Rare Book Monthly
Articles - November - 2004 Issue
Book Shopping in the Pacific Northwest
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Sidney-By-The Sea has a charming little downtown area with 8 or 9 bookstores and an incredible number of thrift shops that, despite the number of book dealers in town, had a lot of pretty good books. I talked at some length with Ginny Porter, Manager of Beacon Hill Books and asked her how Sidney had become a Book Town.
She noted that the Tanner family, who owned a large bookstore in town, had always had a dream to create a Book Town such as Hay-on-Wye in Sidney. The area was not particularly economically viable at the time, and they felt that they could make Sidney a "destination" for book addicts and book buyers. It seems to have worked. They encouraged others, and soon more and more book dealers moved there and opened shops. "It is a passive industry," said Ms. Porter, "and it has helped the economy immeasurably." Each spring, Sidney has a 25% off all books in town sale which brings many book buying visitors. We found Sidney to be incredibly book-buyer friendly and every used book store offered a discount. The car was beginning to sag with the weight of our books and we had a week to go!
Our next stop was The Butchart Gardens, a 55-acre garden on the Butchart family estate just down the road from Sidney. It would take a whole 'nother article to give you the tour we took, but suffice it to say it was breathtaking, and the flowers, trees and shrubs were phenomenal, considering the whole place was once a quarry formed by the removal of limestone used in the making of cement. In the background, peeking through fifty or seventy-five foot tall trees, a tall kiln stack is all that remains of the cement plant.
The next day we took a long, leisurely ferry ride through the San Juans to Bellingham, Washington. We have old sailing pals in Bellingham or I have to say, we wouldn't have stayed very long. The book dealers we met were generally pretty cranky and the mantra we heard time and time again in Washington was "we don't give dealer discounts because our prices are so low." Sorry, guys and gals, but your prices were not so low; they were, actually, in general, pretty high. Now I have a rule, because I understand how difficult it is to make it in the book business, that I give all walk-in book dealers who have some sort of identification, a 20% discount on any book that I can afford to discount. If I pay $100.00 for a book and I'm selling it for $120.00, I can't afford to discount it, but most of the time I can and do. So, when I go to a store, I politely introduce myself, ask if they give a dealer discount, and if they decline, I check a few prices to see if, indeed, they are so low-priced that I won't need a discount to make a profit. One dealer in Bellingham - Henderson Books - had one of the nicest, best organized, best stocked bookstores I have ever seen. They had a plethora of high quality, non-fiction titles. But, he actually said that he not only wouldn't give a discount but that he "didn't want his books to go out of Washington, anyway." All I could do was stare at him in astonishment, thank him and walk out the door.
