BOOKS in the basement
Niagara seller distributes worldwide from his St. Catharines home
Some people put a rec room in their basement. A TV, maybe some chairs and tables. A spare bedroom, sometimes.
Don and Jennifer Longmuir put books in theirs. About 13,000 of them.
All neatly stacked floor to ceiling, organized and carefully placed on shelves that line the walls with another running down the middle of the room. Plus a few on the floor.
“This is 23 years of accumulation,” says Jennifer. “It definitely didn’t start this way.”
That’s how it goes when you run an online book-selling operation from your home. The books just kind of take over.
The business is called Scene of the Crime Books, based at the Longmuirs’ home in north St. Catharines.
It takes orders from individual buyers and ships across North America, sometimes further, specializing in rare, collectible and signed first editions.
Most of their books are crime stories — fiction and non-fiction — as well as mysteries, spy novels, horror and sci-fi.
Their story begins in St. Catharines.
Oddly enough they met at a book store in Port Dalhousie where Don worked. By the mid-1990s they were living in a little apartment.
“We started accumulating books,” says Don. “I already had a little collection, and when our son was born we moved here (to the house they’re in now).
“I started selling at the St. Lawrence Market book show (in Toronto) with about 300 books. I couldn’t even fill the whole booth.”
While Jennifer worked at a Niagara Falls casino, in 2006 Don opened a bookstore in Oakville and made the commute back and forth.
After two years he closed shop, and using his dad’s pickup truck they brought the whole collection back to their St. Catharines home and turned it into an online business.
So that’s how they got 13,000 books in their house.
And 7,000 more stored off-site. Plus a few more he keeps at his parents’ house.
He wanted to be independent, to work for himself. For the two of them to be able to decide, it’s too cold here right now, let’s go to Florida.
“But I’ve learned over the years that being your own employer is harder than working for somebody else,” he says with a laugh.
First, they had to establish themselves in the book-selling market.
That meant travelling across the continent from convention to convention, connecting with publishers and collectors, standing in line to get authors’ signatures on books sometimes 10 or 12 at a time.
A Stephen King signature can add anywhere from $500 to $1,000 to a book’s value.
“Like Comic Con for mystery authors, is how I describe it for people,” says Jennifer.
They met some of the top authors in the business — King, Anne Rice, Sue Grafton, George R.R. Martin, Clive Cussler — and grew their customer base.
It took years, but they built up enough of a name that now they only have to go to one or two conventions each year.
This year, they’ve received two international awards, getting honours from Left Coast Crime in Vancouver and the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention in Dallas, Texas.
They sell through their own website and on platforms such as eBay, Amazon, Advanced Book Exchange and Biblio.
Don says part of the joy of the job is picking through people’s collections. And when they go to a restaurant and staff has stacked some books on shelves as part of the décor, he has to snoop.
Scene of the Crime Books’ clientele aren’t the kind of readers who use their books for coasters or dogear the pages as bookmarks. They are willing to pay extra for that first edition copy or, especially, one signed by the author.
Don believes the rarest book he has sold was King’s epic “The Shining.”
“First, there was his signature,” Don says. “The points were on it — it has to have the right price, there’s a spelling mistake on another page that they later on changed — where it would still be a first edition, but without the changes on it.”
Adds Jennifer: “You want the first edition. A lot of books, (the publisher) realizes there’s a mistake so they recall them. If a couple of those slip through the cracks and get sold, they become very collectible.”
It’s a full-time job for Don, but Jennifer still works at the casino. Eventually they’d like to be able to open a small shop again where they could both work, and where customers come in to shop.
There’s a risk in depending too heavily on online sales, especially on platforms that aren’t your own like eBay and Amazon.
Websites and servers sometimes fail. And the bigger ones that run on algorithms make it hard for owners to shut down their businesses for a couple of weeks to take a holiday.
And as if there wasn’t already enough competition in the business, these days anyone with old books and a computer can be a book seller.
No expertise required.
“One of the most horrific things that happened to us, after 9/11 they had the anthrax scare,” says Don. “Nobody wanted packages to come into their place. For a month and a half — no sales. It dried right up.”
And when you run a book store out of your home, a flooded basement carries a whole different kind of pain.
“That’s our worst nightmare,” says Jennifer.
“We all have a couple of books that we’re supposed to rescue,” says Don.
“You’re responsible for those books — you don’t leave the house without them.”
“But I’ve learned over the years that being your own employer is harder than working for somebody else” DON LONGMUIR