James Patterson tries to save bookstores

At left: The Open Book, the first place I ever worked here in South Carolina, closed its doors permanently four years ago.










Mega-successful author James Patterson is on a mission to save the beleaguered, independent bookstore. Good luck, James!

As I have written here before, I looove bookstores. And so many bookstores are closing; Amazon and e-books and the net have threatened the book industry. (In fact, my photo in that last link, Carolina Book Rack? Like the Open Book, it is now long gone.)

Patterson is giving away $1 million to bookstores, in what he calls a "bookstore bailout":

The best-selling author James Patterson has started a program to give away $1 million of his personal fortune to dozens of bookstores, allowing them to invest in improvements, dole out bonuses to employees and expand literacy outreach programs.

More than 50 stores across the country will begin receiving cash grants this week, from Percy’s Burrow in Topsham, Me., to Page & Palette in Fairhope, Ala., to A Whale of a Tale in Irvine, Calif.

“I just want to get people more aware and involved in what’s going on here, which is that, with the advent of e-books, we either have a great opportunity or a great problem,” he said. “Our bookstores in America are at risk. Publishing and publishers as we’ve known them are at stake. To some extent the future of American literature is at stake.”

The current health of independent bookstores is mixed. While some have benefited from the disappearance of the Borders chain in 2011 and a shrinking Barnes & Noble, the stores have been hit especially hard with consumers switching from paper copies to e-books.

And though many communities remain loyal to their shops, and the American Booksellers Association says its membership has recently grown, the online discounters have wreaked havoc on the independent bookseller’s business model.

Patterson began complaining last year, that the book industry needed a bailout from the feds, just like Wall Street got a bailout. Not surprisingly, nobody paid any attention, so he took matters into his own hands:

Last year, Mr. Patterson placed full-page ads in The New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly arguing that the federal government’s financial support of troubled industries like Wall Street and the automobile sector should extend to the bookstore business. Since that appears to be a pipe dream, Mr. Patterson decided to create his own bailout fund as part of his mission to promote literature, especially for children.

“I’m rich; I don’t need to sell more books,” Mr. Patterson said. “But I do think it’s essential for kids to read more broadly. And people just need to go into bookstores more. It’s not top of mind as much as it used to be.”

He began his project last year by getting the word to store owners that he was willing to begin writing them checks, which will range from $2,000 to $15,000, according to a spokeswoman for Mr. Patterson.

Bookstores responded with informal mini-proposals, explaining what they might do with some extra money. Bank Street Bookstore in Manhattan said it would use the funds to post and stream online video of in-store events. Hicklebee’s in San Jose, Calif., said it wanted to buy a new computer system, replacing its “small, ancient screens with green print” and perhaps bestow a bonus on its hardworking manager, Ann Seaton.

“I think it’s going to have a huge impact,” said Linda Marie Barrett, the general manager of Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe in Asheville, N.C., which successfully applied for a grant to replace badly worn carpeting and a damaged parquet floor. “He seems to be keenly aware that bookstores operate on small budgets.”

And I love seeing the name of MALAPROPS, one of my favorite places in the world, in the New York Times. I am SO PLEASED they are getting some of the bailout money... and believe me, their carpet sorely needs replacing!

I am wishing all the best to James Patterson and the bookstores... and wouldn't it be nice if other rich people took this kind of initiative, to help others in their field? Millionaire musicians should be helping music stores; millionaire athletes ought to be helping small-town teams; millionaire chefs should be teaching young folks to cook, etc etc etc. Let's see some civic responsibility, rich peeps!

As it is, it makes international news whenever Bill and Melinda Gates or James Patterson or Bruce Springsteen or Dolly Parton or Oprah or someone like that, spends money altruistically and helps regular people.

That should be the norm, not the exception.

The Closing of The Open Book

It is with a heavy heart that I report on the loss of The Open Book, the first place I ever worked here in South Carolina. It's the oldest independent bookstore in the area, and ever since the arrival of Barnes and Noble, its days have been numbered.

I am always amazed when the heavily-Republican upstate prefers big business retailers over small businesses, all while bleating the patriotic, pro-capitalist mantra small business is the future of America. Somehow, that never actually translates into trying to SAVE those small businesses by, you know, patronizing them to keep them from going out of business.

At least once a day I hear the phrase, "I can get that cheaper at Walmart." (I fight back the urge to reply, well yeah, if you wanna burn in hell for all eternity!) But it is telling that I can first remember hearing "I can get that cheaper at Walmart," while working at the Open Book. The volume in question was of course some mega-billion-seller by Stephen King or Danielle Steele. We thought, well, they still have to come to us for the offbeat and hard-to-obtain stuff.

That was in 1989, and well before the internet. As you know, that is no longer true.

And unfortunately, you can still get it cheaper at the Walmart.

Greenville's Open Book closing its doors
Customers say a community will vanish with independent retailer
By Jeanne Brooks • Staff writer, Greenville News
January 25, 2010

A card with the news went out to about 1,000 of the store’s best customers over the past year. After four decades in business in Greenville, The Open Book is closing.

Park McKnight, a customer in the store Saturday, said once the doors shut for good, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

The independent bookstore first opened in August 1971, in what was then the Bell Tower Shopping Center, now County Square, long before the era of large national chain bookstores, big box retailers selling books at deeply discounted prices, or online book sales.

Tom Gower at age 48 left a successful corporate job to become a bookstore owner. He went on to make the Gower name “synonymous with local bookselling,” as a Greenville Piedmont story put it in 1987.

The Open Book has remained a locally owned family business to this day. At one point, there were three stores in Greenville and a branch in Clemson. Earlier, for a couple or so years, there was also a branch in Anderson.

Gower’s wife, Elizabeth, and three of their four children — Margaret, Tommy and Grier — worked in the stores alongside their parents. One son, Roger, became a doctor instead.

In 1978, the family opened an Open Book in what was then McAlister Mall, now University Center. Managing it fell to Margaret. She hired Duff Bruce to help, and the two married in 1984.

Through the decades, the bookstore attracted and kept devoted customers like Anne Howson and her husband, Art.

“We have relied on Duff for at least 25 years to make recommendations” about what to read, Howson said Saturday.

Every Christmas, Howson’s husband would call for suggestions for the five or six books he always gives his wife. When he came to the store later, Bruce would have a list ready.

Howson said she was sad to learn the bookstore is closing, “but not at all surprised. I know what a struggle this has been (to keep it going). It’s been a labor of love for them.”

For her, “It’s more than just a business closing its doors.” A sense of community will be lost. The Open Book hasn’t been the kind of place to hurry in and out of. “You walk around,” she said, browse the shelves, and talk books and ideas with the owners and staff.

The Open Book’s various stores were consolidated in 1993 into a single bookstore with a café, which the Bruces now own, in a 12,000-square-foot building at 110 S. Pleasantburg Drive.

Books-A-Million, on Laurens Road, “was already here,” Bruce recalled. “And we knew Barnes & Noble was looking.”

Barnes & Noble opened a 29,000-square-foot store on Haywood Road the following year.

But The Open Book held its own for a while. For one thing, “Greenville was growing at the time,” Margaret Bruce said. She has since come to think, “We probably weren’t getting the new people on the Eastside.”

The year the Open Book consolidated, in 1993, there were about 4,700 independent bookstores in the United States, according to the American Booksellers Association, The New York Times reported. By 2007, there were about 2,500.

The plight of the independents was portrayed in the 1998 film, “You’ve Got Mail.”

The independent bookstore The Happy Bookseller in Columbia, founded in 1974, closed in 2008.

But the Bruces said a combination of factors beyond large chain bookstores, some of which are also feeling pressure, have made it tough for independents. For example, some big-box retailers and online booksellers discount books to below cost, Bruce said.

The Bruces started thinking about what to do two years ago. “We both look at the sales every day,” he said.

They considered different options like going smaller. “But we were just tired,” Margaret Bruce said. “We’ve been doing this a long time.” They decided last summer to stay open through Christmas, then close.

They expect to lock the doors for the final time in about a month. There will be much they miss. They will miss the customers, many of whom have become good friends, they said.

And for Bruce, “There’s really nothing quite like handing somebody a book that you think they might like.”

His wife, who has worked in one or another of The Open Book stores most of her life, starting when she was 15, has always enjoyed looking at what sold the day before and reordering.

Once retired, they both intend to read more. Margaret Bruce also wants to do volunteer work.

Also “Margaret has never been to Europe,” Bruce said. “I haven’t been in 30 years.” So maybe they’ll go.

One thing for sure, “We won’t miss worrying about selling enough books,” she said.

At left: From the children's book department, The Cow Jumps over the Moon.

When the store closes, the book clubs, writers groups and nonprofit boards that meet in The Open Book’s back room will have to find another place.

Some schools will have to seek another advertiser for their yearbooks and another donor. A small pool of local businesses, such as office suppliers, will be in need another client.

And local starting-out authors, as Nicholas Sparks was at one time, will have to look for another spot willing to host a signing for someone not yet widely known.

Howson, a librarian as well as a longtime customer, said, “It goes beyond economics. It makes me sad to think that to save a few dollars we give up so much more.”

The Bruces worked on the language of the card they sent out. Margaret Bruce wanted to make sure it didn’t sound “too weepy.” At the end they put, “We will miss you all and hope you continue to shop local. It matters!”

My deepest and most heartfelt novenas go out to everyone at the Open Book, past and present... it always hurts when a dream dies.

*all photos from my Flickr account.

"The book is still the highest delight."

Left: Carolina Book Rack, Greenville, SC.


After my library preachment last Monday, an email pointedly asks me WHAT do I have against Barnes & Noble? Other than the fact that they drive out independent bookstores, not a thing.

The fact is: I've spent many hours huddled up in used bookstore-corners, perusing stacks of true crime, scifi, fantasy, mindless celebrity-bios, forgotten literary classics and wonky political paperbacks. There is something thoroughly magic about used bookstores; that musty-page smell lets you know you're in for shelves of fun. I'll buy a biography of Roger Vadim for a buck, but I won't buy it new. (I guess it's like waiting for movies to come out on DVD!)

Some of my sentimental favorites:

Jackson Street Books - Athens, GA. A landmark in Bulldog country! An autographed poster lets you know that REM shops here, but I've never seen them.

Open Book - Greenville, SC. Your humble narrator's first job in the upstate was for this Greenville institution. New and used books share space with countless chronicles of the Old South.

Downtown Books and News - Asheville, NC. Trendier sister bookstore Malaprops gets all the attention and the hotshot writers (with accompanying Big Events), but funky DB&N is dusty, musty, plays old soul music, offers abandoned copies of socialist newspapers for free, and has old strips of theatre seats you can sit in while you read. After looking at clean new books at well-scrubbed, hardwood-floors Malaprops, walk a few blocks over to DB&N and join the truly cool.

The mother lode was Atlanta's Oxford Books, now sadly defunct. May it rest in peace. Like Malaprops/DB&N, there was a well-scrubbed upscale version, and a funky used incarnation called Oxford Too, at Peachtree-Battle. A day at the double-Oxfords was a Christmas pilgrimage for me and Mr Daisy, a gift we always gave ourselves. The demise of the store(s) pained us greatly.

Politics and Prose - Washington, DC. Almost as wonderful as the old Atlanta Oxfords, but too far away for me to visit regularly. Harumph, harumph.

I'd love to hear about your favorites, and add a link if possible!

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Listening to: The Jesus and Mary Chain - The Living End
via FoxyTunes