Talking to the man
We have went prime time!
OK, so I exaggerate a bit. Not prime time, but we made the news. Fittingly enough, the print news [We could have made the TV news as well, but I would not know, as I do not watch TV].
Yesterday morning, less than 6 hours after posting the previous post [after weeks of silence on my part], I received a call from the daily paper about…the subject of my previous blog entry. The only conclusion I can draw is that my humble blog is read in the upper echelons of the Commercial Appeal management.
Well, I answered his questions truthfully and, while I am always a bit nervous about talking to the press [comes from my experience years ago when I worked for the Memphis Fire Department. If you were at a given place, and a reporter was at a given place, you could bet $100 they would take a picture of you at the exact time you were breaking some inane regulation, and you could further bet that the day the story ran would be the one day of the year your supervisor would buy a paper and read it], I felt he was being straight with me.
I told him nothing I have not told you, gentle readers, here in the pages of this, my humble blog. I did not bash anyone, I resisted the impulse to go into Saturday Morning Wrestling mode and tell how I am the greatest. Actually, I talked more than anything about bookselling [my favorite subject].
So, if you see my name in print this weekend, have no fear. I will still be humble and will not let it go to my head, and I promise to never wear tights and challenge anyone to a cage match.
Category: me One comment »
May 23rd, 2006 at 11:58 am
the article hugh is quoted in:
(posted by the Friday night and sunday help, the longest continuous employee of Midtown books, aside from HH)
http://www.commercialappeal.com/mca/business/article/0,1426,MCA_440_4697089,00.html
If you’re not buying, just send cash, say Burke’s owners
By David Williams
May 14, 2006
The letter could have been a page from a favorite book.
Certainly it had the elements of compelling fiction — conflict, turmoil and a struggle for survival. This is the story of Burke’s Book Store, a Memphis institution trying to stay alive amid the modern commerce of superstores and online retailers.
“We’re looking for a way to save our store,” owners Cheryl and Corey Mesler wrote last month in a letter to customers. “And, while an increase in sales will help, it must be said that right now we need cash in the form of donations.”
About three weeks later, the support has been “really heartening, really generous,” Corey said. They’ve received $10,000 toward a short-term goal of $50,000, through either donations or increased sales.
The Midtown landmark’s best customers and author friends have responded. There have been $1,000 gifts. One couple stopped by with a $10 check and an envelope from their children. “It had four quarters and four $1 bills in it,” Cheryl said. “That means as much as the big donations.”
The critical time is now until August, when textbook revenue from four local private schools — providing nearly half of annual sales — arrives.
But to save the store in the short-term isn’t the same as sustaining it for the long haul. So while foot traffic is up in the first weeks after the letter, Corey said, “How to keep that going? That’s our theme.”
Cheryl added, “That, and ‘ain’t too proud to beg.’”
How did it come to this? How did a store established in 1875 suddenly become the story — a tale of survival, or not?
“I think there are two things, and they’re intertwined,” Corey said. “9/11 killed retail shopping, because people were literally afraid to go out.
“I think the second thing that happened was the rise of the Internet at the time same. Because it’s safe to sit in your home and order from a computer. It’s safer than going out into the world.”
Meg Zelickson Smith, media relations for the American Booksellers Association, a trade organization for independent booksellers, said the industry “remains challenging.
“Bookselling is a very difficult business. It’s a very low-margin business. If one of the very
slippery slopes gets a little bit slipperier, it can really throw everyone’s game plan off.”
But she said there’s a model for success.
“The thriving independent,” Smith said, “is one that is well capitalized, knows how to market itself, and specializes in events and customer service.”
That customer service, she said, includes stores doing “what they do best, which is recommending books to their customers.”
She also spoke of a concept of “the third place — that place which is not work, which is not home. A lot of bookstores try to create themselves as that third place in a community.”
Part of the ABA model already is in place at Burke’s, with author signings and a Web site featuring upcoming events, browse and search functions for online buying, and Corey’s Top 100 list of beloved books (Joyce’s “Ulysses” is No. 1).
Capitalization, though, is an obvious concern.
And, there’s the issue that to casual customers, the Burke’s staff may seem, well …
“Aloof?” Corey said, catching the drift. “I don’t want that impression. Actually when we met with the staff to tell them all this, that was one of things I said: ‘Let’s make sure we greet everybody.’
“Laid-back has always been our philosophy. … There’s no snobbery amongst our staff. I’d say the worst thing about anybody here is that we’re shy.”
To become a “third place” sort of place, then, Burke’s may need to become a more outwardly welcoming place. What else might it need? A coffee bar? A cafe, a la Davis-Kidd Booksellers’ Bronte (”a novel bistro & wine bar”)?
The Meslers — who bought the store and property at 1719 Poplar for about $600,000 in 2000 — say they’re open to change and suggestion.
Cheryl, for example, said she’d like to talk with the Service Corps of Retired Executives, which offers free counseling to small businesses. She also wants to increase the text-book business. And Corey has spent the last year and a half building up the store’s online inventory, after initially resisting that notion.
“I’ll have to say, to be really honest,” Cheryl said, “if you weighed our business savvy against our book-loving, we’re a little heavier on the book-loving.”
Corey, though, defends Cheryl’s business savvy, while claiming none for himself.
“It’s hard not to feel like a failure, it really is,” he said. “But the thing that Cheryl pointed out was, when we bought the store in 2000, we bought it on a model for bookselling that doesn’t exist any more.
“We’re shackled with a large mortgage that was based on 2000 figures. That’s the bottom line. That is it in a nutshell. That way of bookselling doesn’t exist any more.”
Bookselling hasn’t disappeared as a commercial force. It’s changed. Consider that used books — 65 percent of Burke’s stock — make up an “exploding” market nationally, according to a study released this year by the Book Industry Study Group. The BISG reported used-book revenues of more than $2.2 billion for 2004, an 11 percent increase over 2003. The Internet lit the fuse, accounting for more than a third of sales.
“We have become more aggressive,” Corey said. “We have over 10,000 titles listed online. It’s done really well. (But) it’s not enough to sustain us.”
Used books always have been a “hedge” against hard times, Corey said. Indeed, given that you can buy bestsellers while you’re grocery shopping, used books are what makes Burke’s Burke’s — that $8 third-edition hardback of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons,” a 40-year-old paperback of “Lord Jim,” or dusty biographies of Flaubert or Ring Lardner.
“People are more savvy about it now,” Corey said. “If they think, ‘Well, if I’d like to have that Updike novel in a second-hand hardback, why go look for it? I’ll just go online.’”
But as Burke’s struggles to survive, another local bookseller is expanding. Midtown Books is opening a Downtown location at 152 Madison, downstairs at Memphis Tobacco Bowl, a business whose clients have included the literary likes of William Faulkner and Shelby Foote.
So, Midtown Books believes in bookselling enough to open a store in a basement?
“I think there’s a risk to it, but I also believe the community Downtown is vastly under-served,” said Hugh Hollowell, whose store trades in used books, although the Downtown location also will sell discounted publishers’ overstocks. “You’ve got the Downtown population during the day the size of Jackson, Tennessee — and no bookstores.”
Hollowell describes, without using the term, the “third place” concept as his goal: “Everybody wants to be a regular somewhere. And so we were looking for someplace that already had that community atmosphere.”
At Tobacco Bowl, already the sort of place where a customer could linger, lounge and light up, a coffee bar opened earlier this year at the front of the store. Now there’s about to be a bookstore in the basement.
“I always said, ‘We’re a lot like a neighborhood bar, only you’re not drinking,’” said Hollowell, a former financial planner who opted for labor he loves. “You get a cup of coffee. You browse the shelves. You see people you know. You read the bulletin board for the latest community announcements.”
Midtown — and perhaps by month’s end, Downtown — Books would seem to be in competition with Burke’s.
But in a po
st last week on his blog (www.memphisbookshop .blogspot.com) Hollowell wished for a city of more books stores, not fewer.
He acknowledged the shopper’s ease of Internet, which is a tool for his business. “But for browsing, for looking for ’something to read,’ it is hard to beat your local bookshop,” he wrote.
He ended the post with a plea: “Hey, do yourself a favor. Support your favorite bookstore, would ya? If you don’t, one day there won’t be any.”
Back at Burke’s, first-time customer Robert Borger, 38, was looking for first editions of some of his favorite writers, Isaac Asimov and Clive Cussler.
“I plan on coming back quite a bit,” he said, “because I’ve already seen some other things they have that I’m interested in.”
And so the story has a new character walking across its pages — a heroic figure, if you will, in one store’s struggle to survive.
——————–
Burke’s Book Store
Business: seller of new and used books, including rare and first editions
Location: 1719 Poplar at Evergreen in Midtown
Owners: Cheryl and Corey Mesler, longtime employees who bought the store in 2000.
2004 sales: $740,000
Phone: 278-7484
Web site: burkesbooks.com