Bookstores see the light
Shops survive pandemic with help of virtual tools, express hope as restrictions ease
On a bright March afternoon, visitors to Point Reyes Station in Marin enjoyed its outdoor splendor, casually strolling along the remnants of its port and railroad station — masked but relaxed amid an isolated setting of hills, sea ridges and coastal dunes and prairie.
Some daytrippers slipped into the hamlet’s cozy bookstore.
While the selection at Point Reyes Books has something for everyone, most titles below its whale mural and rustic chandelier speak to the wildest parts of the Tomales Bay, not to mention the greater history, poetry and ecology of California. These are books suited to the sweeping terrain beyond the windows. These are shelves that feel stocked with a purpose.
As customers browsed the jackets of “The Oyster War,” “How to Read Water” and “Monarchs of the Sea,” employee Dawn Steiner chatted with them from a register fortified in plexiglass.
Inevitably, visitors turned the conversation from nature books to who among the six people practicing distancing in the store were vaccinated. Such oddly personal exchanges are just part of the current moment for Point Reyes Books.
A year ago, some observers wondered if independent bookstores, though beloved fixtures in coastal culture, would even survive the pandemic. The mandate to keep their doors locked seemed to have no end in sight.
Yet as strangers in Point Reyes swapped needle stories that day, it felt like the end was finally in sight. Many Bay Area stores are not only open again, but some often have eager customers maxing out their limited capacity.
That hope, combined with a weapon that emerged in the chaos to help Bay Area booksellers compete with Amazon, is adding to their sense of optimism.
“What we’ll be most looking forward to is that energy that comes from having a full store,” said Stephen Sparks, coowner of Point Reyes Books. “In the end, there’s nothing that can replace that.”
Sparks had worked at San Francisco’s Green Apple Books for a decade before buying his store in 2017. He jumped into the venture with his wife, Molly Parent, a veteran of the city’s innovative youth literacy program, 826 Valencia. The couple soon got Point Reyes Books profitable by making it the Bay Area’s destination for curated environmental writing and literature of untamed places.
Their own little touches, like peppering the store with thoughtful, handwritten notes about why they love certain titles, also endeared the place to readers. Author events became another staple of success. Then COVID19 hit and threatened to turn back all the progress.
Point Reyes Books began hosting virtual events on Crowdcast with a sliding scale for tickets. The store’s election day event with Rebecca Solnit and Terry Tempest Williams drew over 2,500 virtual attendees. These digital symposiums have been stabilizing, though Sparks longs for a return to inperson talks.
“As great as the virtual events are, they can be a little anticlimactic when they’re done and you turn the computer off,” he said. “After it’s over, you can’t go have a beer with someone.”
Another strategy to bolster the store was enrolling in Bookshop.org, a website that combines the resources of independent bookstores across the nation to collectively offer selection, prices, convenience and a delivery system that competes with Amazon.
When customers buy from Bookshop, they can specify which participating bookstore will receive the full profit from that order. Bookshop also has an earnings pool that’s evenly split between all participants, so the bigger the site gets, the more all indies profit. According to Bookshop’s virtual map, more than 42 bookstores in the Bay Area are using it.
It’s a way of harnessing love for small businesses that was vital to Walden Pond Books during the pandemic. Walden Pond is an Oakland institution, a possibilityinvoking book portal saddled in a hardware store from the Great Depression just a block from the Grand Lake Theatre.
The store was founded in 1973 by Marshall Curatolo, whose son Paul has been working there since he was 10. Paul said that when COVID hit, Paycheck Protection Program loans combined with Oaklanders rallying to a GoFundMe campaign that raised $108,455 saved Walden Pond. But, he adds, Bookshop.org was another important weapon in the arsenal.
“We jumped on it and it really helped,” Paul said. “The stores are able to get about 75% of what they
would have had made on a sale if someone had physically come in, and we’re not doing any extra work to get that revenue.”
Bookshop.org is tailored to the “buy local” mindset, but some stores have seen that mantra manifest in other ways. One is Book Passage in San Francisco, which was forced to make seismic adjustments during the pandemic.
Owner Elaine Petrocelli has hosted some of the Bay Area’s biggest literary events for nearly 40 years. Petrocelli has consistently brought wellknown authors to Book Passage at her store on the waterfront in San Francisco’s Ferry Building and at her original location in Corte Madera.
Last March, as things got overwhelming, two loyal Book Passage customers reached out to help. They were part of a company called Extended Session, which hosts virtual scientific conferences. The outfit helped Petrocelli launch her Conversations with Authors series. Petrocelli’s relationships with acclaimed authors Isabel Allende, Tobias Wolff, Anne Lamott and Khaled Hosseini also paid off. Each agreed to be part of the series. Some of the talks are free, while others are ticketed events that come with the speaker’s book.
“Even with the free events, we’ve been very lucky that most people have chosen to buy the book through us, which means so much, because I know things are hard for everyone right now,” Petrocelli said.
If the pandemic has been hard to navigate for Petrocelli, one of the region’s most experienced booksellers, it’s even more perplexing for new owners like Chris Saccheri and Flo Grosskurth.
They run Linden Tree Books, a spacious, familyfriendly store nestled in the historic district of Los Altos. Linden Tree specializes in children’s books and young adult fiction. Saccheri and Grosskurth took over in September of 2019, five months before the pandemic hit.
“We were still learning the ropes,” Saccheri said. “We had to do a lot of different things to keep paying the bills and stay afloat.”
That included joining Bookshop.org, operating Linden Tree’s own direct ordering system, offering curbside pickup and doorstep delivery, and gradually — as rules allowed — beginning to let shoppers back into the store. A note on Linden Tree’s window reads, “Don’t let indie bookstores become a work of fiction.” Saccheri said it was his book deliveries around the South Bay that lifted his spirits on that front.
“When you show up to a doorstep and see an Amazon package already sitting there, you know how easy it would have been for that customer to buy the book that way instead,” Saccheri said. “And I would see that, people who would go to that extra length to help keep an independent bookstore alive in their community.”