Good News from an Independent Bookshop

A year and a half ago, our city’s one bookshop went up for sale. My wife and I bought it. The place had 20,000 books, a good music system that probably played 3,000 hours of Bach per year, and a black cat named Raven. It even had an entire room just for theology and philosophy books. (Steubenville, Ohio, is an unusual town.) 

Now we’ve been running the shop for a little while. Experientia docet, said our ancestors. Experience teaches. I prefer Vivaldi to Bach, so you’ll hear more Vivaldi around here now. Raven died and my children are now tending a litter of six kittens, grooming a replacement. And experience has taught us something heartening: Our customers have great taste in books. 

I write this because I hope it will be as great a consolation to you as it has been for us. People tell us all the time that civilization is finished, that the world is coming to an end. But then we look at our sales details and we smile. 

One slow morning, early in our tenure, we had only two customers. The first came in, looked around, and bought one book. It was The Complete Works of Plato, the Hackett edition, which features excellent translations and is a superior book. I had gone out of my way to acquire it for the store, and I was glad to see it find an appreciative buyer. About an hour later someone came in and bought The Complete Works of Aristotle, the two-volume Princeton University Press set. This had come to us by chance, and I considered it an improbable sell—what manner of man could make it through so much Aristotle?—but sell it did. I learned then and there to never underestimate my customers. How many bookshops on earth had had a morning to compare with mine? 

This has continued. My wife and I take turns behind the counter, never there at the same time. Some days we review the sales reports over dinner, just for pleasure. During our town’s recent First Friday celebration—a big annual August block party where thousands of people come downtown—we could hardly believe the consistent quality of the books people purchased. Dante’s Inferno. Alcott’s Little Men. Two copies of The Carnival of the Animals, part of the excellent Story Orchestra series educating children about great works of music (we sold also The Planets and Sleeping Beauty from that series). A compendium of Aztec myths and tales. Hilaire Belloc’s How the Reformation Happened. Crime and Punishment, Demons, and Notes From Underground, by Dostoevsky, as well as two copies of Notes from the House of the Dead (which I stock because I think it his best). Alice in Wonderland. The Gulag Archipelago. Two copies of Slaughterhouse Five. The collected stories of Wendell Berry. Two copies of The Independent Farmstead, a how-to guide for self-sufficient farming. Three copies of The Count of Monte Cristo (one abridged, though the abridgement is excellent). Wilkie Collins’s sensational The Woman in White. The Old Man and the Sea as well as Autumn in Venice, a book about Ernest Hemingway. Made in Ohio: A History of Buckeye Invention and Ingenuity. Transformation in Christ by Dietrich von Hildebrand. How to Face Death Without Fear by St. Alfonsus Liguori. 

Of course we also sold piffle like Bunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery. And Bunnicula Strikes Again! But you don’t feel bad about selling Bunnicula when you sell St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul, The Screwtape Letters, and Moby-Dick all on the same night. JD Vance had just been nominated for the vice presidency, so two copies of Hillbilly Elegy sold too. Not in the news was Tchaikovsky’s Practical Guide to the Study of Harmony. It sold anyway, along with a three-volume set of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter.

You know what we did not sell? A single one of the Amazon bestselling books of 2024. I look at the list and I do not even recognize them: The Housemaid? The Women? Never Lie? People told me that Colleen Hoover was basically singlehandedly floating the publishing industry. I added one of her books to our stock. It never sold and no one has asked for it. In early 2023 someone put in a special order for the Prince Harry memoir, and I got a copy for the store too. We still have it. No one looked at it when we had it on display, and no one asks for it now. 

This was just one day. You can see why my wife and I enjoy reading the sales reports. When we have excellent books, they sell. When we don’t have them, we get asked for them. I love Goethe. I never thought I’d ever sell a Goethe book—he has always been a solitary pleasure for me—but I made sure to have The Sorrows of Young Werther here, in the fine Hutter translation. Sure enough, someone came in asking for Goethe. 

I’d love to go ahead and buy all twelve volumes of the Princeton University Press basic works of Goethe set. But you can’t make a great bookshop overnight—not unless you’re rich. Many books I buy at a 40 percent discount from a distributor. If the list price of a book is $10, I pay $6. This means that if I buy the book, sell it, and restock, I end up losing money: I have bought the book twice ($12) and sold it once ($10). If I sell it again and restock, I will be in the black by $2—11 percent—and out of that I have to pay rent, electricity, wages, etc. Some publishers like Hackett offer only a 20 percent discount, which means I have to sell the book five times before I can restock without losing money on that particular title. That doesn’t even begin to pay for the other costs associated with a business. So I add books slowly. I have nightmares—I am not making this up—where people ask me for great volumes and I have to confess I don’t have them. 

We feel our community has given us a mandate, though. It feels like something significant is happening here in Steubenville. Most of our customers are young. They have grown up in the shifting cultural sands of the internet. They don’t have much money and there are no high-paying jobs in the area (Steubenville’s median income is one-half the national average). They have neither time nor money to waste on whatever fad the publishing industry is going to try to create for the next few months. They want tried-and-true classics. They know there is a whole world of great literature to explore, and they’d like to start sooner rather than later. 

We love sharing their book adventures with them. And with every acquisition we make, we feel that we are getting closer to being the bookstore they deserve. 

John Byron Kuhner owns Bookmarx Books in Steubenville, Ohio.

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Image by Antonio Sicurezza, provided by Wikimedia Commons, licensed via the public domain. Image cropped.