Des Moines Register
08-24-06
Bookstore turns to final page
Ames readers own shares, build shelves, but can't beat corporations
By MIKE KILEN
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
Ames, Ia. - Steve Pett thought it was a shame. Here was a large university
community without a real place to buy books, outside the rather sterile and
limited store in the mall.
"I had the feeling you couldn't live comfortably in a community that didn't have
something like this," said Pett, speaking of the day in 1992 when the idea for Big
Table Books was launched. "But I didn't have any money."
So he sold shares. Once people such as Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane
Smiley jumped on board, 156 investors pumped in anywhere from $500 to
$5,000 and raised $125,000.
"Nobody expected it to make money," said Don Zytowski, a retired Iowa State
University professor and one of the original investors. "It was never a
commercial venture. It was a citizenship venture."
The shareholders helped paint and lay the tiles and build the bookshelves. A rare
community-owned bookstore was born. People lined up on a January 1993
opening night that featured readings by Smiley and Robert Waller, still fresh with
"Bridges of Madison County" fame.
There was hope it would become another Prairie Lights Bookstore, the nationally
known independent in Iowa City.
But Big Table is folding. Its final-day "wake" is Saturday.
Most years it just broke even. A large share of the books are already gone after
its clearance sale.
Pett considers the store on the corner in downtown Ames another casualty in the
war against the behemoth price-busting corporations. Borders opened in 2003,
and Big Table's sales dropped 20 percent.
"It can happen to anyone," said Jim Harris, owner of Prairie Lights in Iowa City.
"You are just one store competing against economies of scale. This whole
country is about the M-word (money) now. I just hate it."
Similar battles have occurred across the country as the number of independent
bookstores who belong to the American Booksellers Association, a trade
organization for independent stores, have dropped from 4,500 in the early 1990s
to 1,800 today.
"A small independent brings people together with similar passions," said Pett, an
Iowa State University English professor. "But the short version is we had a cashflow problem."
The corner bookstore with colored floor tiles, a blue tin roof and wood
bookshelves couldn't fashion a new narrative.
That hurts Mary Kay Polashek of Ames. She has bought books here since
daughter Hannah, 22, was a child. They held an armload of books on a recent
day and told how this place made a difference.
"I want to browse and I want to ask what the staff recommends," said Polashek,
who has been introduced to new authors here. "I find so many more wonderful
books to read."
The corner bookstore isn't the local hardware.
"It's been like a wake in here. I didn't realize the depth of feeling in the
community," said Dale Edwards, the manager and eight-year employee.
One woman even cried.
There is a passion for its place as a great repository of ideas. An independent, it
is assumed, will not only hold titles more literary and offbeat than the mainstream
books pushed by a franchise, but buying from them will become your protest
against chains. Some customers even found books on Amazon.com and brought
in the printout to buy at Big Table at a higher price, Edwards said.
"When you buy a book here you are really paying for something else," he said.
"You are paying for a community's set of values. Selling books isn't like selling
widgets or refrigerators."
It was like buying tomatoes from a local farmer.
The store held numerous book signings for local authors and gatherings for book
clubs. It stocked books on feminism and relatively obscure Iowa Writers'
Workshop novels.
"We've even saved books. We discover a good book and rescue it from falling
into oblivion," he said.
Ames' readers, for example, benefited when the staff featured such books as
"Cod" two years ago and "The Children's Blizzard" when it was in hardback and
still unknown.
John Updike wrote in the New York Times that independent bookstores "civilize
their neighborhoods." They are an alternative to the dizzying experience of the
superstore, stacked a football field deep with titles, like wading through endless
online sites, unedited and unattributed.
When 3,000 community development officials were polled for the National
Mainstreet Center, the top two necessities for a vital main street were a bakery
and a bookstore, said Oren Teicher, chief operating officer of the American
Booksellers Association.
But the steady decline in the number of independent stores isn't all due to
closings. They have always closed, but fewer are opening. And, as book sales
remain flat, retail floor space devoted to them has quadrupled in the last 15
years.
Teicher said more books are being sold in non-bookstores such as
supermarkets, garden centers or discount stores. Today, he said, 55 percent of
books aren't sold in a bookstore.
In Ames, Big Table wasn't alone. Explore, an independent selling travel books
and maps, is also holding a clearance sale and will close. The retiring owners
couldn't find a buyer.
But survival of an independent bookstore requires the passion of saving the
whale or the family farm. Passion and prayers don't beat price.
After all, a book is a book, no matter where you buy it, and franchises have
helped "democratize" reading by making it more affordable and accessible,
others say.
"Book lovers are book lovers," said Holley Stein, spokeswoman for Borders
Group Inc., which has 475 Borders stores and 725 Waldenbooks, mostly in
malls. "If you go to any of our stores you will find many people who have
knowledge and love of books. You can use me as an example. I was an English
lit major who got through college working at Borders."
Zytowski isn't convinced. He was in Big Table holding a book on American opera.
It isn't a place, he said, to find a book on "how to be big in business."
As customers approach the cash register with armloads of books, Edwards said
he isn't giving up. He wants to open another store. He loves the customers of an
independent, with their odd personalities and bright ideas, too much.
"It's a place where people can talk about books," he said. "And people who buy
books have interesting ideas.
"Now I look at these empty shelves and it's how I feel driving through many of
Iowa's small towns. Boarded up."