Rare Book Monthly
Articles - October - 2006 Issue
What's Up and Coming with West Coast Bookstores?
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He said that he thinks because overhead is so high there will be a decline in brick and mortar stores. "Oh, there will always be stores because people like to browse, see, touch, so there will be stores, maybe more for higher end books."
I asked what he thought of books on demand. "Completely negative," he averred. There isn't much more to say, you can find the book itself out there for much less than on demand."
Robert let slip that his partner, Susan Lupkin, was a bookbinder. She's been doing it for four years after several years of training with bookbinders in San Francisco. She said she is most proficient with cloth, but now is branching into leather binding and rebacking. My antennae went up and I thought that would make a good article for another day, and Susan said she knew two other book binders in Oregon. Stay tuned in the future, I often get up Oregon way. Meanwhile, back at the ranch...er, Temple...
Strolling again, I found Maxwell's Bookmark. I had to talk to Bill Maxwell because his logo incorporates one of my favorite Grouch Marx quotes: "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend, inside of a dog; it's too dark to read." Bill said that pretty much sums up his philosophy of books and life. We agreed that a sense of humor was pretty well a necessity to be a bookseller.
Maxwell's Bookmark was the oldest (1939) independent new and used book store in San Joaquin County. "When," I asked owner Bill Maxwell, "did you start in the book business?" Bill said that he got started about two weeks out of college in 1975 where he had just earned a Bachelor's Degree in politics at U.C. Santa Cruz. He rather haphazardly accumulated books, haunted bookstores and then went to work at Harvard Used Books on skid row in Stockton, which had been there since 1922. He started his own store in 1978, bought the Bookmark and then went on to buy Harvard Books in 1981, which he finally closed in 2001. When his lease was up on the Bookmark in 2003, Bill said; "I would come in in the morning and fill all my internet orders and be in the black, but then my staff would come in and by the end of the day in the shop, we would be back in the red, so I closed the store in 2003, culled about 1500 of the very best books I had, had a giant clearance sale, and got rid of most of my 10,000 books. Since then I have had about 1500 to 3500 books online and have been working from home and have been doing okay." Now he does most of his sales on the internet and has a part-time day job as Archivist for the Bank of Stockton's 20,000 photos, where he maintains their collection.
