Book Castle Tries Again
When Book Castle mercifully burned to the ground, we didn’t spend a whole lot of time debating whether or not we would be reopening. Despite the profit-loss statements from the two years we had been open suggesting it would be a wiser idea to take the insurance settlement and bury it under a tree, by the afternoon of the morning after the store burned, I was already out looking for new inventory for the new store, this time a store that we would build from the ground up and would make into the bookstore of our dreams. No shelf after shelf of leftover 1980s mystery hardcovers this time.
Book Castle 2 probably came closest to fulfilling my ideal of what I want in a bookstore—a High Fidelity style store with a bunch of dudes hanging out talking about books who have a genuine passion and excitement about literature. Did it make sense to have three guys working on Saturdays from a payroll perspective? Probably not, but it was fun! You have to have someone around to discuss the latest episode of Mad Men or to watch Youtube clips with, and, at Book Castle, we had not managed to figure out the cost-effective way to do this (cats instead of humans).
Starting Up:
Last time I wrote about the terrible decision to buy out Entertainmart’s terrible stock of rejected books to start our bookstore, so when we had the chance to make a store from scratch, I was excited to have the chance to build up the store we wanted that would be all killer and no Dick Francis hardcover filler. Coming back from a book buying trip in Kansas City a few months into our inventory rebuild, my mother and I came across a bookstore in Belton, MO that was having a going out of business sale. The owner was retiring after decades of being a bookseller/amateur inventor and offered us a great deal on his stock. While not the exact kind of stuff I had been fantasizing about opening, the deal was un-pass-up-able, and getting the injection of—I don't recall, but maybe 15,000 books, would move up our timeline of opening the store substantially, and after just a few months of buying and processing books in my parents basement, I was ready to move to an actual location.
I’m putting in photos now and realizing I left a lot out, including that we rented the unit next door, knocked out the wall and doubled the size of the store, and yet, TOOK NO PHOTOS OF ALL THAT!
So the spring after the store burned down, we were prepared to launch our new Book Castle on South Campbell in the former home of IPA, the teacher supply store (this led to 8 years of people showing up looking for classroom decor) just south of Bass Pro on the opposite side of the street. We were much happier with our location; however, we were less than a mile north of Hooked on Books, which, in our estimation, was our imagined rival and the most successful general used bookstore in Springfield. My general belief was that if we could just get discovered by their customers, they would prefer us (this is not true of Bookmarx, but at Book Castle we had much more space and had an inventory 5 or 6 times as large as I have now, and had large mystery and romance sections and not just a store full of experimental fiction.) And we did build up a solid base of customer support, but we never completely tipped over into being as successful as I had hoped.
While, at Bookmarx, I don’t have as large of an inventory as I would like at present (I would like books to fall on people’s heads from giant stacks with every step they take), I have an incredibly high turnover rate. I sell, basically, every book I bring into the store. I struggle to build my current inventory because every year I take in x number of books and at the conclusion of the year, when I look at my inventory numbers, I have sold approximately that exact number give or take a couple hundred in either direction. It’s a great problem to have, but at the same time, I promise I am trying to make the store into a big messy mass of books!
A News-Leader article featuring me beardless. Disconcerting.
What went wrong?
Nothing really. The store was profitable, and would have been even more profitable if we had a more pragmatic payroll. The used bookselling landscape was a bit different in the early aughts. There was a lot more money to be made in online selling. The heyday of early internet bookselling before everyone got their inventories uploaded and rare books became scarce and scarce books became common happened right before we entered the bookselling world. Nevertheless, online selling was still the majority of our sales. Book Castle did a robust online bookselling business; it was probably close to 70-80% of our sales most months. This is completely inverted for Bookmarx, where I have had periods where I haven’t even had books listed online at all. While the online boom has passed, there is a still a market for selling books that are actually rare and collectible online, but I am much happier to have a store that does the vast majority of my sales in-store rather than depending on third-parties sites and in the race to the bottom style of online selling.
Let’s hear from our “fans” on Yelp
Book Castle, for better or worse, was a store built to appeal to everyone, but more than anyone the now extinct species The Hipster. Culturally, we’ve buried the hipster (along with the Metrosexual, although your average Daily Wire host suggests otherwise), but at Book Castle we seemed to believe that Springfield contained enough oyoung people who aspired to be intellectuals that if we put out the Tao Lin and Donald Barthelme displays, we would build it and they would come. Why did we have a Barthelme is Watching photo hiding behind the shelves? Who knows!
I think the biggest problem with Book Castle 2 was our location. While we did try to appeal to everyone, and dutifully learned the vampire romances authors and 2000s era erotica titles our customers wanted, we naturally were strongest in the categories of books that we were most interested in ourselves. My brother Jon built up our science fiction and fantasy section, I focused on the literary fiction and pretentious nonsense, and we both loaded up on classic literature when we were out buying books, which led this like gardening or self help to be afterthoughts (Oh hey, I’ll grab this copy of Men are From Mars on the way out, I guess).
Part of the problem is that downtown was probably the natural home for the kind of store we wanted to build. We wanted to have author events and book clubs, and were never able to get momentum. (Our proposed midnight release party that got spoiled when Amazon started shipping out copies two weeks early for David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King definitely would have been 3 guys clocked in standing around reading DFW together). This is something I acknowledge I could do a better job at with Bookmarx.
Early News-Leader profile of Book Castle
I haven’t written about our employees because who would want their own boss riffing about them on a blog in 2025, but we had a bunch of great employees (and just a couple rotten ones!).
Some fake news from this article, and I don’t really remember why, but my sister is in this photo acting like she’s working, and she never worked a day in the store in her life. FAKE NEWS, JENNY!
Matt was our longest serving employee and when we began discussing closing, I was hesitant because it would mean he would lose his job, but luckily, he already had a plan to move to New York City before we closed, where he still lives and works in a cool bookstore that had a midnight Thomas Pynchon release party for Shadow Ticket where he hosted Pynchon trivia just last night! (This is all true).
We’ve gone through periods of having a lot of events, but now that I’m much more personally busy, I really only have readings or book clubs when people propose them. If someone wants to have a poetry reading, sure come on down. We used to do monthly local writer readings, but those became too bothersome for me because I would line up 7 or 8 people to read, and then the day of one by one I would get messages from readers saying “Actually, I cant make it tonight. Sorry,” and then would wind up awkwardly at 715 saying “Uhhhhh, thanks for coming out, that’s it!” after a short story and poem were read.
Something I mentioned in the last post was that there was sometimes a tension between how the store was represented, and when researching the Book Castle for this, I stumbled across something that I had forgotten—a SECOND Book Castle facebook page that my parents were using to promote the store which was separate and had little to do with the way Jon and I were marketing the store, for example there is a lot of promotion for Sarah Palin’s memoir and a William F Buckley biography on the page. Not the vibe we were trying to put out, we were trying to put out an energy that would lead women to come in and look at us and say “Oh WOW, did you really read all that Thomas Pynchon, you must be SO SMART”.
Okay, I see why my parents had some hesitation about my marketing strategies
So why did we close:
Book Castle closing wasn’t a reflection on the store’s financial state, as we had gotten to the point where we had an established clientele and had predictable sales; however, the store relied on Jon and my time and expertise (this is the thing that is difficult to replicate and make a bookstore into an interchangeable fill in the ____ with a new person thing). I can’t easily train someone to have all the information I have. There are simple things that can be imparted easily, but learning the trade takes time.
There are lot of used bookstores who can allow any employee to buy books because the customer brings them in, and they scan each ISBN and the computer tells them YES or NO. You see the online seller version of this if you guy to the Friends of the Library book sale with their handheld scanning devices. This, obviously, takes little to no skill other than the need to be unphased by annoying every person around you. There used to be a guy I would see at sales in the surrounding states that my brother would refer to as The General because he had an army of 13 and 14 year olds he dispatched to run around each book sale scanning books for him. It’s not uncommon to see someone engaged in this get rich quick scheme for a few years and then they fall off the scene after they wound up getting poor slowly. But all of the factors that go into knowing which books will sell—the factors that are why, percentagewise, I sell every book I bring into the store each year—are skills that are more difficult to transfer.
So when it came time to decide if we wanted to renew our lease, the factors that went into closing were all personal—Jon was going to Korea to teach abroad, my parents were moving to Boston to take a position as president of a college, and, at the time, I was teaching ESL and my aspiration was to, I suppose, enter academia in some capacity (SHUDDER thinking about that now, no offense to all the teachers!), so selling or liquidating the store made the most sense. At the time, I had been working for a decade in the bookstore and, again, while the store was well established, it hadn’t seen the growth I had wanted, and I was ready to do something else. It would only take a year away from it for me to realize, “Oh actually nevermind, I dont want to do this (fighting with 19 year olds about plagiarism), I want to do that, (telling 19 years olds about Pirandello)” and to have the realization, “Oh I know how to do that, and I could just decide to do it,” and I did.
Next time, I’m going to skip writing about opening Bookmarx because I feel like I’ve talked about that a million times already, and will write about the time in 2019 that the store ALMOST closed, and how we made it past that (a dark time that I prefer to forget and pretend never actually happened!).
But I will give the last word on Book Castle to my parents from the second secret facebook page they created:
