June 25, 2015
In 2013, when venerable Robin’s Books on 13th Street went out of business, elegies were sung and obituaries written. But when mystery novel-oriented Whodunnit, on Chestnut Street, closed late last year, there was barely a ripple.
In the 1950s, Center City used to be home to more than two dozen independent bookstores, back before the Internet when there was less competition for eyeballs, and rents were cheaper. But it was never a particularly easy business and as Borders and Barnes & Noble entered the scene, followed by Amazon and the rise of e-books, many predicted the death of bookstores.
Today the future remains uncertain but, despite Whodunnit’s fate, some remain optimistic. After all, e-book sales have been flat for over a year now and if Amazon’s influence on the publishing industry is baleful it has also destroyed the more direct competitors to independent bookstores: Borders, Walden, and B.Dalton are all out of business, while Barnes & Noble is closing 12 stores this year.
After years of decline, the American Booksellers Association’s (ABA) membership has grown every year since 2009. They have added 311 new member companies since then, for a total of 1,712, and 576 new locations for a total of 2,227.
But little of that growth has occurred in Philadelphia, which is dominated by used, as opposed to new, independent bookstores.
The most recent independent new book seller to the region is Main Point Bookstore in Bryn Mawr on the Main Line.
In Philadelphia, there are 15 ABA members, among them the venerable Joseph Fox, open since 1951, and Head House Books in Society Hill, which opened in 2005. But according to its owner, Richard De Wyngaert, the business has only taken off in the last couple years. He says that 2014 was his best year ever and 2015 is shaping up to be even better, in part because of the increasing population of upper-middle-class people downtown who may see books as something close to a luxury good.
“You have to curate, you can’t just have everything,” says De Wyngaert. “There is a whole population of people who will stop reading books altogether, but I think upwardly mobile, urbane, urban dwellers are going to continue to read books. I wouldn’t want to have an independent bookstore in a suburb somewhere. I think you need the density, I think you need the sophistication.”
The city’s used bookstores largely fall outside of this calculation. For one thing, the price structure is totally different: Used books sell for less money, but can be sold at a large profit -- pay $1 for a book and sell for $8.
They also don’t tend to be particularly well organized. From Port Richmond Book’s sprawling former movie theater to the echoing vaults of Mostly Books, many of these stores are glorious messes that are perfect for browsing but not for finding that one book you’ve been looking for. Others rely on specialized business models: Mt. Airy Read & Eat serves food and coffee, many Penn professors direct their classes to purchase course books at A House Of Our Own.
Queen Village’s Brickbat Books sells both used and new and is closer to De Wyngaert’s definition of the boutique bookstore. Opened in 2008, cubbies cover the walls of this beautifully tailored shop. Each one contains books of a very specific type that cater to a certain cosmopolitan taste. Fans of John Grisham need not apply. Fans of Evelyn Waugh will find an ample supply of the good stuff.
The shop sells both used and new books. The owner of Brickbat, Patrick Richardson Graham, pictured below, used to run a used bookstore in Old City.
“After a while at the old shop the OK books were crowding out all the really wonderful books on the shelf,” says Graham. “When we opened here I wanted things to be a little more open and have things be a little more apparent, weed out all that stuff that was perfectly fine, but not fabulous. And that’s the way the business seemed to be going. The middle seems to be disappearing. Books are worth either this much or nothing.”
Despite the cheery numbers from the ABA, and the success of stores like Brickbat and Head House, there seems to be another looming threat to Philadelphia’s independent bookstores. Pretty much all of the city’s shops seem to be owned by older people who have been in the business for a long time. Given the uncertainty that haunts the bookstore business, will another generation rise to replace them?
National data gives some hope, even if the trends have not been evidenced in Philadelphia yet.
“We have seen over the last five or six years a significant number of existing stores selling to new owners,” says Oren Teicher, CEO of the ABA. “A decade ago when people got ready to retire one of the realities of our world was that many of those stores simply went away no matter how profitable they may have been. That’s been turned on its head.”
But if rumors of the death of the independent bookstore were greatly exaggerated, it is also too soon to say what the industry will look like in the medium-term future. The business will remain, essentially, an uncertain one.
“It’s always a struggle,” says Head House’s De Wyngaert. “You are always a couple [of] bad decisions away" from going into the red.
