Myles Friedman

Post Office Problems & Forging Ahead

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I am not ashamed to admit how little I know about the business I am starting, but my ignorance of some things even surprises me. I learned this week that, though my address is in the downtown center of a busy county seat, the U.S. Postal Service will not to deliver mail to me. It turns out that several blocks of downtown Pittsboro have been excluded from mail delivery for many years. We used to have a post office one block from the main street, but some time ago the post office moved a mile away, leaving downtown businesses no way to get mail other than by driving out of town to collect from a post office box. Not only that, but mail correctly addressed to me is being returned to sender, including my first power and water bills.

So, of course I had to rent a P.O. box this week, adding to my list of unexpected expenses. And changing my business address on many new accounts is added to my list of unexpected time wasters. I am not going to rant about the post office, or how (with all the paperwork I’ve completed for local officials) someone might have saved me a lot of trouble if they had mentioned this bizarre condition, but I could.

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Facebook and Customer Communication

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This week Circle City Books and Music became the unexpected recipient of more Facebook attention than Tom Cruise’s date registry. Does that sound like an exaggeration? I suppose. But when, on Wednesday, the turnstiles started clicking faster than I could keep up, that’s how it seemed. We created our Facebook page August 1 and after five weeks, thanks to a large and indulgent family and several friends,  31 people had “Liked” us; fewer than one per day. Then Wednesday hit and in the space of about six hours 27 new people, mostly strangers, were added to our “Like” roster.

There is a lot about Facebook that I don’t understand. How is it that for weeks virtually no one had visited the Circle City page, then, all of a sudden, cascades of new people appear on the site? I know 27 people won’t exactly crash anyone’s server, but for us it was a 2700 percent increase in daily traffic. If your 401K had that kind of one day increase, you’d notice it. But does it mean anything? Are these future customers or are they the inhabitants of the online world and, as such, Amazon shoppers? And where do they get off calling this thing a ‘book’? A book is a tangible object with a finite and measurable mass; Facebook is the opposite of that.

In any case, after the initial shock wore off, I tried to take advantage of this apparent interest in our store before these disembodied souls had time to dissolve into cyberspace never to be heard from again. I posted a community survey, asking the community to tell me what they like to read. What genres, what books, what authors. This is something that couldn’t have been done 30 years ago when I was last in the bookselling business. But if 30 people tell me now, as one respondent already has, that they want “science fiction, fantasy, urban fantasy and horror,” that will certainly change my approach to book buying.

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Lots of Painting While the Bookstore Opening Gets Closer

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The days are hurtling by as I proceed toward my mid-October opening, leaving me exhausted at night until about four a.m., when my panic alarm rings and I find myself wide awake and unable to sleep. What keeps me up is a long list of unmade decisions: the final design of the store’s logo, the evaluation and purchase of inventory software (or whether to open without any), the choice of credit card processors, advertising options, like whether to buy time during the Super Bowl…

The painter at work

Meanwhile I grind away at the books and shelves. Early in the week, I finished the demolition of a private library, which is now boxed and housed in my storage unit. The seller’s home had been condemned – it’s being replaced by a park and some new condos – so I had the privilege of ripping the bookshelves off the walls and loading them into my truck, and then tearing the front porch apart to back my truck and loading ramp right into the front door. That took two days, with more help from my friends. Later in the week I devoted myself to getting the shelving ready for books, and reducing the mountains of boxes that loom over me.

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Is it Difficult for a New Bookshop to Find Books?

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The weather in North Carolina has turned a corner toward fall, which means that occasionally I can open the doors to my store and let some air in. I’ve been spending most of my days behind my new counter, organizing sorting, cleaning, pricing and studying. Even though there is a “Closed” sign visible, with the doors open, people poke their heads in, wondering what’s inside and when we open. I’ve been giving tours to anyone interested, and several people have arrived carrying books to sell.

I am starting to feel buried by books. I think I can squeeze 15,000 books onto my shelves, still leaving room for records and cds. But I think I have collected over 25,000 books since mid July. When I started, I wondered if I would be able to accumulate enough books to open in just two months; now I don’t know what to do with all my books. They are rising around my ears like an advancing flood. I rented my third storage unit this week, mostly to make enough room in the store to construct shelving. It may turn out that storage becomes a permanent expense.

The books I added this week are an astounding assortment. As I mentioned last time, there are 150 circus books. There are also many old railroading books, a collection of old tool catalogues, 50 books about mountains, a whole shelf from the 1950s about atomic energy, 20 volumes of My Book House – I could go on, but the fact is I don’t have the shelf space for such esoterica. Perhaps I will rotate special sections in and out of the store for a week at a time, keeping the rest in storage. It’s too early to say for sure; first I have to get shelves in place and then see what fits. Curiously, I am finding very few of the books I most like to read: Orwell, Waugh, Maugham, Greene – the mid-century Brits. Over time, maybe I’ll pass my odd tastes on to customers.

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A Simple Model for Pricing Paperbacks

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I am finally home after 10 days on the road. My trip was mostly devoted to burying my father, but I did find time to visit several bookstores in Massachusetts, a state lush with them. One store in Danvers was a discouragement; it had more 10,000 square feet and 100,000 books, including nearly everything you could think of. It made my 1,220 square feet seem awfully meager. But then I visited a tiny store in Arlington which was warm, inviting and full of promise. I wish I had more time to browse, but I did note that there were three people working, which I took as a very encouraging sign.

I am now sitting in my store surrounded by empty shelves and over-stuffed boxes, and the conspicuous silence of solitary work. I have to price many thousands of books, and no one can do that but me. I can farm out the sorting, the carrying, the cleaning, the sign painting, the shelf building and the logo designing; the pricing belongs to me.

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Opening A Bookstore, Relocating Bookstock

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I am writing this from Lynnfield, Mass., where I am preparing for my father’s funeral. He passed away last week, in the middle of my hectic transfer of the contents of one bookstore to another. His death was no surprise; he had been declining for months and barely alive for the last 10 days. Still, I’d have to say that business seems awfully trivial under such circumstances. Operations are on hold back home, but I can report the following about my big move.

Soon to be Circle City Books

Twenty-thousand books, packed tightly, might fit in 500 boxes. But where does one find 500 boxes? For me, buying them is a most disagreeable option; and even if I wanted to pay U-Haul $1.50 each, they don’t have 500 on hand. Your local grocery store, if you get there at the right time, before they crush and bale their boxes, might have 15 or 20. Then there is the liquor store and the drug store. In the end, the best place is the recycling center where every few hours a new supply gets dropped off, cut down flat and left for scavengers to reclaim. Over the course of three days, I assembled an army of 150 boxes, far too few. Perhaps if I had more time I could have collected enough, but I did the best I could.

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The Birth of a Used Bookshop

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This is the first of what I hope will be a series of reports on the birth of a book store. From where I sit today, 21 days after the idea was first conceived, the future looks like a maze of unanswered questions. As I go along, I’ll describe how I figure things out, and then share the results. First, though some background.

Some thirty years ago, for several years, I helped run a used book and record store in Carrboro, N.C. The rent was $200 a month and we sold many books for a dollar and most records for two dollars. We kept the money in a shoe box, didn’t take credit cards and we never had a telephone.  We had lots of websites – and the spiders who built them.

All that makes me an experienced bookseller, but one with practically no useful expertise. Still, the idea of going back into the stacks had been poking around my mind for several years, and last month I noticed an empty storefront in downtown Pittsboro, N.C., near where I live. What appealed to me about the store site was that it’s a corner building with windows on two sides and a long wall facing traffic coming into town on which to place a large sign. And the driveway that runs along the side goes with the building, with space in the back for four cars, giving me control of eight parking places. The building has the look of a small cottage with stuccoed walls that I will paint in a yet to be determined color. Inside, are 1,220 usable square feet, plus a small bathroom. It was once a law office, so there are several walls of built-in bookshelves.

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