An interview with Downtown Brown Books, ABAA

Biblio checks in with Downtown Brown Books, ABAA to learn more about their book business, collecting interests and more! To view and shop their inventory, click here.

When did you get started in bookselling?

I started quoting books from AB Bookman's Weekly in the early 1990s. Before the Internet, if you wanted to find a book, customers would go into a used bookstore and fill out a want request. The bookstore would save them up and then take out an ad in AB, a weekly magazine mostly filled with classified advertisements. If you had a copy of the book, you'd send the advertiser a postcard with a brief description and your price. Sending the postcard meant you'd reserve the book for a couple of weeks. If the customer wanted your copy, the advertising bookseller would mail you a check and you'd send them the book. If you didn't get a check, you'd know you were free to sell the book to someone else. It sounds cumbersome, but it actually worked.

What drew you to bookselling?

Ever since I was a kid, I collected stuff. Minerals, coins, stamps, matchbooks, and then books. At some point I realized you could also sell books, so I started doing that. And now I don't know how to do anything else.

Did you have any mentors in becoming a bookseller?

My biggest regret is not working for an antiquarian bookseller when I was just starting out. But geography and the need for money got in the way of that. As a result, most everything I know has been learned the hard way. The bookstore I visited most was Serendipity Books, in Berkeley. I learned a lot from the owner, Peter Howard, because I was willing to let him lecture me. Bolerium Books, just across the Bay Bridge from Serendipity, in San Francisco, was my best source of books in the early days. They were selling all sorts of things--Chicano studies, Marxism, LGBTQ books--that were way outside the mainstream in the 1990s, but almost seem normal now. It was great to be able to see such unusual material and to learn from them as a customer.

What are your specialties as a dealer?

I'm a generalist at heart. I try to specialize, but I can't seem to stick with it. Someone once told me they specialize in whatever they bought most recently. That accurately describes my approach to bookselling. Lately, I have acquired a lot of science fiction and modern first editions. But I also bought a collection of clock books (mostly sold) and navigation books (going fast). So you never know what you'll find on my shelves.

What's the most amazing book you've ever sold?

Like most booksellers, I'm much more excited by the things I haven't sold than by the books I had in the past. But if I had to pick something, it would be the handcolored edition of Codex Espangliensis, an artist book with text by Guillermo Gomez-Peña and artwork by Enrique Chagoya. It was designed and printed by Felicia Rice at Moving Parts Press, in Santa Cruz. It's an extraordinary book, a single long sheet, bound like an ancient Mexican codex and printed on bark-like paper, filled with imagery based on popular culture of the US and Mexico. There were only five copies of the handcolored issue. I had the book for all of a couple of hours. It came in one afternoon and was gone by the end of the day. You can still buy the trade edition, published by City Lights.

What is your favorite part of being a bookseller?

I love the research - I enjoy figuring out what something is and trying to add something new to the collective knowledge about a book. I also like working with collectors to build unusual collections. One of my favorite customers is interested in a very particular kind of cookbook. I would have thought there were only 50 that met her criteria, but when I met her ten years ago, she already had 300. Most are $10-20, but over the years, I've added more than a hundred titles to her collection. Not because it's especially lucrative but because I think she has an interesting idea.

Do you have an open storefront or have you in the past?

For twelve years I ran an open shop, and it's still an open shop, but I've relocated to another city (Portland, Oregon) where I have an office that is open to the public by appointment only.

If so, do/did you have any bookstore pets?

No. I'm against them. The best cat I ever had was the worst kind of bookstore cat. He loved to use his front paws to pull all the books of the bottom shelf.

What is the funniest / strangest / scariest thing that ever happened in your store?

A big rock star came into my shop once and spent a long time looking around. When she came up to the counter, I wrote my co-worker a note, "That's Big Rock Star!" I was trying to be sly, but my co-worker couldn't read my handwriting and didn't recognize her. When the Big Rock Star went to pay, she handed me this blank card with a magnetic strip. I've seen some fancy credit cards before, but nothing like this. I swiped it through the machine. Nothing. Then I looked again, and said, "I'm sorry, I think this is your hotel room key."

What is your favorite bookshop (other than your own)?

It's too bad that there are so many fewer bookstores around these day. I go to Powell's City of Books most often. I would go to Adam Davis's Division Leap, but he moved from Portland about the time I got here. Division Leap is almost more of an art project than a bookstore because what they do is so often way ahead of everyone else. Rachel Phillips of Burnside Rare Books, here in Portland, is a really smart bookseller. She somehow manages to combine the best traits of traditional antiquarian booksellers with a seemingly instinctual understanding of the Internet age.

What do you personally like to read? Collect?

I don't like to read books less than 20 years old. If people aren't reading it after 20 years, I'm fine not reading it, too. I also read a lot of non-fiction related to whatever books I've most recently acquired. I ended up with many books from the library of the scientist Stephen Jay Gould, so I've been reading all of his books this year. I have two book collections, both very nearly complete, one of first editions of the Indian writer R. K. Narayan, and the other of books by the Berkeley poet and children's book author, Gary Soto. Unfortunately, I have almost everything from them, and what I don't have, I've never even seen. But there's always hope.

What's your favorite book you personally own? Would you sell it, if the price were right?

My wife, the writer Amy Stewart, dedicated a few of her books to me, and Gary Soto dedicated one too. In book collecting, the best copy of any book is the dedication copy, the copy signed by the author to the person she names on the dedication page. I suppose I would sell those dedication copies, but the price would have to be a lot more than right, it would need to be extraordinary.

What one book would you buy if price were no object?

An inscribed copy of Swami and Friends, R. K. Narayan's first book, in a dust jacket. I'm only aware of one copy of the book in a dust jacket and my only remote chance of getting it will require me to out live him. I have three copies without a dust jacket, all with small variations - such are the compulsions of book collectors.

If you were stranded on a desert island and could bring three books, what would they be?

Let's see - I'd definitely want one of my wife's books. Probably Girl Waits with Gun (by Amy Stewart). It's her first novel and the book she is most passionate about. Then I'd say Ursula Le Guin's omnibus The Books of Earthsea, which has the Earthsea Trilogy, a set of books I've read many times. That edition includes a few things I haven't read yet, which would be nice. Plus it is set in an world of island archipelagoes, which seems appropriate. Then I'd need something practical, like Bradford Angier's How to Stay Alive in the Woods. How to Stay Alive Under Some Palm Trees would be more useful, but no one has written that book yet.