San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
INDIE BOOK SHOPS HAVE NURTURED US. IT’S OUR TURN
We can save them all this winter if we just give them our business
You remember all the details during the most cinematic moments in your life. I was in a little strip mall in San Mateo on the day I started to care about reading. The owner of Peninsula Comics pulled up in a dune buggy, walked through the cluttered store and opened up the world. I had no friends who read comics, and had never been inside a real comic book store. But the student was ready, and comic store Yoda appeared.
“You like the XMen? Then you’ll love this ... Your local corner store missed an issue of The Secret Wars? I think I have the back issue over here …”
On the list of things you will never be able to find on Amazon. com is your tribe. That happens in bars and museums and gymnasiums and community centers. And it happens as much as anywhere in independent bookstores and comic book shops.
For much of local retail and entertainment, the future is painfully out of customers’ control. We’re essentially helpless to outside forces, whether it’s stimulus money, forgiving landlords or some Illuminatilike force of wealthy San Franciscans who look to their own resources to preserve the city’s neighborhoods.
But the future of local bookstores is 100% on us. And we are capable of saving them now.
For Green Apple Books coowner Pete Mulvihill, the pandemic was his pessimist nightmare coming to fruition.
“I always think that we’re doomed,” he said, during a phone call last week from the flagship store on Clement Street in San Francisco. “My wife makes fun of me because the sky has been falling for the 27 years I’ve been here. And in March I finally said, ‘ Hey, I’m right.’ ”
The sky did start to fall, with a sudden forced closure on March 16. Online sales, at that point 1% or 2% of the business, became the threestore chain’s only income. Green Apple adapted, quickly simplifying online orders simpler and adding virtual recommendations and other customer experiences. ( Green Apple and many other Bay Area bookstores have since reopened for instore service.) The community turned out, in ways large and small. For the first time, local schools started making substantial orders from the store.
“It took us I think 12 years to do a million dollars in sales on our website,” Mulvihill said. “And then we did it in the first four or five months” of the pandemic.
The bookstore is still behind for the year, but its shortterm survival is not in doubt. And somehow, in the middle of a pandemic with a city order that banned browsing, the institution became even closer to its customers and the community.
“People literally saw storefronts boarded up,” Mulvihill said. “They saw their favorite businesses closed and weren’t sure if
they’d be open or not. It really got through to people. ‘ Wow, if I don’t spend my money at this place, it’s not going to be here.’ ”
Ask a successful author to tell you when they fell in love with reading, and their words will paint a picture with stunning detail.
For “Smile” and “Guts” graphic novelist Raina Telgemeier, it was time spent with her father, Denis, after school, at the San Francisco State University campus bookstore near her childhood home.
“He would pick me up after school, and my bus stop was on the campus,” Telgemeier remembered during a September interview on The Chronicle’s “Total SF” podcast. “It had these big concrete beams and all these weird angles that ran through it. And big picture windows. The light would stream in in the afternoons. We would just spend hours. ‘ You go look at your stuff. I’ll go look at my stuff. If you want something, I’ll buy it for you.’ ”
Interviewing authors, I’ve heard a version of this story over and over. Romance novelist Jasmine Guillory fell in love with reading as a child wandering through Cody’s Books in Berkeley and Lane’s Books on Park Boulevard in Oakland, both gone now. “It’s the love of discovery that I have missed in not being able to wander around ( during the pandemic),” she said during a July interview.
“Hilo” and “Pedro and Me” author Judd Winick’s memories are almost identical to my own. As a child he’d wander into a comic book shop in New York, and have some of his first adult conversations about nerdy topics, including the Marvel “What If” series and its similarities to “The Twilight Zone.” “It was the first time that I actually found in hindsight that I was really talking about storytelling,” he said.
When you hear enough of these stories, it becomes clear that bookstores don’t just have a role as retail outposts. They are also factories and forges, shaping the future of the art we consume.
We’re stuck with this feeling of helplessness. Neighbors can buy memberships, make donations and pressure politicians, but so many of the businesses we love — bars and arcades and theaters and small concert venues — are physically closed. The future is in large part dependent on forces beyond the consumer.
But the bookstores and comic book shops are differEric
ent, because we can keep them whole now. By simply shifting our behavior, we have the power to save them all.
Rediscover your local bookstore or comic book shop, or adopt a new one using Indiebound. org, which has a bookstore finder on its home page. Commit to make all future preorders from independent bookstores. If there’s no one close, use Amazon alternative Bookshop. org, which has raised nearly $ 10 million for local bookstores.
“I love Amazon. Amazon supports my work. But they will be fine,” Winick said.
“If you can take the extra few minutes to reach out to your independent bookstore and order your books there, they will benefit in a much greater way.”
Adds “Pearls Before Swine” and “Timmy Failure” author Stephan Pastis:
“If you’re not supporting the local bookstore, you will rue the day that bookstore closes. Those people care about the community. They’re another essential part of it.”
Support the growing number of authors who have signed stock deals with local bookstores. Pastis signs for Copperfield’s Books near his North Bay home, drawing a character in each book. Winick signs for Folio Books in Noe Valley. Telgemeier, even after becoming one of the most popular young adult authors of the last decade, signs books by the hundreds for mail order exclusively at Green Apple.
Authors are doing their part. Former CBS anchor Dan Rather has been on a Twitter tear lately, urging fans of his book “What Unites Us” to choose an indie bookstore. Mulvihill said a Twitter exchange led to podcast host Roman Mars signing hundreds of copies of his “The 99% Invisible City” book for Green Apple.
“There’s no one thing that saves us. It’s the opposite of death by 1,000 cuts,” Green Apple’s Mulvihill said. “A hundred little improvements and changes is what keeps us going. The school orders are one thing that helped. The signed copies and preorders are another thing. … All the things add up and matter to our survival.”
The most cinematic moments are yet to come in the Bay Area.
When it’s safe, people will come back to the restaurants and movie theaters and bookstores and the other institutions that help define our neighborhoods.
Citizens will be more grateful than ever before and will visit these spots not just as an errand or diversion but an act of civic duty. Meanwhile, the small businesses will be ready, having finetuned their online shopping and 21st century customer service as a matter of survival.
“If there’s a silver lining for any of this, I feel like the ‘ shop local movement’ accelerated by about 10 years,” Mulvihill said. “It sort of forced us to adapt.”
Our independent businesses can thrive for generations. But first they must survive this single winter. And right now, we must be hellbent on saving as many as we can. As DoorDash founders become billionaires, ask your favorite local restaurant if they’re benefiting from the deal, and commit to do what’s best for them. Find out if your local hardware outpost can order the propane, heat lamp or patio umbrella you’ve been getting at the big chain store. Pledge to preorder exclusively with indie bookstores in 2021 and beyond, until they know you by name.
Make every decision through that filter. And allow 2020 to serve not just as a wound, but a lesson.
That choosing convenience over community has a cost: that the bookstores and comic book shops are fighting valiantly for their futures. And if they’re gone when this economic horror is over, there will be no one to blame but ourselves.