Dodging Bullets in Book Wars

This is the tale of two independent bookstores. One East Coast, one West Coast. One that lost the battle with the superstores, the other still in the ring.

Jeannette Watson, 54, ran Manhattan’s Books & Co. on Madison Avenue for 20 years until the rapidly changing marketplace put a period on her endeavors in 1997. Margie Ghiz, 59, is Midnight Special Bookstore’s guiding light. A Venice institution since 1970, the store moved to Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade in 1995, where it is book-ended by a Borders Books & Music and Barnes & Noble Booksellers.

Ghiz, in jeans and rolled-up shirt sleeves, and Watson, in black Chanel slippers and flowing periwinkle skirt, are as different as Susan Sontag and Virginia Woolf. But last week at Midnight Special, the two chatted about the challenges of keeping independent bookstores alive in the shadow of the superstores. We also invited two chains; neither was able to participate. (Watson is the subject of Lynne Tillman’s “Bookstore--The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co” (Harcourt Brace & Co., $25.)

Jeannette Watson: l really liked looking over all of the [book] catalogs, but I didn’t enjoy the buying as much because I liked being downstairs [with customers]. . . . The people working downstairs . . . I really wanted them to love to read. And I would want them to be extremely nice to the customers and polite and not criticize their taste because sometimes the staff could be extremely . . . condescending. And some people were afraid to come into Books & Co because they thought it was maybe too intellectual. So I tried to make it be a very friendly, open place, so people would come in and then maybe you could get them to read something better. We didn’t carry Danielle Steele and a lot of very commercial authors.

Margie Ghiz: We don’t either.

Watson: But if I could think of an author that was maybe like that person, only better, I would recommend it. One of the nicest things that happened when the store closed is a woman who came up to me and said, “I was never a reader when your bookstore opened, but based on what you’ve recommended over the years, now I’m reading the complete works of Balzac.” I thought that was what it was all about. You [feel] assured the world is a better place if someone takes the right book home--and, I’m sure you feel this way too, Margie, that it could change their life some way. . . .

Ghiz: True. And when someone comes to me looking for a job, I try to find out if they have a passion. Music, cinema, sports, anything, I don’t care. That matters to me; education doesn’t. I want a diverse staff. It matters tremendously in this store. I want it to reflect L.A., and L.A. is predominately a minority place, so it’s important to me that the staff, the books and everything reflect that. . . .

Watson: Sometimes I’d find myself talking people out of a sale.

Ghiz: If they are going to ask you [about a book], you owe it to them.

Watson: It’s wonderful to have that power. . . . I remember once my first husband’s divorce lawyer wrote a book. [Laughter.] “No! We’re not going to carry that book in this store!” I felt so good about that too.

Ghiz: [Laughs.] You should have invited him in for a reading and then closed the store down about five minutes before he got there.

Watson: I remember the first time I felt the impact of the chains, because I had a customer who spent a lot of money, and she was part of our Christmas sales, and she was really involved in the art world. And I ordered this Fra Angelico book, and it was this $100 book, and I expected her to buy a lot of copies--probably 10. And she walked into the bookstore, and she picked out all of these little books, and then she said: “I found that book at discount. And I was kind of stunned. But that was the beginning of the whole thing . . . in ‘87, ’88.

Ghiz: That’s right.

Watson: Once we straightened out some of our financial problems in the first year, the next years were wonderful. It was a booming time of the stock market. We were at a great location. People from all over the world would come in. And then it started to change. And the most irritating thing would be . . people would walk in with pads and pencils and write down titles of our lovingly selected, displayed books! We would throw them out of the store. But that was just the worst! I feel that that’s my mission now, to talk to people about how important it is to spend more money to buy their book at an independent bookstore and cherish the bookstores that are left because there are so few of them.

Ghiz: I think one of our big mistakes is [the way] that we have defined bookstores. Instead of saying, it’s a new day . . . like a store in El Monte that is both a frame store and a bookstore.

Watson: Joyce Meskis at the Tattered Cover in Denver is absolutely brilliant. . . . She has these two huge stores! She has her own parking garage. The best restaurant in town is in her store. It’s 4,000 square feet of selling space. But she says it’s hard. . . . Look at all you do to stay part of the community. I’d tried so many different things. First, I spent a fortune hiring a publicist, but the publicist didn’t really get it . . . then I hired a marketing person, who was very crude and the staff hated him. And they hated the idea of the store being marketed as a commodity. Sometimes now I think if I had let the customers know that the store might close, that we might have been able to save it. But that’s kind of dicey, because I don’t think people like losers. So you try to appear like a winner. . . . But the bottom line was the sales in our heyday were over $1.4 million, and then we lost about $300,000, and I just could not get it back. . . . When we announced that the store was closing, everyone was heartbroken.

What I hope is that the consumers will really get educated: that they need to spend more money buying their books to maintain all these wonderful, very quirky, very different small bookstores around the country. I’m a symbol of someone who lost their bookstore because her customers didn’t understand that.

Ghiz: But I think it’s more or less an end of an era. I just think what’s being lost here is different from what might be lost in another type of business. . . . The access to choice needs to be guaranteed. That’s why we’re here.