I love many things: bookstores among them, but I also love Ann Arbor, one of the coolest towns on the planet. I read recently about how Mike Gustafson and Hilary Lowe moved back to Ann Arbor to start a bookstore, Literati.
Now, how can you not love a bookstore that says this: "We believe that, contrary to popular belief, we are not hurdling towards some digital, machine-operated future where an Amazon algorithm can decide your reading list. We believe in the whimsy that an independent bookstore provides. We believe that people still enjoy reading real books where real people work in a real bookstore.
Almost everything in our store is repurposed or designed locally. Our bookshelves were purchased from the original Borders Store No. 1. Our tables were purchased at local thrift stores and consignment shops. Our bookmarks were designed by SIBLING, a local graphic designer in Ann Arbor. Our logo T-shirts and totes were printed by VGKids, an Ypsi-based printing company, and they were all made in the USA. We are committed to working with and supporting the local community. "
I'm thrilled to be able to talk to both Mike and Hilary about their store and remember--you don't have to live in Ann Arbor to order from them!
I love that you boldly went ahead and opened a bookstore at a time when
the economy is not exactly bookstore friendly. How can everyone help support
such greatness?
Quitting jobs, moving from
Brooklyn back home to Ann Arbor, and opening a bookstore in this wintery
bookstore marketplace was, and continues to be, a very, very scary endeavor and
yet equally exciting I think there’s an underdog status with indie bookstores
that, for those opening up shop these past five years, garners reactions of
equal parts excitement, support, and skepticism. Sort of like how you’d look at
a kid who tells you he’s going to make the NBA one day. That was kind of the
reaction we got when we told people we were opening a bookstore in 2013. And I
think we’re still trying to catch up to the ramifications of all those
fast-moving pieces in our journey. But finally after a very hectic and crazy
year and a half, we’re just now catching our breath. We’ve been open 10 months,
and we’re making plans for a one-year anniversary. Some said not to open.
Others told the media that we were “doomed.” So we’re thrilled to still be
here, selling books, and not just puttering along, but doing quite well, hiring
more full-time staff, buying more books and bookshelves, and coming up with a
plan for 2014 that doesn’t involve living out in the streets or in our parents’
basements.
Honestly, the community support
has been incredible. Ann Arbor is one of those places in Michigan and one of
the few places in the entire Midwest where we didn’t have to sell or pitch this
idea that when you spend locally, more of your money stays local. Ann Arborites
already know that, embrace that, and for the most part, live like that. Though
Ann Arbor was hit hard with a number of bookstores closing, we thought the market
was under-served after Borders closed. Now two new bookstores have opened, and I
believe Ann Arbor has a healthy number of bookstores again. The thing is, even
though bookstores sell books, people support indie bookstores because many of
us offer much, much more than books – we host events, author readings,
children’s story times, open mic nights, book clubs, etc. and the vast majority
of these events are free to the public, community-centric, and locally focused.
Ann Arbor has been incredibly, incredibly supportive so far. We have a long
hill to climb, but the support has been great. We’re so lucky.
Right now we are simply trying to
get the word out around Ann Arbor that we are here, we are downtown Ann Arbor,
and that we sell new books. As far as support, a very easy way to support us is
to support us via social networking. In that regard, we’re trying to have more
of an audience online. We’ve been very focused on creating a community in every
facet – both in person and online. We’ve noticed that by embracing social
media, we’ve kept an online community engaged and invested both with us and
with books. We like to have fun, we like to be creative, and we try to show
that online as well as in our store. By utilizing social media and not shying
away from it, our goal is that, should the day come when rents are too high or
the market is even more “not bookstore friendly,” we can change, grow, morph,
and move somewhere that will accept us… and hope that our audience will move
with us, too. Bookstores 30, 20, and even 10 years ago just didn’t have the
plugged-in digital audiences that exist now. We have followers not just from
around Ann Arbor and Michigan, but around the country, some of whom buy books
through our website, which is just like buying in the store. We can keep them
posted what’s going on. We’ve been encouraged by other bookstores’ use of
social media, and I think social media has allowed small and niche underdog
businesses to keep their fan bases loyal and the support going. Some people
have found us online, liked us on Facebook or Twitter, then began to buy books
through our website just because they like what we do. It’s amazing, and many
indie bookstores do this, too.
Literati has a real community feel, which I love, and which I always felt when I lived in Ann Arbor. I was intrigued that you left Brooklyn to come back to Ann Arbor (something I totally get. I never stopped loving Ann Arbor.) Can you tell us about the hows and whys or how you returned? And why you decided to open your store in Ann Arbor rather than Brooklyn?
Hilary grew up in Ann Arbor and I
have family here. So it was a literal returning home when we moved to Ann Arbor
from Brooklyn. But when we were living in Brooklyn, Hilary was working for
Simon and Schuster as an independent sales rep, and bookstores were just part
of our everyday lifestyle. We’d visit many of them, from McNally Jackson to
Word to Community to where Hilary worked for a few months, Greenlight
Bookstore. It was never this huge rally war-cry of “WE MUST SUPPORT THE LOCAL
BOOKSTORE!” but more just like heading to the bar on a Friday night… it was simply
something we did regularly. And when we got engaged and heard Borders was
closing nationally, we had this huge hole in our hearts because Ann Arbor
didn’t have a bookstore downtown selling new books. There is Nicola’s over in
Westgate and now BookBound on the North Side, so between us three covering the
geographic regions of Ann Arbor, we feel like with the other used and niche
bookstores in town, we have filled the gap that Borders left behind.
Brooklyn is a fantastic place
filled with writers and readers, but there are already institutions there and
in-place. We were living in Crown Heights, and we toyed with the idea of
opening somewhere around there, but we just felt like Ann Arbor was home
(because it is). We thought we had a good idea what kind of bookstore would
work here, what kind of books we would sell, and what people were interested
in. It’s always a guessing game, and we continue to learn what Ann Arborites
like to read, but we are Midwesterners through and through, and we wanted to
open a bookstore in the Midwest. (Though we still sometimes miss Brooklyn!)
You said in an interview that you had a preconceived idea of whom your
customers would be--what was that idea and how were you surprised? How do
you make a bookstore flow and be engaging? How does it matter where
cookbooks verses fiction may be? Did you research stores you loved or work on
things you had always wanted to see in a store but were never able to
find?
We had an idea what kind of
inventory would work, but we were and are surprised every day. The biggest
surprise was how well our poetry section has been received. It’s consistently
our 2nd or 3rd best-selling section. That’s more than
history, or science, or our children’s section. Many bookstores stuff poetry in
a small, cold, dark shelf somewhere unseen behind the best sellers and the
thrillers. Our poetry section is right up front near the door, two cases filled.
Credit goes to John and Russ, our two poetry MFA graduates on staff, who
curated what we feel like is the best poetry section in the state. Also credit
goes to the amazingly supportive poetry community in Ann Arbor. Ann Arbor is a
town of poets. Poetry is strong here. Much of that is because of the
educational systems in place, from the stellar MFA program to the Neutral Zone
and the job Jeff Kass does with poetry and youth in Ann Arbor. We’ve been the
beneficiaries of what was already a strong poetry community long before we
arrived.
Store lay-out was difficult, and
continues to be something we monitor. We are a small space, and we have two
floors. Having two floors can be good, and it can be bad. For events, it’s
great because we can separate the events so as to not disturb the rest of the
store. For theft and staffing and lugging books around, it’s not the best
layout in the world. So we really, really had to consider layout carefully. The
manager of the original Borders store, Joe Gable, helped us with our original
layout. But, man oh man, we agonized, debated, and continue to debate. People
think that when you open a bookstore, that’s it. The books never move, the
shelves stay in place, and you just sit back and watch the customers come in.
Not at all true. Every bookstore is an organism of many moving pieces – the
books move, the shelves move, and like a river, over time, the geographic
layout of the store completely changes.
The best decision we made in the
opening process was that we painted our sections with chalkboard paint so we
could quickly switch sections. We have changed sections around so many times,
we’re running out of chalk. We wanted to get that flow just right so a customer
can walk in the doors and circulate throughout the store and the transitions of
topics would make sense. As in, we wouldn’t have military history flow directly
into humor. Sounds like common sense until you begin to play around with
unlimited options… then it gets tricky. And you can drive yourself crazy trying
to guess what is the best customer experience for browsing. But for our two
floors, we have fiction on the main floor and non-fiction on the lower-level.
That way, we can identify ourselves with being a fiction-centric store but also
be able to point non-fiction lovers in the right direction. (Plus the lower
level is cozier with more seating – perfect for browsing the many non-fiction
options be have down there – including history, cooking, nature, decorating,
science, philosophy, sports, and much more!)
We did research other bookstores,
but it’s one of those things where you can’t do too much research or you’ll
drive yourself nuts. Sort of like (what I imagine to be) the difficulties in writing.
If you sit down to write, say, a memoir, it might help to read other people’s
memoirs to see how they structure it, formulate it, and narrate it… but if you
read too many memoirs, you’ll just
stare at your own blank computer screen in complete anxiety and terror. We
toured a few bookstores and got some ideas, but they were general ideas. We had
to cater Literati Bookstore for this specific space and our specific two floors,
so many of our pre-conceived notions of what-a-bookstore-should-look-like simply
flew out the window. The store would be much different if, say, we had just one
level, or if we had a wider layout instead of a long layout. That’s why indie
bookstores are all fantastic: Every owner caters his/her store to exactly fit
the space. That’s when you can tell when you’ve stumbled upon a great
bookstore. When every inch of it has been thought and planned.
I always ask booksellers, do you have a sense of what book a customer
might need, as opposed to what he or she says he wants?
A book is like a relationship:
While you might want the beautiful
vixen and yet need the stable Girl
Next Door, in the end, you’re going to choose what you’re going to choose. I
can point you to both and say, “Here you go!” but the decision of who you
choose is not up to me. Like my mom always says, “You can’t help who you fall
in love with.” Bookstores allow people to fall in love… with books, with ideas,
(sometimes) with people…. So if a customer comes in and asks for a book
recommendation, I’ll give them a list of books based both on what they say they
like and what I think they might like based on their previous reading habits.
We always ask “What is the last book you read that you loved?” This helps us
guide them to what we think they may like. But ultimately, they’re going to fall in love
with a book based on circumstances that we can’t always predict. But that’s the
beauty in bookselling. You help guide and you may have a good match, but they
may browse your selection and come across something they thought they’d never
pick up in a million years and go in a totally different direction. It might be
completely outside the realm of explanation. And that’s the point. A grand
serendipity of sorts.
What’s obsessing you now and why?
Oh so many! I just read The Goldfinch over a month ago now and I
still can’t get it out of my head. Hence why we’ve chosen it as our first
Literati Bookstore pick and I’m excited to see what others in Ann Arbor think
about it. So much of why we love reading is the experience of connecting with
people and we’re excited to offer that connection here through the book club. I
also just read a great memoir called My
Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff, which is coming out in June. It is about
her experience working for Salinger’s Agent at 23 – her first real job. It’s as
you might expect – bizarre and lovely and life-changing. It was so much fun – I
read it in one sitting. But the book that keeps on giving for me is the
cookbook One Pan Two Plates. Best
cookbook for couples without kids. Michael says the jambalaya is the best he’s
ever had, anywhere, including in New Orleans. The Hungarian Goulash is also
pretty amazing.
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