I’ve wanted to write an apologia for our near 2019 closure and just a SORRY ABOUT ALL THAT for the years 2018-2019, but for a long time like not enough time and distance had passed, but that was like 7 COVIDS ago, so--
"Starting today we will be liquidating our inventory. As of now all books are 25% off and over the next few weeks discounts will increase until all we have left is a stack of Anthony Trollope novels and this 1960's pick up artist book called 'How to Pick Up and Seduce Women' that we have somehow and I refuse to sell to anyone who would want to own it."
I’ve been writing about the various bookstores I’ve been involved in and now, sadly, it brings me to the time I like to pretend never happened, the almost closing of Bookmarx in 2019. At the time, I could not offer a reasonable explanation beyond the obvious—enough money was not coming in and too much money was going out. And there wasn’t even all that much going out, the store shelves were fairly stagnant as I could not afford to travel to buy books (Honestly, I mostly survived this period because a book dealer who had closed his store was bringing me 100 or so books a week at rock bottom prices). The store, as it existed, was unsustainable. I wont get into precise specifics, but I make what I made in the entire year in the first five months of the year now.
This was in a period when I was desperate to do anything to make money. I had been working more hours and making less. I would say YES to anyone who wanted to do anything at the bookstore in hopes that I would make some money. I would let people host comedy shows at the store that would keep me there until midnight (my takeaway from this is that 75% of comedians are illiterate) or let bands play (getting noise complaints from the Airbnb upstairs), and let any political group (no matter how annoying) have their meeting in the back in hopes of making some extra money to scrape by. (I will still let people use our space, but I now respect my time, so no, I wont let someone do a comedy show on the 4th of July that involves me coming into work on the 4th of July for a show that only a half dozen people come to).
So why if I have all this alleged knowledge of how to run a bookstore was I doing so poorly? The argument I wanted to make when my haters (shocking, I KNOW) called me a 4x failed bookseller tried to use the store’s near closing to prove I was a failure was “Hey man, the store is fine, it’s the man operating the store that’s the problem, tyvm”. The store, though, wasn’t actually okay since there is a one-to-one correlation between how well the store is doing and how well I am doing personally. And in 2019, I was personally not doing well. To quote Stuart Smalley, I was an “active alcoholic...big...stinking...drunk”.
I don’t really have a caption for this image, but here’s Stuart Smalley. They put him in the senate!
And I don’t how much you know about drunks, but it turns out that they are not the greatest stewards of their money. I’m not sure what exactly the plan was for turning the store around. I remained oddly optimistic that if I could eventually climb out of debt (how???), I would be able to turn around the store. I just went back to look at HOW BAD my October 2019 , the month I decided to throw in the towel, finances were and I made a profit of $16. Hey not bad, you may think, you didn’t lose money, that’s not so bad. Yes, but my take home pay for the month was...$16. Why was I not just going to work across the street driving for Jimmy John’s, I wondered.
So these were the numbers I was (drunkenly) staring at on a spreadsheet blurrily trying to make the numbers work in a way that made sense, and after a year or so of this, I finally conceded, the numbers were not going to turn around. Having liquidated a bookstore previously, despite the store being in the worst state it had been in, I mentally ran some numbers and figured if I tossed up the Going out of Business banner and sold everything I could, I would be able to pay off my personal debt and have a small reserve of money to live on while I figured out my next move, and THEN I would start building up my inventory, so I could start yet another bookstore.
I essentially wanted to do a soft reset on my life, and to give myself the opportunity to do it correctly this time. I will address the obvious flaw in this thinking in a moment. So after talking to my landlord, I announced we would be closing on social media. This all happened in, probably, an hour long freakout about how bad things were sliding on a Friday morning. So then came time to publicly admit the store had failed, so I made my social media post and went back to fretting. Obviously, the way these things go, when a business announces they are closing, there is an immediate outpouring of shock and sadness and people saying “No, why” etc. And it was nice to hear how much people loved the store, but beyond anything else it was all just embarrassing, and not just in the normal way where when you try and don’t succeed at something, but this was worse because it wasn’t that I had tried and failed, it was that I had tried and self-sabotaged myself to failure. But, there were some people who reached out about the closing that gave me the sliver of hope I needed to consider continuing to try, which started to curb my thinking back towards trying a bookstore rescue.
A few news stories came out that afternoon about the closing, which ramped up the comments (mostly positive, a few about the cat stench—for more see the one star reviews from this time period, actually on second thought DONT). The other thing that happened is that people started coming into the store to buy up/use store credit/gift certificates on books at our liquidation prices (I started at 25% off everything). I had a full store of people buying books again, and thought “Hey I kind of like this. It’s fun to have a bookstore. Too bad this one is closing. Great location. I hope I can find something exactly like this when I start up again in 2025 or so.”
The Friday and Saturday I announced closing were, to me at the time, ridiculously busy, however I think it’s just that I had been slow for so long that I forgot what it was like to have a normally bookstore with people shopping inside of it. Those two days of liquidation seemed like I was making money hand over fist, but when I look at the actual numbers now, they were probably more akin to an average Friday/Saturday now, and actually a little slower.
Bloated Appearance? CHECK
Red Face? CHECK
This man was DRUNK in this photo!
I immediately entered into the bargaining stage, and began to run the numbers on if I could maybe re-commit to the bookstore from this moment on, and if I, could really commit to stopping drinking and put all my energy into the store, perhaps I could make it because as is obvious, I already had the store of my dreams, even if it were in a diminished state. Maybe, I thought, I could still salvage this. I spent the rest of the weekend in this state of mind and by Sunday afternoon, I could not wait until Monday morning to call my landlord to take it all back and plead to not rent to someone else, and to give me a year lease to try to turn things around.
The store has existed longer now, on the back half, of its existence that the near closure feels far enough behind that I don’t find it difficult to think about or embarrassing anymore. It’s the same way with sobriety, in the immediate aftermath of getting sober, you may not want to tell people or fear you will jinx it, but you get to a point in life when you look back on yourself at an earlier point and I simply do not know the man. I cannot relate to myself. What do you mean I would wake up at 7 am and walk to the Casey’s and start drinking so I could maintain a buzz all day. Who WAS he? I was Doordashing HOW MANY liters of wine to myself AT WORK?? How on earth would I fit drinking 2 dozen beers a day into my schedule now, I have too much to get done! And while I do still have some empathy and a soft spot for the depressed desperate lush version of myself, I simply cannot relate one bit. That jackass had nothing but free time and how did he spend it? Drinking and passing out to movies on staring at my phone on the couch. I would kill to have 2 free hours to watch The Smashing Machine now! And that bonehead squandered it!
So after speaking with my landlord, I announced we were actually NOT closing, which led to that article above, and some people saying “Oh they did it for free publicity” and while the effects of the surge in business was a factor, no it was not part of my master plan to remind people that I existed and that they will miss me when I’m gone, it was all just a desperate act of a desperate drunk. And, for the record, the December following that announcement of the closure did not lead to boffo business. After the liquidation weekend, business returned to normal—not before bad times normal—bad times normal, but I was in a period of sobriety and truly believed that turning the store around was possible and I felt nothing but optimism as the calendar turned on the next best year of our lives—JANUARY 2020.
Womp womp ending there, I want to wrap up this series on the history of Boomarx with one more about surviving 2020 and COVID and the future of the store in the next couple of weeks, so look for that OR DONT! (Also I’ll put this in the next one, but as a side note, I have been sober something over 3 years now, so you don’t have to worry if you come in if there will be a red-face lunatic behind the counter).
