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It would not be an exaggeration to say that those who love books in the Washington, DC, area are in mourning over the death of Carla Cohen, the co-owner and moving spirit behind independent book store, Politics and Prose. Over the years, the store has become a mainstay, a refuge and a cozy home for people for whom books are a passion and a way of life. (Cohen died October 11 from cancer. Click here to go to the store’s website.) It is the place I stop at most often when heading out of DC in the late afternoon or early evening.
The store, highly successful and profitable, is up for sale. I would love to see some supposedly civic minded organization like C-SPAN or NPR buy the store and keep it the way it is, only a little better over time. This idea, however, is a joke. Neither one of those two media small empires has any known aspirations at deep public service. They are in it for themselves and for spreading their reputations as wonderful places for news, commentary and Congressional hearings. The gap between what so called non-profit organizations are and what they desire to represent is, of course, large, but it is important to remember than non-profits don’t have to accomplish great things, they just have to make people think they are. (Of course, both C-SPAN and NPR draw from what the store offers, especially C-SPAN, which records and replays author’s talks frequently. Free programing, you know.)
It is possible that the beloved P&P might survive Cohen’s death. The store takes in several million dollars a year and its fans include many prominent people with money to spare. Surely they will not let it die? Well, hell, they might, because people are a lot slower to open their checkbooks than their mouths. It might seem like an overstatement, but DC without this one independent book store would be vastly different, sadder and more empty.
In any case, I was wondering about the fate of book stores during a later summer vacation in Maine, a state that has not been overrun by franchise restaurants and stores. Each modest size town in Maine seems to come with two features that appeal directly to me and a lot of other people: a book store and a bicycle shop. Not a bad start. Meanwhile, people in the media centers of our country are crying in their beer about the possible end of book stores and, beyond that, the novel, which is being supported less and less by the huge publishing companies.
Ebooks, we are told, are killing book stores. Before that, it was the big chain book stores that were driving out the smaller, cozier stores where the owners and staff knew books and could help you find something. Oh, don’t forget to put Wal-Mart and Target on your worry list, book lovers, because they sell books too and at a deeper discount that most book stores think they can afford. Is that enough to get you depressed? Amazon and online, discount resales of lightly used books....the list goes on.
Well, some of what you read in the media is actually true or at least partly true. There is trouble all around for books, but my personal eyeing of the scene in Maine indicates that there are larger forces at work, force which have gone unmentioned in the general coverage in places like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.
What is killing book stores? RENT! Shopping centers and malls have to get a certain level of rent from each tenant to pay their mortgages and make their profits. There is a simple formula for how they do business: pay up or get out.
When businesses become successful in a given location, they might be safe from rent increases for three to five years. After that, they are at the mercy of their landlords. The owner of the property knows how the businesses are doing. He knows he can squeeze them for more money because moving a business costs a lot and might even destroy it, by forcing it into a new location. In short, he’s got the store owners by the tender parts at negotiation time. What do the store owners have on their side? Nothing but the threat to move, which is not an entirely empty threat, but one that will surely hurt them, too. They have to weigh the costs of moving against the increases the landlord insists on having.
The big chain stores probably have more power on their side, because the shopping center owner knows, first, that they can pay the rent, and, second, that he is dealing with a professional organization that knows how to fight back. The big chains know what they can pay and still make money and they have driven up rents, or allowed them to rise, to the point where smaller, less cut throat businesses cannot survive.
Independent book stores need to be located in older, seedier shopping areas, perhaps those where the owners have already paid off their mortgages and for whom rent represents a lot more direct profit. In many towns and cities, these semi-rundown areas either don’t exist or they are in such a far-gone state that no business can thrive there. Book stores, art galleries and lower volume businesses need to be grouped into a general area, if possible, so that foot traffic hits them because it is hitting other stores nearby.
The best strategy for a book store, independent or otherwise, is to own their own building. That way, the profits they make stay with them or at least get passed along in payments toward ownership. .It is very difficult, however, to find the perfect combination of location and ownership. Owning the wrong building can prove a trap.
Politics and Prose is located in a little shopping area along Connecticut Avenue, N.W. that does not appear to be under pressure from chains or to go “upscale”. The benefit, then, is that it has been passed over by the waves of big deal development that hit many other areas. P&P has raised the bar by making itself a destination book store with very frequent appearances by authors reading from and promoting their books. It is not uncommon for the store to have a more than one event per day (35 during October, in fact). The store expanded over the years and includes remainder books (downstairs, just before the coffee shop), children’s books, poetry and a lot of serious non-fiction.
The other major factor, beyond rent, that is hurting publishing generally is the way it does business. Books are sent to stores on order by the publishing houses, the store stocks them and then, if unsold, sends them back to the publisher for a full refund. Last I heard, the publishers were also paying for shipping each way. The only risk for the book store is that they might not have enough books on hand to sell, so they order up and then return what they don’t need.
Publishing houses support new novels for about four weeks, on average, it seems to me. Why, I ask, is a novel that comes out in May of no interest by September? Its a novel, for goodness sake, not baked goods. You’ve got one small chance to catch on and, faster than you can say “Oh damn”, its over. These policies help to ensure that most of the novels published every year disappear before the public even has a chance to find them. This is called destroying your own business from within. It is a strategy that publishers are also applying to first novels by refusing to take them at all or granting miniscule advances (How does a thousand bucks sound, buddy?).
There is more to be written on this subject, so I will hope to come back to it in future days on the TerryReport. The next time you see an independent book store, stop in. Buy something, if you can find something you like. And, when you are looking for something to blame for the decline of book stores, don’t think Kindle. Think about the landlords, evil or otherwise, who don’t care what kind of store is in their shopping center, as long as they make more money every year. Also, thank Carla Cohen for helping to create and hold together a wonderful book store that gives heart to an otherwise busy and sometimes heartless city.
Doug Terry, 10.17.10
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