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| Changing Hands Bookstore reads ahead of giant retailers | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| By Chris Page, Get Out | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| March 29, 2007 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Live in the East Valley long enough and you’ll pick up on the mythology: A one-time independent icon on Mill Avenue in downtown Tempe that, like the dive rock bar Long Wong’s, became the victim of corporate gentrification and exorbitant rents. Now, seven years later, it’s a suburban strip-mall bookshop at McClintock Drive and Guadalupe Road with a progressive bent, Mitch Albom jockeying for shelf space with Che Guevara and Oscar Wilde. It’s a store struggling to make it in the era of “big-box” behemoths and Amazon.com. That’s the story. But spend an afternoon in the store and the vibe is business as usual. Crumb-fingered customers meander in from the Wildflower Bread Company next door to thumb through magazines. A browsing phalanx clogs the doorway, picking through surplus books on the sidewalk. And the employees working the front counter and in the back office, a generational goulash that includes tattoos and wrinkles, are too excited about the store’s recent acquisition. “We got a bike rack! We got a bike rack!” chimes Yvette Roeder, the store’s public relations manager, weaving her way through the store. “You know,” she jokes, “with booksellers’ wages, all many of us can afford are bicycles.”
Funny thing about bookstores and making money. The writing’s been on the wall for independent bookshops like Changing Hands since the mid-1990s, when monsters like Borders, Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com began sucking profits from mom ’n’ pop purveyors en masse.
It’s a perennial best-of-the-Valley list-topper. Notable authors such as Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama and, in a different category, “Golden Girls” star Rue McClanahan (coming April 30), help the store pull hundreds, if not thousands, of people to appearances. Meanwhile, initiatives like the First Fiction Tour and Page 23, a club of young employees who suss out hip lit to spotlight, aim to wrangle a new audience of readers in the 20- to 40-something set, whether that means dragging former Spin magazine scribe Chuck Klosterman to a bar for a reading or cluing in customers to authors such as Salvador Plascencia, who visited last year to promote “The People of Paper,” authors who disappear on the shelves of a Barnes & Noble. The year-and-a-half-old Page 23 is attempting to take its program to booksellers nationwide, says organizer Kyle Hague, 28. His group champions books that wouldn’t otherwise be on the radar of a suburban book shopper. “They’re books that would sit on shelves for six months and then go back,” he says. Now, a relatively obscure book like Elizabeth McClung’s 2006 novel “Zed,” about a 12-year-old girl surviving in an urban development dystopia, can end up selling 30 copies in Tempe — a remarkable number, considering. The right atmosphere Idealism flows freely at the store. Shanks, 55, says she harbors the same ideals that fueled her and a few friends (with about $500) when they opened the first iteration of Changing Hands in 1974 in a tiny shop at Fifth Street and Mill Avenue. “We always wanted to have a bookstore where people could come in and talk about books, talk about political and environmental topics,” she says. “The idea was, by talking about books that can change the world, maybe we could change the world. I still believe that.” Retail awards have piled up. Most recently, Publishers Weekly crowned Changing Hands its 2007 Bookseller of the Year. “You can buy books anywhere,” Shanks says. “But I don’t think anywhere you can have the same aesthetic experience.” Rebecca New, a 20-year-old Mesan with a “Star Trek”-inspired “Live long and prosper” tattoo on her chest, says she visits the store once a week and figures she buys a stack of books every month. She’s been doing it awhile. Her mother used to hand her cash and let her buy whatever she wanted. For New, the appeal of Changing Hands is its atmosphere and its offerings. “Vegetarianism isn’t just one shelf of, like, five books. It’s three shelves,” she says. “Other indies are really dusty and there’s one guy working, and he’s the comic book nerd of books, a la 'The Simpsons.’ Here, nobody makes me feel stupid for buying the Paris Hilton book or anything like that.” Reading ahead Running an indie bookstore has taught Shanks to look to the future. She imagines she’ll leave the store in two years or so, enough time to finish her tenure on the board of the American Booksellers Association. The three owners, Shanks, husband Bob Sommer and Suzie Brazil, expect the store to change hands to a pair of 30-somethings: floor manager Mary Matiniak and store marketing director Cindy Dach, who owns several galleries and retail spaces in downtown Phoenix’s arty Roosevelt Row. Shanks envisions a future in which Changing Hands remains vital even if printed books don’t. “I imagine people coming in, in four or five years, and using a kiosk,” she says, “either downloading an e-book or checking (store inventory) and then doing a chat with someone else buying the same book.” In the meantime, Changing Hands is teaming with Portland, Ore.-based Powell’s Books to perhaps put author appearances on YouTube. The emphasis will remain on trying to connect something intimate — the lonely act of reading — with a larger sense of community. “The social component,” Shanks says, “is almost bigger than the books.” >> Changing Hands Bookstore’s 33rd anniversary celebration runs 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday, April 7, at Changing Hands Bookstore, 6428 S. McClintock Drive, Tempe. Arts and crafts, storytelling and live music. Free. (480) 730-0205 or changinghands.com. Upcoming free events Thursday, March 29: Travel writer Marybeth Bond discusses “50 Best Girlfriends Getaways in North America” at 7 p.m. Saturday, March 31: Former U.S. Marine and U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter talks and signs “Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change” at 2 p.m. Saturday, March 31: Page 23 presents irreverent Australian author Max Barry (“Jennifer Government”) in a free 5 p.m. workshop on how to write a first novel. At 7 p.m., he reads from and signs his latest book, “Company." Sunday, April 1: Rebecca Walker, author of “Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence,” gives a 7 p.m. reading from her memoir. Wednesday, April 4: Schoolteacher and administrator Paul White (“White’s Rules: Saving Our Youth One Kid at a Time”) leads a 7 p.m. panel discussion on the problems plaguing the public school system. Contact Chris Page by email, or phone (480) 898-5656 |
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A great local success story--using the social component to build brand loyalty. Suggest removal of this commentSeptember 11, 2007