Pulp Fiction Books’ expansion bucks the industry trend
Pulp Fiction Books is a Vancouver bibliophile’s happy hunting ground, but the independent bookseller’s story began in a North Vancouver hardware store almost a half-century ago.
“I’m a North Shore kid,” said Chris Rayshaw, owner and founder of Pulp Fiction. “Down at the foot of Lonsdale there’s an old heritage building which in the ’70s was a place called Paine Hardware.”
The hardware store, opened by John Bemmister Paine in 1911, was a tenant of the Aberdeen Block at First and Lonsdale, along with the post office, the British Columbia Electric Railway company and, briefly, city hall.
Paine Hardware had been operating for 60 years when Rayshaw, just a child, visited with his dad in the mid-’70s. The sheer, wondrous diversity of goods occupying the store’s floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves, the old oak counter, oiled-wood floors and old-time cash register stoked the curiosity and imagination of the young Rayshaw.
“My dad was a very big do-ityourselfer and some of my earliest memories as a little kid are going to Paine Hardware with my dad and you’d walk in, it had squeaky wooden floors ... all these guys in white lab coats bustling around.
“My dad would bring in some little thing like from a hose bibb or something or some little piece of a hot-water heater and the guy who’s on the other side of the counter would instantly know what it was. They would have the part somewhere in the basement, and then he and my dad would have a 10-minute conversation about it.
“Everybody who worked there had been working there for decades and were knowledgeable about everything they sold, and to me at five or six years old, it looked like they had every single hardware part in the world.”
It was Rayshaw ’s introduction to a business that was a benefit to the community it was part of, he said.
“I think in the back of my mind I had been wanting to do something similar, only with books.”
So while the internet ravages chain bookstores (and quite a few independents), many around the Lower Mainland are thriving. Nuggets in Chilliwack, Kestrel in Kitsilano, Renaissance in New Westminster, and Paper Hound and MacLeod’s in downtown Vancouver are just a few of them.
And this spring, the 19-year-old Pulp Fiction Books will move its Commercial Drive store into a heritage building down the street and double its floor space.
“I have been very fortunate ( because) business has increased each year we’ve been open, and the increases have been getting bigger, not smaller, as time goes along,” Rayshaw said.
While someday Rayshaw would perhaps like to be known as the Powell’s of the north, in a nod to the venerable 48-year-old used bookstore in Portland, it wasn’t obvious at the beginning that Pulp Fiction would even get to this point: three stores and an inventory of 80,000 new and used titles.
After a checkered employment history of job-hopping, mostly quitting jobs in anger or getting fired, Rayshaw cashed in what little life’s savings he had at 29, took the boxes of books that filled his parents’ garage from the hundreds of used-book stores he had visited in the U.S. — mostly hard-boiled detective stories, books about lesbian pirates, or wacky science fiction — and opened in 500 square feet at Main and Broadway in 2000.
“It was me, a few thousand books and a cigar box in place of a cash register,” he said.
While major chains have folded or closed stores — the selling of scented soaps, fancy dish towels and whatever other whatnots not helping the bottom line — Rayshaw’s business model is simpler: sell only books, hire knowledgeable staff who are in for the long haul and pay them more than minimum wage (in his case, almost 20 per cent more to start), and stand out from the crowd.
Today he has 10 staff members. All of them have cleared a high hiring bar, he said.
“Chain bookstores are always hiring because people are always leaving,” Rayshaw said.
“I don’t want to do that. I don’t think I’m a benefit to my community if I do that, if I just create some minimum-wage employment.
“So I thought, ‘I’m going to do it differently. I’m going to work a little more myself. I’m not going to hire as quickly as I might like, which is going to be stressful. And when I hire, I’m going to look for people who are thinking about this job as they would, say, if they were apprenticing for a trade.’”
Anyone can — and does — walk through the door of Pulp Fiction Books, and they are a knowledgeable clientele, including lots of local and international writers, who know what they want.
“It’s an amazing job,” Rayshaw said.
“If you want to come to work every day and see stuff you will have never seen before in your life, if you can retain information, if you like to learn new stuff all the time, it’s the best job in the world.”