal with Vios was finalized, Sindelar was in talks
with a theater company—he declines to say which one—about
sharing space. “They had this idea that maybe their lobby should be a
bookstore during the day. There’s a bit of shared risk there. It’s
realistic for both an independent bookstore and a nonprofit like a
theater to share space.”

He’s absolutely right. Three or four like-minded small businesses
could easily share a space like this, combining their cachet and
customer base into a kind of small cultural engine. Avid fans of the
arts tend to spread the wealth to many different kinds of culture. Why
can’t Bailey/Coy Books and Northwest Film Forum share a space with the
BottleNeck Lounge? What if Queen Anne Books and a theater troupe were
to move in together? Or Fremont Place Book Company, a small art
gallery, a tavern, and Sonic Boom Records? Dozens of examples of that
excrementitious corporate buzzword “synergy”—the theater’s stage
could be used for author events when there were no plays scheduled, for
instance—spring immediately to mind.

The other great important change at RTP: Since January 1, Michael
Coy—one of the founders of Bailey/Coy Books and until recently an
owner of M Coy Books—has become the store manager. When M Coy
closed last year, many in Seattle’s book community feared that Coy’s
decades of experience and practical bookselling knowledge would be
lost. Sindelar believes that, as knowledgeable people like Seira Wilson
are squeezed out of the business by penny-pinching conglomerates, “a
vitality of book knowledge” in Seattle “could become diluted,” and the
fact that Coy has such a long history and so many friendships in the
community is a huge thing for the store and for Ravenna.

The party in Wilson’s honor went on for hours, and many celebrants,
myself included, probably had one beer too many. But things never
became funereal: Wilson’s natural effervescence—she’s a young
woman who remembers
everyone’s name and reading tastes no matter
how long it’s been since she’s last seen them—saved the party
from becoming a kind of recessionary wake. Memories of drunken
get-togethers were excitedly—and, yes, drunkenly—recalled.
Eventually, as the night wore on, guests walked arm in arm out of the
beautiful bookstore, swearing that they’d return sometime soon and be
together again in happier times ahead.