Brentano’s

One of the recurring characteristics of “change” is that the first iteration of something new looks a lot like what it is replacing. So it has been with ebooks and ebook retailing. The ebooks themselves have, for the most part, been the same as the print books except rendered on a screen instead of on paper. And when we say “the same”, we mean right down to duplicating meaningless blank pages and the legend often found in print books that tells you how many printings the book has had. (This still happens frequently; I’ve just experienced it on The Big Short which I’m now reading in B&N’s reader.)

And ebook retailing has also imitated print book retailing in that the emphasis has been on the assembling the largest possible aggregation of book title choices in one place. This is a paradigm that makes intuitive sense in the physical world; once I’ve driven to my local superstore, I don’t want to find the mysteries are here but the cookbooks are in a store down the block.

It has been a long-established “fact” (although I question if it is still true, as we’ll explain later) that the larger is the selection of books available in a single location, the more powerful is the magnet to attract customers. My father found this out when he was in charge of the Brentano’s chain in the 1960s. Their Short Hills, New Jersey store was the worse-performing store in the chain until they doubled its title selection. And then, like magic, it became the best-performing store in the chain.

Amazon dot com reproved the point when they went into business in the mid-1990s. Although they were not the first online bookstore, they were the first to really attempt to carry everything. In fact, they went beyond carrying everything by providing a database (obtained from Baker & Taylor, in which there is another story) that not only showed just about all the books in print but also books that were no longer in print! Conventional publishing and retailing theory at the time would have said it was a bad move to return suggestions in search results that were books not available for sale. But, of course, it built their competitive advantage. They rapidly became the best place to search because of the completeness of their database and, actually, confirming to a customer that “what you want is a book that was indeed published but is not now readily available” made it easier to sell the customer a substitute. Whereas the the store (online or off) that didn’t have the unavailable book but didn’t also provide that information found it harder to close the alternate sale.

The point about the importance of selection was proven again by Amazon when they launched the Kindle in November, 2007 and lit the fire for what is still a spreading conflagration of ebook reading. Before Kindle, there were perhaps 100,000 ebook titles available as PDFs that could be read on a full-function computer, but not nearly as many in formats that could work on smaller devices (Palm, Mobi, Dotlit). Amazon launched Kindle with about 150,000 titles and used their market power to get big publishers to put more and more of the newest, hottest books into their format closer and closer to publication date.

There were other features of the Kindle (the ability to load books wirelessly and instantly without going through an intermediary device; its easy-to-read e-ink; its built in dictionary; Amazon’s deep relationship with very large numbers of online book buyers; and, of course, eye-catching prices relative to the print edition prices of the hottest new books) that fueled its near instantaneous success, but the robust title selection was a critical element.

So to that point — one could say to this point — the largest possible selection in one place has been as important to the success of an ebook retailer (obviously: online) as it was historically to a print book retailer with a physical store.

Early in the decade, it occurred to me that the magnetic power of the large selection in one physical store had sharply diminished. When Dad doubled the inventory of the Short Hills Brentano’s, he delivered a selection that the consumer couldn’t match for many miles around. When Barnes & Noble and Borders got Wall Street money to replicate the Bookstop model of 100,000+ title superstores in the early 1990s, they were enabling consumers to find conveniently books which had previously been obtainable only with great effort. But the limitless shelf space of online bookselling undercut that advantage and by the early part of this decade, it seemed to me that the consumer was finding the unlimited availability of titles online which could be delivered in a day or two so powerful that the large selection in a store that might be available immediately had really diminished appeal.

But there’s another thread of bookselling history on- and offline that I believe will soon become the dominant paradigm for ebook retailing. And, of course (just so you are reminded what blog you’re reading), it fits into the concept of “verticality”.

Publishers have known for a long time that good deals can be made and large sales can be registered through what we call “specialty retailers”. (The label for these sales in a publishing house, and others such as sales to catalogers or premium sales, is “Special Sales.”) The store that sells the tools and materials to refinish your floors can sell you a book to explain how to do it. The store that sells computers and paper and ink can also effectively sell resume or how-to computer books. The garden supply store can sell books on how to make your roses bloom.

Amazon and other online merchants (and not just of books) have long operated “affiliate” programs by which a web site can earn a commission on sales made at the primary merchant by referring a customer. This generally works by having the affiliate site promote a particular book title; when the site visitor clicks on the link, s/he is delivered to Amazon or BN.com’s page for that title. If the customer buys, the referring site gets a commission. These revenues don’t often amount to big money for the referring sites (although they sometimes do), but it is believed (but as with All Things Amazon, we don’t have the critical data to confirm) that, cumulatively, referrals from perhaps millions of affiliates deliver significant volume and customers to Amazon (and others.)

This is as far as “special sales” have gone in the ebook world. But the guess from here is that this is about to change and that the change we’ll see in the next few years will obliterate the notion that “all subjects in one place” is a significant marketing advantage, online or in a store. Many book sales, and particularly ebook sales, will move to “contextual” resellers. Your accountant’s web site will sell you the book(s) that help you understand a new tax law or how to ready your business for sale. Your favorite sports web site will sell you the new biography of Alex Rodriguez. And your favorite “Literary Review” newsletter and website will take care of your needs to acquire fiction directly and without your having to shop the vaster stacks of an online superstore.

That is: curated ebook offerings (a click away from the ability to buy lots more content beyond the curated selection) will be featured on every web site with any significant traffic. Delivering purchaseable content — books right now, but ulimately magazines, shorter articles, and relevant audio- and video-content as well — will become a standard expectation of any site (or web community) that aspires to a true mutual embrace with its site visitors. “What I’ve read lately and liked, and why” is a legitimate offering to anticipate from every blogger or commentator with a following.

Last week, Barnes & Noble held its regular call to announce financial results and future expectations. In that call, B&N expressed the expectation that the ebook world would ultimately settle down to about five players and that they’d be one of them. With that perspective, they saw for themselves a reasonable proportion — say 20% — of the ebook market.

My first reaction to that was “what are they thinking? There won’t be five online booksellers; there will be five million.” A day or two later I had a conversation with one of my personal tech gurus who saw it the way B&N’s statement suggested they did  (”it will consolidate, just like the music business did…”) He also asked a lot of practical questions. On what devices will these ebooks be read? How will all these individual sites deal with the format issues, the DRM issues, the customer service? In other words, “great vision, Mike, but how can it possibly work?”

I think it will work like affiliate sites worked, but in a more sophisticated way. A strong central operator providing scale facilitates the commercial offering of the niche player. The harbinger of the future is the deal announced last week between F+W Media and Ingram Digital. Ingram is setting up all F+W specialist web sites (and they have them for many different vertical interest groups) with the ability to sell both ebooks and print of all publishers to their site traffic. (Although we have working relationships with both companies, we weren’t involved in that deal and don’t know any of the details.)

I believe that the Ingram-F+W deal is the start of something new and big. Both companies are going to find ways to improve on whatever is the starting point. F+W is going to have to learn how to merchandise what Ingram can give them into a unique shopping and content consumption experience for the consumer. And Ingram is going to have to learn how to deliver what they can offer to F+W in a way that enables F+W  to curate and enhance the selection to deliver something uniquely customized to its own community.

If that view of the future is right, the competition among the players who can provide the ebook selection and transaction services Ingram does — those in the game already like Amazon, B&N, iBooks, and Kobo and those saying they’re about to come in like Google, B&T’s Blio, and Copia — is going to take place in a whole new arena. B&N has announced deals like this, where they “power” somebody else’s bookstore. Kobo hasn’t yet, but I’d expect them to; it just seems to me like an opportunity they’d see. This is a bit odd; it puts “wholesaler” Ingram in competition with retailers to create the next round of niche retailers. Ingram obviously has the built-in capability to offer print and electronic book delivery but, of course, B&N has the internal resources to do that too, and  B&T can do it too. There are anomalies to rationalize about margin, but, in the end, customer acquisition through this strategy will be far cheaper than it is most other ways, even if a fixed margin from the publisher is shared with the niche player.

This business hasn’t really begun to happen yet; we’re just seeing the outlines of it. Initially, the competition appears to be about how each retailer delivers its vast set of content choices to the online consumer in a consolidated way. (And usually it has been the same for Ingram. Most of their business has come from large “sell everything” ebook stores.) But over time it will evolve into a competition for niche resellers. Winning is always about delivering the best consumer experience but the challenge will be to deliver the best consumer experience to somebody else’s consumers. White label is the key to the ebook (and book) retailing future.

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I am finding an eerie similarity between the disastrous Gulf oil spill and the parlous state of America’s bookstores. In both cases, the forces are in place for a disaster that will play out over the coming months and years. And while the tragedy of what is happening in the Gulf is far more consequential to everybody on the planet than what is happening to our bookstores, we are appoximately as powerless to prevent an eco-system disaster of the first magnitude in both cases.

Of course, the causes of the problems are quite different. British Petroleum, it would seem from here, could have operated differently and the blowout might not have happened. If the US government had the same offshore drilling rules as the Canadian government, requiring the relief well to be dug at the same time as the main drilling well, the disaster might have been averted.

Just like the shrimpers on the Gulf Coast, we are entering the highly visible stages of what will be a painful and accelerating change in the circumstances for general trade publishing. In an exchange in the comments of a post here from last November called “Why are you for killing bookstores?”, I was told by a resident of Orange County, California, that he didn’t even know where his nearest bookstore was. Now there is news that Laredo, Texas, is aware of its status as the largest city in America without a bookstore because its local B. Dalton outlet has been closed. Unfortunately, I don’t think Laredo will retain that status for very long. Much larger cities will be joining Laredo. These are like ships not bothering to leave the harbor because there is nothing out there worth catching.

Bookstores in the US are being pushed aside by the forces of what in the larger sense is definitely progress. The four biggest villains are the switch by consumers to Internet shopping (which affects all brick-and-mortar retail; Walmart’s sales are down too) and three aspects of that switch that amplify the problem: the ubiquitous availability of used books sold alongside the new, competition from long tail books that would have disappeared from commercial view in years past, and the rise of ebooks. All three of these effects reduce print sales in terrestrial stores, crippling retailers and damaging publishers as well.

The trend is impossible to ignore. Borders, just rescued by the latest White Knight that believes the business can be saved, announced that same store sales were down over 11% in the first quarter compared to a year ago. Barnes & Noble’s reduction in same-store sales was put at “2 to 4 percent” in its most recent reporting. [Late add: B&N actually reported same store sales down 5.5% in the most recent quarter.] Borders is a financially challenged operation with an inadequate supply chain, which could have led to not having the books they need to get all the sales that might have been available to them. But, if that’s true, the well-financed and well-operated B&N would be benefiting from their rival’s problems. (They probably are; sales would have been down more if they weren’t.)

I first worked in a bookstore almost 50 years ago, in the summer of 1962 in Brentano’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue. I’m going to guess that there were about 25,000 titles in that store: 10,000 hardcovers upstairs on the main floor and about 15,000 paperbacks downstairs in the brand new paperback department where I worked. Maybe there were more, but not a lot more. And this was one of the best bookstores in America at that time.

There just weren’t a lot of bookstores in America in 1962. Mass-market paperbacks were on sale in many drugstores and on many newsstands, and were in somewhat limited supply in bookstores. Paperback distribution then was just about exclusively through rack-jobbing local wholesalers and offered lower margins than trade books. Even Brentano’s, which was one of the few stores served direct by mass-market publishers, displayed the mass-market paperbacks by publisher rather than by subject to make it easier for the publishers’ reps to check their stock and fill in empty pockets every week.

Department stores were critical outlets for publishers. They provided what amounted to local chains in each city which were, at that time, just beginning to expand into suburban locations through a nascent shopping center industry. Reps for Dolphin Books (Doubleday) and Collier Books (Crowell-Collier, later Macmillan), two trade paperback lines begun by my father, were putting racks of their books into barber shops and motel lobbies in many parts of the country which had virtually no bookstores at all.

Running a bookstore was very hard. Publishers were numerous, title acquisition was fragmented. The only national wholesaler, Baker & Taylor, was really a provider for the libraries, which were willing to wait for B&T to go get the book after they ordered it from them. Local wholesalers, sometimes the same operations that rack-jobbed the mass paperbacks, didn’t attempt to stock much more than the bestsellers, the resupply for which was their real profit center.

In the late 1960s, as shopping center construction heated up, this started to change. Two national chains, Waldenbooks and B. Dalton Booksellers, grew on the back of that expansion. Shopping center developers preferred a national chain to a local independent as a tenant; they were more “bankable” when the developer was borrowing money to build. So these two chains started to grow as fast as suburban mall development would let them, which was pretty damn fast. When I went into publishing sales in 1974, each of the chains had about 300 stores nationally.

Dalton revolutionized backlist sales. Before scanning technology existed, Dalton instituted unique SKU numbers for every title which the cashier would punch into the register when each sale was made. (The SKU number was on a sticker on the book.) That enabled an automated reordering system to bring core backlist (designated “model stock quantities”) back in as they sold it.

Dalton had a “hot list” and a “warm list” of titles. The “hot” titles sold 10 copies a week across the chain. The “warm” list sold 10 copies a month across the chain. That was in a chain of about 300 stores and gave me my first real understanding of how few titles sold very much in a bookstore! Those lists were very important. If your book wasn’t on the hot list, it wasn’t going to get noticed by a buyer for re-ordering. And if it wasn’t on the warm list, the title was likely to be returned.

At about the same time, the early 1970s, the Ingram Book Company introduced technology that changed life for the independent bookseller: the microfiche reader that allowed every retailer to know, before they ordered, what Ingram was carrying. All of a sudden, just as Dalton was demonstrating how important a broader selection and in-stock backlist could be to a store’s economics, independent stores could imitate that strategy by ordering regularly through Ingram. Although computerized inventory management help was still a few years in the future, just being able to get the books from a single reliable supplier enabled independents to begin to compete and grow. (Of course, independents still didn’t have the advantage of 300 locations providing data so they could detect a “hot” book or “warm” book that might not be evident in a single store.)

There were two newer operations spawning stores with robust backlists in the 1970s: Paperback Booksmith and Little Professor. Both jump-started new independent stores with their branding, their inventory, and systems to support both new title buying and keeping key backlist alive. The Doubleday and Brentano’s chains had fewer stores, but bigger and richer ones.

From the publishers’ perspective, this was all providing more and more opportunity: more stores, more efficient stores, more backlist-conscious stores. So general trade publishers grew. Title outputs grew. Dalton and Walden grew. Independents and various smaller chains grew. Ingram grew. Baker & Taylor grew.

In the 1980s, the growth continued, fueled by increased efficiencies. Machine-readable fonts enabled Walden to imitate Dalton’s point-of-sale monitoring without having to sticker every book. Computerized inventory tracking systems improved efficiency at stores far and wide and at the wholesalers as well. New retailer Crown Books pioneered a new idea: a more limited selection of new books, combined with a lot of remainders and bargain books, and aggressive discounting of bestsellers. Even while the chains grew, the independents grew and became more powerful. A newly-energized American Booksellers Association became an aggressive advocate. They sued major publishers, ultimately forcing changes in sales policies that were deemed too chain-friendly.

Throughout the 1980s, the independents were the ones building the big category-killer stores. Good independents were confident that they beat the chain stores on title selection. They were even competing pretty much at full price against Crown’s deep discounting simply by being the place you could find the books you wanted. In the late 1980s, Borders and Barnes & Noble, along with Wall Street, saw the opportunity. Borders acquired Waldenbooks and B&N acquired B. Dalton to give them operational scale, and then they started to open very large 100,000+ title stores (under their own brands, not the acquired ones) in a model that had been developed by a Texas operation called BookStop (which was acquired by Barnes & Noble.) This just meant more growth for publishers; more backlist being stocked in more places. This might have been when the big indies first started feeling a pinch; I recall Andy Ross of Cody’s expressing concern about a big Barnes & Noble opening in Berkeley about that time. But the indies and the chains had a much bigger problem just over the horizon.

In the summer of 1995, Amazon.com opened for business. And, probably since Day One, but certainly increasingly and increasingly obviously, Amazon has been damaging the ecosystem which spawned a robust bookstore network and, which, in turn, fostered large and powerful general trade publishers. That was when the wall protecting the water that fed bookstores and trade publishers was breeched by the oil of digital distribution.

The analogy is not precise. Amazon is not a villain like BP. They aren’t just destroying an old eco-system; they are building a new one. To the consumer that is finding shopping easier than it ever was before, finding books they could never find before, being presented with cheaper choices of used books and electronic books that were not available before, there is no crisis here. In fact, there is no problem.

But to bookstores that depended on customers that had little other choice but to come to them for the books they wanted, shop from what was available under the store’s roof or wait for something to be brought in from outside, and who were effectively restrained by geography from shopping around for price or selection, the waters have become toxic. And to publishers that built a business whose principal competitive advantage is their ability to take intellectual property and put it onto bookstore shelves, the imminent prospect of reduced revenue, increased costs, more difficult title acquisition, and competition from old IP long-sold or long-dead, are now fouling the drink for them as well.

All of the eco-destroying forces that have so far hit the  bookstores, like the oil coming onshore in the Gulf, are just harbingers of much bigger waves of challenge to come. More and more people buy ereaders and cut print consumption drastically; more and more books get digitized; the long tail only gets longer as more and the more digitized stuff meets increasingly efficient print-on-demand. And more and more competitive material enters the supply chain with some appeal to the public but with no participation in the structure that makes bookstore stocking easy. The bookstores’ problem is not just about demand, it is also about supply. That’s competitive advantage for trade publishers in getting their books on bookstore shelves, but it is competitive disadvantage for bookstores competing against a universe of content a click away from more and more eyeballs and mindshare.

In an exchange in front of a large audience at BookExpo last week, one prominent publishing executive took relative comfort in the fact that “more than 90% of our business is still print.” That’s (still barely) true, but only about 70% of the business is still occurring through brick-and-mortar outlets. That number will be under 50% in 12 to 18 months, and the slide will still be accelerating. Big publishing grew in an eco-system of expanding retail shelf space. It has been challenged in the past 15 years as all that growth was stopped by the new forces unleashed online. Now that shelf space is going to start to shrink faster and faster, it is hard to see how big trade publishing can avoid doing the same.

Another aspect of this problem was raised this morning on a mailing list I’m on. Public libraries are losing the funding they need to stay open. Public libraries buy a lot of books from trade publishers, although most of those sales go through wholesalers and not all publishers are managing library sales discretely the way they should. Library purchases have tended to act like ballast in previous recessions; public funding wasn’t usually as volatile as consumer spending. Unfortunately and somewhat coincidentally, the erosion of the bookstore infrastructure is occurring when we’re also facing what is likely to be a longterm crisis in public funding as well.

Two Australian booksellers were in my office last week. The trauma they face is even worse than it will be here. Geography has protected Australia from competition so books are priced 50-to-100 percent higher than they are here. That’s been great for bookshops. Their trade looks like ours did 15 or 20 years ago.  With the arrival of ebooks and POD, they’re probably facing the changes we’ve seen since then in the next two or three years.

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There is considerable concern among the trade publishing establishment about the future of brick-and-mortar stores. As well there should be. Retail stores provide the most efficient promotion opportunities for books: putting them in front of people poised to buy. They give clear signals about sales appeal by positioning and piles of stock of varying sizes; they make it possible to “look inside” of illustrated books in ways that no online presentation can match; they enable discovery through serendipity; and they put more different book choices in front of any person faster and more efficiently than any web page or smart phone screen possibly can.

But they’re troubled. Same store sales, or what the Brits call “like-for-like”, have been declining. That may be partly due to the recession, but it is also due to factors that won’t go away: shifts of sales to the Internet, to ebooks, and perhaps to substitutes in other media and the Web.

The magic that grew Barnes & Noble and Borders into behemoths was large store size and title selection. My first experience with this effect was a lesson from my father, Leonard Shatzkin. He took over executive responsibility for the Brentano’s bookstore chain as a vice-president of Crowell-Collier (later called Macmillan, a company subsequently bought by Simon & Schuster and not connected to the company now called Macmillan) in the early 1960s. The store in that chain that was doing least well was in Short Hills, New Jersey. They doubled the number of titles the store carried and it soon was the best-performing store in the chain.

But the “size as a magnet” concept took a back seat to mall store expansion by Walden and B. Dalton in the 1970s. As shopping centers were built across the country, the mall developers favored national chains, which were “bankable”, for their leases. Walden and Dalton rode that wave and added hundreds of stores. Meanwhile, partly assisted by the expanding wholesaling services offered by Ingram, independent stores thrived and grew their title selections beyond what the space-challenged mall stores could offer.

In the late 1980s, Bookstop, a discount chain in Texas, pioneered the “superstore” concept: a massive selection of 100,000 or more titles under one roof. This was the Brentano’s Short Hills effect writ large. By that time, Borders and Barnes & Noble, which already had larger stores than the mall stores, had bought Walden and B. Dalton, respectively, giving them critical mass to support robust central operations and provide leverage in their relationships with publishers. The new superstore concept suited Wall Street, and the two big chains were bankrolled to roll out superstores nationwide.

This was great for everybody except some of the larger independents which, up to that time, had the large title selection field to themselves. For publishers, it meant lots of additional shelf space for their backlist. For consumers, it meant a large increase in choice at hundreds of locations around the country. The attraction of 100,000 or more titles under one roof was compelling; these superstores didn’t need malls to bring them traffic. They were destinations worth traveling to on their own.

But then came the Internet, and Amazon. As we used to remind ourselves quite often ten years ago, “the Internet changes everything.”

And what the Internet did was to seriously dilute the attraction of so many titles under one roof. Now “unlimited” choice was available online: not a hundred thousand titles, but millions. Not just the books presented by active publishers and chosen by buyers, but all the books, in or out of print.

By the turn of the 21st century, it seemed to me that the powerful attraction inherent in the massive superstore selection was muted. I advised a client to “leverage your infrastructure to figure out how to make the small store work.”

But, by that time, both the big chains were phasing out their mall stores. This was not entirely a matter of store size, although it might have been seen that way. The malls the stores were in were often in suburbs from which prosperity had moved on. The effect of the Internet wasn’t just being felt by bookstores, but also by department stores, which were the “anchors” that brought traffic to the malls. So footfall at the mall stores fell, quite aside from any negative impact of a limited title selection.

In 2009, the mall store era has officially come to an end. First Barnes & Noble announced it was closing all the remaining B. Dalton stores. Then, this week, Borders announced it is shuttering more than half of the remaining Walden stores, which will leave only 130 operating, in January.

Meanwhile, it only takes a visit to a B&N or Borders store today to see that they are hardly stuffed with books; the ones I’ve been in lately appear to have more space than they need, and this is when stores are relatively full of merchandise.

Of course, larger stores can be more cost-effective than smaller ones for other reasons beyond the attraction of the title selection, even if that attraction is working well. There are per-store costs, of store management and central management attention, that don’t readily reduce with store size. And while the effect of a massive title selection at a retail location might not be what it was 20 or 40 years ago, more titles will certainly attract more traffic than fewer.

Meanwhile, the other big change in the book retailing scene in the past 20 years has been the growth in sales at mass merchants: Wal-mart, Costco, and the price clubs and supermarkets. These stores leverage existing traffic (one would think that few, if any, customers go there for the books) and deep discounting to make significant book sales with a very limited selection of titles, usually well under 5,000. They’ve been part of the problem for full line book retailers. Their pricing and ubiquity bleed off sales of the highest-profile bestsellers. In the 1970s, bestsellers pulled people into bookstores where they might buy lower-profile books. Today bestsellers are presented to the public at cut prices where people buy their groceries or school supplies, leaving the bookstores with the customers who still consider them a “destination.”

Both of the big bookstore chains, but particularly Barnes & Noble, own unmatched infrastructures to deliver a curated selection of books to dispersed retail locations. They found it impossible to make the small stores they owned in the mall locations profitable, even with those capabilities. (In fact, Borders, which doesn’t have a supply chain to match B&N’s, outsourced some of its shelf-stocking at Walden to wholesalers in recent years. It is inconceivable that B&N would ever do something like that.)

But bookstores are going to be getting smaller; we know that intuitively and the stock we see in the current superstores confirms it. And smaller bookstores, if they were planned to be smaller, would require less space, less traffic, and less sales to be viable.

Of course, smaller stores wouldn’t be a magnet for traffic; that’s what turned the Short Hills Brentano’s around and that’s what fed the whole superstore revolution.

So it would seem the combination for the future might be a B&N or Borders mini-store inside another large retailer. Remember, many other retailers are going to be having the same problem; figuring out to deal with having too much space, so there should be potential collaborators on the other side of the partnership. This will require a different kind of inventory management than the chains exercise now; more of a rack-jobbing approach. But their capabilities: to source books, select books, organize books for presentation, and to deliver books all over the United States, will have more consumer demand than they’ll be able to satisfy with only their own very large stores.

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My first real “job” in publishing was working as a sales clerk at Brentano’s flagship bookstore on 5th Avenue in the summer of 1962. I was deployed to the paperback department, which had opened only weeks before.

In those days, almost all real consumer paperbacks were “mass-market”, rack-sized paperbacks. And almost all of what we now call trade paperbacks were academic. My father had really started the concept of consumer-oriented trade paperbacks with the Dolphin line at Doubleday in 1958 and was just then building the Collier Books line for Crowell-Collier (which later acquired and became called Macmillan; all now owned by S&S and not today’s Macmillan via Holtzbrinck.)

In this new department, downstairs in the basement, housed with a tiny foreign language department off in a corner, the trade paperbacks occupied chin-high bookshelves through the middle of the sales floor. Against a wall were the mass-markets, displayed by publisher. That was because the Pocket Books, Bantam, NAL (Signet and Mentor), Ballantine (and other) reps came in and did detail work on their books on a weekly basis. So the store made it easy for them to take inventory and manage their restocking. 

The sales clerks, including me, took the inventory of the trade paperbacks and recorded the data on cards that went “upstairs” to Lillian Friedman and the buyers to make restocking decisions.

So you had to know who published the top authors, like Steinbeck, because that was how you found them.

This was a long time ago, but I remember two incidents as clearly as if they happened yesterday.

Because I am seriously hard of hearing and this was before the digital hearing aids I have had for ten years that now mask that problem, I had to do all sorts of things to compensate. In those days, there were no credit cards. When people wanted to charge something, they just told you their name and you wrote it down on the slip recording what books they were buying, along with their address, and the store sent a bill.

When people told me their names, I almost never could hear them well enough to get it straight, so I routinely would ask them “please spell it.” That was the simplest way to for me to get it right.

The embarrassing moment came when I asked John Dos Passos to “please spell it.” I became mortified on the “capital P-a-s…”

Another time a young man came to the register and said the charge was to “Mrs. Robert F. Wagner.” I heard that. “Address?”, I asked.

He looked at me like I was from another planet and said, as if I should have known, “Gracie Mansion.”

It is a good thing I found other work in book publishing then because I was really not well equipped to be the best bookstore clerk.

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