Sunday Afternoon

A beautiful, sunny  summer day, warm and dry, salty ocean perfume wafting up and down Main St., and the Seagull Opera in full cry, wheeling overhead or squabbling on rooftops. I was taking my weekly summer bike ride – no workout, no numbers to try to hit, just an easy ramble though downtown Gloucester and the waterfront. I was thinking of stopping by AmVets for a beer, but then pulled up in front of Dogtown Books on Main Street because I wanted to talk with Caroline and Lucas about some local maps and ephemera. Ever since I closed my shop, they’ve been selling my Gloucester material on consignment, and they’ve been doing an excellent job of it. As close as I’ll ever get to an annuity.

However, lovely Sunday afternoon that it was, Caroline and Lucas were not to be found. One of their workers was minding the shop, and man, was she minding! The place was jammed with people – at least three different groups working the stacks, maybe a dozen browsers all told, and almost all of them were under 40. One gang of three left, two of whom were happily waving quality paperbacks at one another. They were promptly replaced by a party of two, again on the younger side. One group toward the back of the store was all crowded together looking at the same book (wonder what it could have been?) What stood out the most to me was that these people were enjoying themselves – chatting across aisles, comparing notes about their finds. They actually seemed to be having fun!

I thought about this encounter for the rest of my ride.  The scene at Dogtown Books was remarkably different from anything I’d experienced in any of the three used book shops I had on Main Street between the mid-1980s and 1993, when I finally wised up and went home to run my business. Back then the used book business was very serious. I wore a sport coat to work every day. It was part of my costume – intended to signal the dignity of my profession, and the importance of the books I had on offer… almost all of which were “collectible.” Sure, I had a couple of boxes of paperbacks out front, and a rather scrawny shelf of modern lit in hardcover, but my stock in trade was books about local history, or art, or gardening, or golf, or whisky, or any of a dozen other subjects. And the thing about the books that filled my shops, the thing I took the most pride in, was that these books were hard to find, scouted up by me in secret places. All very dignified, very grown up, very serious.

Dogtown Books came into being around then. In its first iteration it was run by Bob Ritchie and, though he was never the bookman I took myself to be, he bought and sold collectable books too. And his customers were just as old and established as mine were. And he was every bit as serious as I was. Then Bob sold his shop to Caroline and Lucas and everything changed.

They weren’t serious book people at all. They were social folks, on the hip side of things. They didn’t do rare book shows or put out catalogs of desirable material. They published a literary magazine, and they had events and readings and open houses. But mostly what they had was… fun. The vibe in their iteration of Dogtown Books was that books were there to be enjoyed rather than agonized over. Reading books and enjoying them, and talking about them with your friends was as much a social activity as going to a bar or hanging out with your pals after work. It wasn’t about intellectual struggle. It wasn’t about the constant quest for knowledge, nor did it involve obsessively chasing rarities. Dogtown Books was about stories – varying views of the world, people and their strange, marvelous lives. Caroline and Lucas aren’t selling rarities, they’re trading in the experience of literature. They’re selling cheap and trading in volume, and those books fly out – at least they were last Sunday – at a rate I’d never experienced in all my years as a retail bookshop owner.

That gave me plenty to think about for the rest of my ride.  I’ve been noticing a similar ambiance in newer shops on my scouting routes (yes, I’m still scouting) and even on the national level at provincial book fairs. I had some good customers during my years in brick and mortar shops, and I learned a lot about the business. But I was never much good at retail. If I had it to do over again (which I won’t), I’d put more fun into the mix, a little more excitement.