Building the Used Bookstore of the Future

Bookstore Register #1

I'm a second-generation secondhand bookseller building the used bookstore of the future. Join me every other Tuesday as I learn the family business, curate news from the book industry, and celebrate books as the pinnacle of art and the foundations of civilization. This was originally called Bookseller’s Register.

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One day in 2020, my wife and I  were sitting around and I said something about a book I liked and she said, “oh yeah! That’s your one weird thing: not doing the book business.” 

A few weeks earlier, we had been discussing someone we love who had a serious problem. We agreed that everyone who knew this person understood their problem better than that person did, but that the person in question seemed totally resistant to advice or help or even honest acknowledgment of what was going on. 

I said to my wife, “if ever there were one thing about me that everyone gets except me, you have to tell me.” She laughed and I said, “but seriously, tell me what my one weird thing is.” And she laughed again and said she would.

And apparently, my one weird thing was not getting more involved in the family business. 

“What?” I asked in shock. 

She said, “yeah, you have the time, the support, the resources, the know-how, and even the stated desire to start working in the book business with your parents, but you just never do anything at all.” She stood up to get more coffee for herself. Over her shoulder, she said, “it’s easily the craziest thing about you.” 

She said it with a smile and a laugh, but it was a gut punch. Mostly, because it was true. 

My parents own a secondhand bookstore, the biggest one in the fourth-largest city in the United States. For most of my life, I have helped out around the store, and for much of my adult life, I have done little bookstore-adjacent jobs and side hustles, tweaking the website and covering the front desk on a day here or there. I had always anticipated that the bookstore would take a larger role in my life as I got older. But, I never really put in any work. Like many parts of getting older, it wasn’t until my wife reminded me how little I had done that it dawned on me that I needed to actually do something. 

Since that brief conversation in 2020, a lot has happened. My wife and I bought a house and had a baby. I started writing online. Covid came and went. But still, not very much bookstore stuff. 

But I have decided to change that with this new series.

The Content

This series will chronicle my journey getting more involved in the book business. There are a few things you can expect from every issue, starting with the blurb you saw at the top: 

 I'm a second-generation secondhand bookseller building the used bookstore of the future. Join me every other Tuesday as I learn the family business, curate news from the book industry, and celebrate books as the pinnacle of art and the foundations of civilization. 

To break the blurb down: 

• I’m “building the used bookstore of the future” because I feel strongly that used bookstores are key a thread in the fabric of any society with free speech and open commerce. But to build the used bookstore of the future, I need to understand the ones of the present. My parents currently run one of the most successful operations in the country, so a lot of what I write about will have to do with what I can learn from them. 

• I will “curate news from the book industry” as learn more about other bookstores and the book industry ecosystem, from creation to formatting to delivery to marketing and so on. 

• I will “celebrate books as the pinnacle of art and the foundations of civilization” by sharing book reviews, commentary, stories, and other media that show how influential books have been in human history.  

Finally, my big goal is to build the used book business of the future. But to keep these issues concrete, I will set smaller, intermediate goals and update you on them. The first goal is to assemble an inventory of 25,000 hand-picked books with the help of my Dad. So each update will come with a total of books that I added to the inventory since the last issue and the total number so far. 

The Format

You can expect an issue every two weeks which will have three parts: 

• Feature: Written by me, this could be anything from a memoir, to a book review, to a business plan, to a long-form update on the business. (I will not label it the Feature, it’s just the writing that comes after the blurb.)

• Update: This is where I will share the inventory level as well as any updates in my building of the book business. 

• Links: These will be 1-5 interesting links from around the book world that I think are interesting and relevant to this journey. 

The Name

I settled on the name “The Bookseller’s Register” because a register is both a record of things and a place where business happens. (Although my Dad said he’s working on a better name.)

The Future

I have a lot of ideas about what to write about, but if you have specific questions you’d like to have answered by the son of some used bookstore owners (or the owners themselves), include them in the comments and I’ll make sure to write on them in the future. 

For now, I will release this from my main Substack, Castles in the Sky, every other Tuesday. If the interest grows, I will make it into its own Substack. 

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Update

📚 Total Inventory 1,470 | Inventory Since Last Issue 1,470 📚

Since this is the first issue, I don’t have any big updates. As I said before, my current goal is to build up an inventory of 25,000 handpicked books. This is between 200 and 300 moving boxes full of books.

Starting in the next Update, I will include pictures and a blurb for a few of the most interesting books I went through. Here’s just one for this issue.

The Tamarind Seed by Evelyn Anthony

As I’m sorting through books and deciding what to list as inventory, I run into a lot of old books like this and have to do some digging to find out what they’re about.

Sometimes books with names and authors I don’t recognize are flash-in-the-pan pulp paperbacks without a trace online. So you assume that the book is some obscure printing everyone forgot about.

But sometimes you learn some really cool trivia or become familiar with some movement or cultural moment you didn’t know about before. And the book turns out to have been a big deal. This was one such book.

This was author Evelyn Anthony’s 17th out of 49 novels that she wrote between 1952 and 2015, and it was the only one adapted to become a movie.

“It started on a distant island. Outwardly, just two people falling in love, but with one vital difference. Every time they kissed, the world’s intelligence chiefs held their breath.”

So begins the trailer for The Tamarind Seed, a 1974 film based on the 1971 novel of the same name. It was apparently one of the top 25 grossing movies of the year and had some big names attached. Omar Sharif, of Dr. Zhivago, and Julie Andrews, of Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, were the leads, and the director was Blake Edwards, famous for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Days of Wine and Roses, and The Pink Panther movies among others.

The wild thing is that I didn’t discover any of this history until I was going to write this post! This is what a used bookstore is like: tens of thousands of dense little pieces of culture and history constrained onto paper to fit in your backpack.

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Links

I referenced the family business a few times, so I want to share some background info in this week’s links.

Short Documentary on the Family Bookstore

This is a fantastic short documentary on the family bookstore, Becker’s Books, by my good friends at Bennett Creative. It gives a great overview of who we are and what being in the store is like. 

Interviews of my Dad and Me

Here are short interviews someone from the local news did of my Dad last month.

And here is an interview of me from the same session.

See you in two weeks! Please let me know if you enjoyed this, and what you would like to see covered in future issues.

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