How to Ru(i)n a Bookstore—Book Castle 1

There is a photo in a 2005 issue of the Evangel University paper of me smiling holding two singed copies of books that narrowly avoided disintegration in the fire that destroyed our first bookstore—the books are The Da Vinci Code and The Last Temptation of Christ. Those books were the last that was left of our inventory which inspectors labelled a total loss. But hear me out...few book burnings would prove more positive. 

The first version of Book Castle opened in 2004 on North Glenstone in a shopping center that no longer exists. At the time I was in college and working full-time at Campbell 16 as a projectionist and HEAD usher (which qualifies me to open a video store as an expert movie man). My parents wanted to open a business, and their first choice was a Dairy Queen. They wanted us to run it, but my brother Jon and I had no interest in serving up hot eats and cold treats, so we came back with the counteroffer of bookstore, which made sense as a business that two young men in their 20s would want to work at, but not as much sense as parent entrepreneurs looking to create a business empire.  

This ad demonstrates the competing visions. My ad idea centered around a joke about Edgar Allan Poe’s opium usage…

My brother and his wife Calah had been working at Hooked on Books at the time, so had gained some insight into the business, and there was not a no-compete clause in place. I didn’t have a very big hand in the beginning of that store because I still had school and a full-time job, so when we opened I was only working 20 or so hours a week (this is my way of semi-washing my hands of the thing and saying “Im not to blame”. Brave stuff from me).  

The majority of the books we started with came from buying 5,000 books from Entertainmart who had determined that books were dead. For the record, buying 5,000 mostly remaindered books that had been sitting dormant on the Entertainmart shelves was NOT a great way to start a bookstore, but you don’t know what you don't know until you’ve wasted a bunch of money on it. And we learned a valuable lesson—don't buy 5,000 books that have been sitting there unpurchased for half a decade. Who knew!?! Vintage Stock recently added a book section to their store, so books are officially cool again, and those who jumped off the book wagon in the face of e-books are back on the bookwagon, until, I assume, they figure they can make more money on the next iteration of Labubus or Funko Pops in 2037.  

I didn’t feel much of a sense of ownership over Book Castle at first. I didn’t have much influence on the aesthetics or name and the inventory was mostly just what we were stuck with, although Jon did begin to start going out and finding inventory outside of the Entertainmart junk closer to opening, but it wasn't until I was actually working in the store with the books that I was able to have more of an influence. Staring at case after case of book club mystery hardbacks that were a decade and a half old made us think “What if instead, these were books that I would like to sell, I guess I will find those”. This all seems obvious.  

The main thing I remember about the Entertainmart books was peeling each price sticker off the dust jacket, which were actually two or three price stickers placed over one another because these were deeply discounted, and how this would tear at the cuticle under my nail. We had to peel 5,000 of these things, and our reward at the end was 5,000 remaindered copies of Nevada Barr novels.  

One problem with the store is we didn’t have any overarching vision for Book Castle when we first opened, which is a problem for a business. If there was a vision it was probably 4 or 5 competing ideas of what each of us wanted a bookstore to be like. One person envisioned a theological bookstore, another a home for cozy mystery readers, and I just wanted to have a section of the kind of gobbledygook that I enjoyed reading as a 23 year old, which is how we wound up with the obnoxiously named postmodern fiction section, which I have, for some reason insisted on carrying over from store to store (I’ve found similar sections at other stores with various annoying names--”Hipster” or “Counterculture” and I see no one else has nailed the naming either).  

In addition to not having the inventory, we also didn’t have the customers and did not know how to attract them. The calculation of being near a university and hoping to attract readers did not result in foot traffic. The only real notice we got from Evangel or Evangel students (despite this store being opened by a CURRENT STUDENT!) was when it blew up, they had a comic in student newspaper with a joke about how the explosion was caused by gas from Taco Bell. If anyone can find this in the Evangel archives, PLEASE send it! 

Any new business has two key problems— (1) having a desirable product or service and (2) managing to attract people. We had neither. I have blocked most of our early attempts at advertising, but I do remember a rather large expenditure for radio advertising on the local Oldies station, which included them broadcasting live from the store one Saturday and talking to the people who showed up live on air, which gave us the great feedback going out on the airwaves that the store was “small” and didn’t have very much..  

For any new business, this period of trying to remain optimistic and hopeful about the future while sitting in an empty building surrounded, in our case by, book club mystery hardcovers, is most difficult. Fortunately for us, the store blew up! By the time of the actual gas leak and fire, we had been in business for the better part of two years, and Jon and I had started to figure out what running a bookstore was like, and more to the point, what running a bookstore that we were running was like. By the time we had started to remake the store into the image of what we would want a store to be like, we got the midnight call that the store was in flames.  

I keep saying “Remaindered” books. A “remainder” is a book that has been liquidated by the publisher due to low sales. Entertainmart’s stock was made up mostly of remainders, so we were getting the books that didn’t sell the first time and then sat around going unsold a second time. Third time was not the charm.

This, of course, turned out to be the best-case scenario because it allowed us a fresh start and let us start over with our knowledge and, best of all, an insurance settlement that would x out all of the losses and would provide us an opportunity to correct all of the mistakes that we didn’t know we had been making—terrible location, bad books, advertising in the wrong places, an entire shelf of remaindered Janet Dailey hardcovers.  

The cause of the blast was a gas leak in the Mexican restaurant (and NOT from Taco Bell flatulence, thank you very much Evangel University cartoonist!) that had opened a few months earlier. Fortunately, it happened late at night, and no one was present. God was clearly looking out for us, and by that I don't mean saving us from death, but from saving us from another few years stuck running out the clock on that lease, and most likely, cutting our losses and getting out of the book business for good.  

Next time, I’ll write about our grand return with Book Castle 2, the store that SHOULD have rightfully defeated the more successful bookstore down the road, but which never quite found its audience, despite it being the best bookstore Springfield has had in my adult life.  A comeback story of sorts, even if it ultimately ends in liquidation!