Jacob Brogan talks to independent bookseller Topher Lundell on Slate’s Working podcast.

How an Independent Bookseller Keeps Business Booming in the Internet Age

How an Independent Bookseller Keeps Business Booming in the Internet Age

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May 5 2016 10:12 AM
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How to Run a Used Bookstore

Read how one independent bookseller keeps business booming in the age of Amazon in this Working podcast transcript. 

bookseller.
Topher Lundell.

Jacob Brogan

We’re posting transcripts of Working, Slate’s podcast about what people do all day, exclusively for Slate Plus members. What follows is the transcript for Season 5, Episode 12. In this episode of Working, Slate’s Jacob Brogan talks to Topher Lundell, a bookseller at Second Story Books, a rare and used bookstore located in Washington, D.C.

To learn more about Slate’s Working podcast, click here.

This edited and condensed transcript may differ slightly from the podcast.

Jacob Brogan: Can you tell us who you are and what you do?

Topher Lundell: My name is Topher Lundell and I am a bookseller and book buyer at Second Story Books in Washington, D.C.

Brogan: What does that entail?

Lundell: A lot of different things. Basically, we are a used bookstore. We also sell rare books. And we have a little bit of a side business with CDs and DVDs.

Brogan: We’re in the bookstore right now. Can you tell us a little bit about this space?

Lundell: We’ve been here since about 1979. Most of the floor is taken over by used books that we buy mostly from people coming in off the street, or estate sales. And then we also have different cases, which have some of our more rare and expensive items.

Brogan: How many books in total do you think you have in the store?

Lundell: That’s a hard one to gauge. I would say it is 10,000. Don’t hold me to that. Overall, we have between this store and our other store about half a million books.

Brogan: So, a lot of what you do is figuring out how to add to that collection.

Lundell: Exactly. We have a large warehouse in Rockville, Maryland, where people will come if they have a large collection of books, or we have a book buyer who goes out and buys for people who are moving, somebody who has died. He’ll bring them to our warehouse. And the best store stock comes to this location.

Brogan: So when you are doing those initial buys, it’s just huge bulk?

Lundell: We tend to take everything, and then we sort out what we want to keep for us, what we want to put outside on our outdoor sales. And then what is going to be our more expensive items, our first editions, signed copies, and things like that.

Brogan: You must spend a lot of time sorting through those large collections?

Lundell: By the time they get here, they’ve largely been sorted through. We’ll get a delivery every day. I’ll spend a good part of my day, if they haven’t been priced, figuring out how much they’re actually worth, and then how much we can sell them for. And then we catalog them, which means that we give sort of a description of the contents and the condition of the book.

Brogan: Why do you have to catalog them?

Lundell: To sell online. A lot of our more expensive books won’t sell in the store. They will sell online.

Brogan: The impression is often that Amazon has killed independent bookstores, but in practice, it seems like it’s played a large role in used bookshops like this one.

Lundell: That’s really true, because we actually do sell on Amazon.

And as far as Amazon killing the independent bookstores, it seems like now they’re killing the larger chain bookstores. Our advantage is that we have a small store that’s very well curated, and we have people who work here who know books.

Almost anything you get on our shelves, you can find on Amazon. But you can’t browse in the same way. You don’t have the same people recommending things. That’s the big difference.

Brogan: Do existing entries for books on Amazon inform the kind of thinking that you do here about pricing and even selection?

Lundell: They do. We will use Amazon as well as other websites like ABE Books, who specialize in used and out-of-print books. We’ll use both of those to gauge where we want to price a book. And there’s a difference between pricing something for online and in the store. Most of the books in the store we don’t sell online. It’s only the rare and expensive things.

Brogan: Do you use algorithms to settle on pricing? I know that some booksellers do that.

Lundell: On Amazon, we do.

Amazon is sort of a separate business for us. Our Amazon books aren’t on the shelves. They stay at our warehouse. We try to find a good price for them, and then we have what’s known as a re-pricer that will slowly lower the price to match other vendors.

Brogan: And hopefully not take it all the way down to one penny.

Lundell: Exactly. There are bookstores who have a model where they will put everything online and if it goes down to a penny, it goes down to a penny. And then they make their money off of the shipping. There’s like a very small amount that they can make off of shipping. We don’t do that. We try to never go below $10 on Amazon. We’re not a huge operation that can afford to go down to penny book sales.

Brogan: When you’re thinking about pricing in the store, what informs your decision of how much a book should cost?

Lundell: For regular store stock, we have a really simple price mechanism: it’s half off for a paperback. Half off the cover price. And then hardcovers, we would tend to start with half off for a book that was published this year. And then it slowly lowers from there. Our hardcovers tend to sell from $12 to $14.

Of course, we have to do research on things that are a little bit more rare. And that’s where online resources really come in handy.

Brogan: How do you decide how much to offer relative to how much you’re going to sell a book?

Lundell: Here in the store, if somebody brings in a few books that are going to go on our shelves that are just regular paperbacks or hardcovers, we tend to offer store credit for those. If we offer cash, it’s a little bit less than that, so the percentage is a little smaller. We don’t really have a set percentage, because it all depends on what the book is.

Brogan: What do you pay for like a really expensive book, like a rare first edition of Dickens?

Lundell: That’s a bit more of a negotiating process between us and the customer. If it’s worth a certain amount of money, the owner of the store will offer to sell the book on consignment, which means that when the book sells, we each get a portion of the profit from that.

Brogan: But generally when you’re just buying regular old books, it’s more about the whole package of what they’re delivering and how you think you’re going to move it?

Lundell: Exactly.

If I think, if it’s a book that I think I’m going to sell fast, I tend to offer a little bit more. If it’s a book that I have a little bit of doubt if it’s going to sit on our shelves and then wind up on the street, I will offer a little bit less.

Brogan: What kind of books are the ones that you expect to turn around quickly?

Lundell: That’s part of having some experience in the store where that really helps.

For example, I don’t know that much about military history, but military history is a great seller here. Fiction always sells well. And philosophy always sells well here.

And then you have to know what the hot books are now. If a book by Elena Ferrante comes in, I’ll buy it immediately, and it will sell within the hour. It’s just a part of being experienced in the bookselling business.

Brogan: You’re an extremely voracious reader. What do you look for? What excites you when you find something as you’re searching through books?

Lundell: I’m a big reader of fiction, and that’s what I love. So it’s always exciting for me when we get something that’s a rare first edition of a fiction book.

But what I really like working here are the surprises that come in. The other week we had a book that was signed by Einstein. And that just came in off the street. No planning at all. Things like that are really where the exciting parts of the day are.

Brogan: When you find something like that signed copy of Einstein, do you find that just by sort of flipping through the book? Or does the person who comes in off the street usually identify it for you?

Lundell: Sometimes you will find that you notice something that the seller didn’t notice. This case, they knew what they had, they just didn’t know what it was worth. And when they found out, they were really surprised.

Brogan: How do you interact with someone when they come in to sell something?

Lundell: We do this every day until 4 o’clock, so we have people coming in off the street. And it’s a really wide range of people. Some of the unfortunate things are we get a lot of people who come in who just don’t want their books to get thrown out. And it’s hard for us to turn those people away, even though we do have such a limited space. We have a lot of people who are selling us books and we have to turn them down. And they’re telling us, “No, this is a really good book.” And we understand. Luckily there are a lot of charities that we try to redirect people to.

Brogan: Is there anything that you’ve had to turn away that was especially painful to you?

Lundell: All the time.

It can be a little bit heartbreaking seeing somebody who thinks that they have something that because it’s old is going to be worth a lot of money. And I know that some of that is tied up into their own emotional connections to it. And so when you tell them that, “Oh, well, this book doesn’t really have much monetary value.” And you try to say it in a way where you’re not saying that this book is worthless, because to the person who is selling it to you, it’s not.

Brogan: Used books do tend to come with a certain history, a certain weight. Do you feel that way?

Lundell: Definitely. Some of the more interesting things are when we pull up a collection of books and we go through them and we can find letters from people, gift inscriptions, that kind of thing. That’s always fun to see.

Brogan: What do you do with that kind of stuff? Just leave it in the book for other people to find?

Lundell: We have a small collection of things. And we’ve been adding to that. One of the unfortunate things is we get so much of that, that a lot of it just gets tossed.

Brogan: What time do you arrive at the bookstore?

Lundell: I get in every day at nine.

The first hour of the day I am checking the store to see if we have any gaps that need to get filled, a section that looks empty, and I’ll send up a request to the warehouse who sends down the delivery. I’ll say we need to get more in Civil War, philosophy, things like that.

I usually touch base with the owner and he tells us what is going to come down, how many boxes we’re getting in the daily delivery. I also fulfill our Internet orders.

And then at ten we open. If it’s a nice day out I will bring out our sale carts, $2, $4 carts of books, which comprise a good amount of our sales for the day. And then the rest of the day is basically cataloguing books, selling books, and buying books from the people who come in.

Brogan: When you’re interacting with people who just come in looking for a book, what’s that process like?

Lundell: It’s interesting, everybody thinks that all books are now on computers. Everybody asks us, “Oh, can I have a look at your catalog?” And we really don’t have a catalog for anything except for books that we sell for over $100. I read deeply, but I don’t know everything. And some people assume that they’re interested in a book on the Civil War, so they’ll mention an author and assume that you know who that is. That’s often not the case. So you have to coax them to say “Where is the book?” and you show them the shelf where it would it be and suggest alternatives when that book isn’t there.

Brogan: Do you have a typical customer?

Lundell: There’s not really a typical customer, but we have a lot of customers who are here every day. A lot of that is because we have a high book turnover and we do get new things every day. There are a lot of people who are very obsessive about shopping for books. We have some people who come in two or three times a day.

Brogan: Do those people also sell a lot?

Lundell: They don’t actually, and sometimes I wonder where all these books are going, especially with our sales carts. We have people who will buy five to ten books every day. Those are going somewhere, but they tend not to come back here.

Brogan: What kind of book does end up on those sale carts?

Lundell: Books that are a little too damaged for us to sell in the store. They might have some highlighting or underlining. Covers are torn.

And then there are a lot of books that are 20 years old, and there have been changes in the world. An investment book from 1999 goes on the cart, because there have been changes since then in the investment world.

Brogan: Does that stuff still sell?

Lundell: You’d be surprised. Yes. Books like that sell.

Occasionally we’ll get a decorator who comes in, who is just buying books to put in the background of a shot, or to put in the background when they’re selling a house. They will buy 20 to 30 books at a stretch.

Brogan: If someone wanted to delve deep into their love of reading and wanted to become a bookseller themselves, do you have any advice for them?

Lundell: Go to your local used or independent bookstore. A lot of places are hiring all the time. It’s not a job that pays a lot, but if you love books, it’s definitely rewarding in a lot of ways.

Brogan: We’re standing here in front of—?

Lundell: This is one of our rare bookcases. This houses a lot of history books. And our Dickens collection.

What I’m pulling down now is a first edition of Edwin Drood. This is interesting; not only is it a first edition, but it also still has the original pamphlets, the serial editions of the book. Something like this is extremely rare. You can see that a couple of copies are a little bit torn, but considering the age it is still pretty immaculate.

Brogan: It looks like there are ads on the back of these little pamphlets.

Lundell: Exactly. So, Dickens would publish these. They’d come out every month, which is one of the reasons that a lot of his books, you’ll get to the end of a chapter and it will be a complete cliffhanger. On the back there would be ads. This is an ad for portrait albums, a croquet set, and writing papers, which I guess every English gentleman needed.

Brogan: Are you involved with pricing an object like this one?

Lundell: Yes. Something like this I would price along with the owner of the store. Anything that’s this expensive, I obviously have to run by him.

This is something where you would do a good deal of online research. You want to make sure that you have all of the pieces. A first edition will often have a spelling mistake or a caption that’s been written differently in later editions. You have to do enough research to find out if the book hits all of those points.

Brogan: How do you protect books like this?

Lundell: First of all, you want to handle the book as little as possible. We always recommend that people keep it in a dry place. The worst thing for books is any sort of dampness. And that can spread from one book to another and really hurt your entire collection.

Brogan: Do you maintain a dehumidification system in the store?

Lundell: We don’t have a museum quality climate control, but we do check our climate all the time.

Brogan: How much do books like this go for?

Lundell: It varies. The Drood I showed you was $1,250, which is a good price for that. This copy of The Pickwick Papers, I’m going to say $2,000.

Brogan: Is that written in the book itself?

Lundell: Yes. We pencil our prices on the first page, on the upper right hand side, which is fairly common for used and rare books.

Brogan: In this case there are one, two, three, four, five shelves, about two-feet wide each. How much do you think a case like this is worth?

Lundell: Anywhere from $100,000 to $150,000 probably. There’s a collection of Milton’s poems in one of these. Virgil from it looks like 1650. Some have been rebound, but many are in their original vellum bindings as well—these white bindings you see there.

Brogan: When you’re buying an item like this, are you doing the research already about how much you’re going to charge for it?

Lundell: Yes. Exactly.

Something like this, it’s not something that we buy off the street and price right away. We’ll usually hold onto it for a while, do some research. Sometimes we’ve contacted other booksellers that might have experience in a certain area that we don’t.

But a lot of it is just experience. The owner of this store has been doing this for 50 some years, so after a while I think it’s more of a feel thing for him, whereas for me, I do as much research as I can.

Brogan: Some horror in there, too.

Lundell: There’s a little bit of horror in there.

For example, this first edition of Stephen King’s The Stand. And it’s signed by him for Christmas. It’s a fairly rare book. There’s a signature there, 1978.

What you’re looking at here on the edge of the book, this brown spotting, that you’ll find on a lot of older books—this is called foxing. You see it on prints. Anything that has paper. There’s a little bit of controversy as to what causes it. They know that it is indirectly caused by water and dampness. But some people think it’s a mold, and other people think it’s just staining. It’s pretty universally found on books of a certain age.

Brogan: Despite that foxing, you’re charging $750 for that?

Lundell: $750 for The Stand. A book like this, a first edition of one of Stephen King’s, I think it’s like his fifth book. His first book, Carrie, was a huge seller. If you can find a first edition of that, I would imagine that’s somewhere in the $5,000 range, because they didn’t publish that many of the first printing.

Brogan: Something I’ve always wondered, why are first editions so valuable to people?

Lundell: It’s hard to say. A lot of it has to do with scarcity. The first printing of Carrie probably had a very small run. Now that he has become so famous, his print runs are like probably 25,000 copies at least. It’s just the scarcity of having a book like that. There’s nothing secret inside the book that you’re going to find— it’s just another collector’s item.

Brogan: It’s about that connection with the past?

Lundell: Exactly, yes.

Brogan: What else in this case stands out to you?

Lundell: I really like this Ray Bradbury, Dark Carnival. $700. Again, a first printing, first edition, and published by Arkham House, which did a lot of reissues of H.P. Lovecraft books. They were a fairly small publisher. This was Bradbury’s first short story collection.

Brogan: Do you think that when people buy books like these, they actually plan to read them?

Lundell: For the most part, I would imagine not. There are people who like to get first editions and read them, put them on their shelves. Then there are people who have collections or obsessions. Somebody came in the other day and was asking how they should start collecting books and first editions. And to me, you would have to start with something that you really are interested in, otherwise it’s just like buying a stock. And I don’t really see the point of doing that with a book.

Science fiction is a very popular collection to have, because I think a lot of people have a connection to their childhood. These were the books that they read. An emotional price feels right to them.

Brogan: You have one of my favorite books of my teenage years, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, by Philip K. Dick. How much would you charge me for that?

Lundell: This was $325.

Brogan: I don’t think my childhood is worth that much.

Lundell: This one has a bit of remainder spray, which means that the book was selling in hardcover, it didn’t sell, they sent it back to the publisher. They spray it to mark that it was returned to them. Then this book probably sold for $1. And now it’s $325.

Brogan: To some extent, what we really see here is not just the history of an author, or the history of a particular book, but the whole publishing industry.

Lundell: Yes. You can definitely see a lot of books published in the same era will have a lot of the same fonts. They’ll copy each other, especially if a book sells really well, you’ll see a lot of books that use almost the same image and the same font.

So this is our fiction section. This is probably the section of the store that I’m most familiar with. I definitely came to the bookstore and my love of books through fiction.

Brogan: This section is just alphabetical by last name and it’s a sort of general fiction section. Do you have any guiding rules for when something gets pulled out and ends up on a sci-fi shelf, or some other kind of genre classification?

Lundell: Typically, that’s up to the shelver. There are some authors that sort of stride between science fiction and fiction.

Somebody like Kurt Vonnegut, I tend to put in fiction, and that’s sort of a snobbish thing to do, because he is a science fiction writer, but people tend to look for him more in Vonnegut.

You try to get in the customer’s head and see where would this person be looking for this book. Stephen King has written some books that aren’t horror books, but I would always put all of his books together in that section, just because that’s where people are going to look for him.

Brogan: And this is all paperback. Is there a reason that the hardback stuff is separated out into different shelving?

Lundell: It’s mostly a matter of space for us, and our shelving system.

We have found that if the book is not published in the last year, or if it’s not a classic by Faulkner or Hemingway, somebody like that, that we don’t sell it in hardcover. It will just sit on our shelf forever.

People like to come into a used bookstore, get their paperback, and walk out.

Brogan: You hear people talk sometimes about used book smell. Is that something that you have experienced?

Lundell: Every. I think I’m pretty much immune to it at this point, it’s just the smell of my job.