When he opened Main Street Books in 1988, Fred Powell’s plan was limited to serving the community. He had no experience in writing or publishing nor did he have a love of books greater than any other educated person. He had adopted Frostburg and wanted to start a business that his neighbors said they thought would best fit the small mountain downtown.
“I literally put my six-month-old daughter in a stroller, and we walked around town. I just introduced myself to people and talked about, well, what kind of business would you like to see in Frostburg?” he said.
Powell had run businesses before and had plenty of retail experience, enough anyway to know what he didn’t want to do. Clothing was out as was food. Someone suggested the town could use a bookstore. The suggestion captured his interest and imagination, so he packed his daughter up once more and continued his rounds, rephrasing his original question.
“I got so much positive feedback on that that I just started working on it,” he said. “ It took about a year from start to finish.”
Powell wasn’t computer savvy, which wasn’t an impediment in 1988. The American Booksellers Association ran a prospective bookseller school at the time, so he signed up and took the course. He also went to his mother’s favorite bookstore to shadow the owner.
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At the time, he was learning practices that ought to have become obsolete in the last 30 years, tracking inventory by hand, choosing books by likely preference rather than an algorithm. Then he borrowed some money and took the plunge. He held his breath for the next seven or so years.
Give the People What They Want
Since he didn’t have any money, Powell invested time in the community. Volunteering and helping out on community projects. Sponsoring the occasional sports team. Before the turn of the century, there wasn’t much of an author community, such as the type that gathers in independent bookstores today. One of the results was that his established base consisted almost solely of readers and he learned to satisfy that base.
The town of Frostburg, Maryland, occupies an odd niche. Occupying the very western edge of Maryland, it’s nearer to Pennsylvania than to most of the rest of the state. As the ’80s became the ’90s and the millennium turned, big box stores still hadn’t made their way up the mountain.
To this day, the closest thing Frostburg has to a box store is a defunct Rose’s Department store and the odd Dollar General. It’s a college town that in the last few years has blossomed into a tourist destination. It’s as much luck as it is hard work that Powell and his staff developed the kind of relationships that have helped the store endure.
One of those pieces of luck was a change in landlord followed by a change in location. The original Main Street Books occupied a small storefront with 1,500 square feet of selling space. When it looked as if his lease might not be renewed, Powell took advantage of a vacancy next door. That very well may have changed everything.
A Bigger, Better Space
The former furniture store was double the size. It had a loft office and 14-foot pressed-tin ceilings that wouldn’t be all the rage again for another decade. Cavernous when it was empty, the added headroom allowed Powell to pack it with books without creating claustrophobia among the patrons.
“I would highly recommend a 14-foot ceiling if you can do it,” Powell said, “because my bookcases are 8 feet tall and in my original store they almost hit the ceiling.”
The big glass double doors open wide enough to drive a Mini Cooper through and the display windows let in plenty of light. Powell didn’t even paint the walls, leaving the entire inside essentially untouched.
“The beauty of this was that the people that owned that furniture store for almost 100 years didn’t do anything to the space, so they didn’t paint over the woods.”
The staircase leading up to the offices, the trim and molding all are original and amplify the sense of the place. They’re among several unquantifiables that give the place soul.
Powell had 75 volunteers on moving day, including a Boy Scout Troop. It’s a perk of being involved in a small community for what was at the time only a decade. Librarians from the local university helped shelve the books, and two days after Powell closed for the final time in his old space, the new Main Street Books was open as if nothing had changed.
As the years passed, Powell would still grab the odd table left at the curb for decoration and install it to create a new nook somewhere among the stacks.
Each of his three booksellers is responsible for a section and inventory still is performed the way Powell learned to do it in the late ’80s, by hand. The booksellers just know what is selling and what isn’t. They each unpack and shelve the books that belong in their sections and advise about what moves and what doesn’t.
Frostburg’s Main Street Books More Than Survived the Pandemic
The store still runs on pen and paper. Although he has a cash register now, Powell saw no pressing need to join the digital book revolution, preferring to let it pass. The store has been isolated enough that not only did it survive the rise of the box store, but its prominence among the region’s avid readers provided a buffer against Amazon. In fact, the store has no website—just a Facebook page.
It was the kind of place that should have been devastated by the pandemic, but things have actually improved at Main Street Books.
To be clear, there were a harrowing few months. With the shutdown, the booksellers were laid off, but they returned sooner than anyone might have expected. As brutal as the pandemic was for some booksellers, others were caught up in the national realization that books are still worth reading and bookstores were still worth having.
“I ran the store behind the scenes for those two months doing mail out home deliveries, curbside pickup. However, for a while, you weren’t supposed to do curbside pickup, so we couldn’t do that. I would just leave it in the doorway and people will come and get it,” Powell said. “After that, when we were able to reopen…we kind of were able to ramp up things like home deliveries because it was more than just me doing that.”
People got a kick out of seeing him biking around town delivering books. The booksellers came back on for deliveries as well. People bought gift certificates that they wouldn’t use for another year or so.
While other bookstores were upgrading their websites and streamlining their ordering process, Powell and his booksellers were taking orders by phone, email and Facebook message. They hand-wrote credit card slips. They walked the block to the post office, sometimes mailing books halfway around the world to satisfy orders.
Then, as with so many other rural places, telecommuters from the cities discovered the depressed housing prices and the relative cost of living and began making their way to the region. As the country started opening in fits and starts, Frostburg’s budding tourist industry got another boost, and, just like that, Main Street Books was back on solid footing.
Powell doesn’t expect to see the kind of growth that he has over the last two years, but his store at least has leveled up.
“Summer of 2021 was just huge, and that was mainly because of the newfound tourists, so the whole year was just incredible,” Powell said. “There’s more normality to it now.”
*Main Street Books is located at 2 E Main St Frostburg, MD 21532