Bookman store relies on reader loyalty

The glass cabinets and bookshelves are topped with an assortment of curios: a wooden monkey, a skull, an old typewriter, carved animals, deer antlers and toy soldiers.

The wall shelves are lined with layers of yellowed postcards, pulp cover art, pictures of bearded ladies, ancient ruins, battle lithographs, and portraits of literati and of movie stars: miscellanea that made their way into the bookstore by being tucked between the pages of the books themselves.

“Some people just rip them off and take them,” said David Hess, co-founder with Paul Bonaventure Sr. of Bookman, a used bookstore in Orange. “They don’t realize that they can just ask me and I’ll take it down and hand it to them.”

Bookman is part of an endangered species in the retail world: an independent used bookstore. As bookselling has moved to the Internet over the last two decades, beloved bookstores have been closing at a rapid clip.

“Ten years ago, there were more than 30 used bookstores in this area,” Hess said. “Now there are only about three or four. It’s a sign of the times … a dark one, but a sign of the times.”

But Bookman has managed to survive — and on some levels thrived. It has done so by building a loyal community of readers and by offering books and an intimate sense of place that Amazon cannot.

For Hess and his partners, the battle for survival began not with Amazon but before then, with the rise of big bookstores like Barnes & Noble in the 1990s. Those national chains hammered small independents by being able to sell at lower prices.

“We weathered that just because we had more unique titles and more than the bestsellers,” Bonaventure said. “It didn’t affect us too much, although it hurt a lot of the new independent stores.”

Bookman still manages to turn a profit in the Internet age, in part because of changes in its business operations. Buying direct from book scouts and other sellers decreased in the past decade, but customer trading increased. Book trades now make up 80% of the new titles Bookman receives.

At Bookman, customers can hand in their books and take new books off the shelves in trade. Though this means less buying of large groups of books at a time, the shift to trading offers a cheap and steady flow of books, often from the same customers who support the bookstore with their purchases.

“A lot of the people who come here like to browse,” Hess said. “You don’t know what you want or what you will find. You can’t do that online.”

Bell Mayor Alicia Romero, who frequents many Southern California used bookstores, enjoys browsing the titles at Bookman for similar reasons: the chance to find rare books.

“Books that if I wasn’t looking for them, I wouldn’t necessarily find them,” she said. “The randomness of finding a book that is of great interest to me; even better if I find one I was actually looking for.”

This serendipity extends beyond the customers. When Bonaventure receives a box of used books from a trader or peruses a garage sale, he can never know whether he’ll come across a shelf-load of pulp or a rare find nestled among the junk. That rare find often gives itself away with only the subtlest of hints.

“There are a couple tricks in this trade you’ve got to know,” Bonaventure said.

“Like a lot of people collect John Steinbecks. He wrote a book called ‘The Moon is Down.’ A first edition of John Steinbeck’s ‘The Moon is Down’ is probably a hundred-dollar book. But if you look at it — I think it’s page 113, line 12 — is a dot in the middle of the sentence.”

And that dot can make the difference between a buck and a big sale. The dot, of course, was an error made in the book’s first printing. Not only does it indicate that the book is a first edition, but also that it’s a first printing of a first edition, a rarity among rarities.

At a garage sale one day, Bonaventure came across such a find in a toolbox.

“I looked at it and sure enough, it’s ‘The Moon is Down,’” he said. “I look down: page 113, line 12. And sure enough, there was a dot in it. I asked him, ‘What do you want for these books?’ He said ‘a buck apiece.’ With the dot, it’s a $150 book.”

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Hess, who has co-managed the bookstore with Bonaventure since its founding in 1990, worked with Bonaventure at the Book Baron, a now-closed bookstore in Anaheim that fostered the pair’s love of books from the time they were teenagers.

“I’ve always been an avid reader,” Bonaventure said.

“All we did was read books. That’s why we both worked at the Book Baron. We’d take books home and read all day.”

And that love of books helped create Bookman, especially with the sizable personal collection that Hess had accrued.

“In fact when we started the store, he brought his entire book collection,” Bonaventure said.

“For the first year we paid our rent, and we paid our utilities and all our bills with the books we sold.”

Bookman started with perhaps less than a third of its current shelf space in 1990. In 1992, Hess and Bonaventure bought the space of the recently closed business next door, and about a year later they bought the space next to that. Today, there are enough bookshelves to make the store something of a labyrinth.

But Bookman is something of an anomaly.

“Ten years ago, there were more than 30 used bookstores in this area,” Hess said. “Now there are only about three or four.”

To further secure their future, Hess and Bonaventure are looking to turn Bookman into more of a community bookstore, making it available as a place to host local events and where local authors could promote their work.

The problem is that sometimes authors are too local and either do not have a substantial customer base or the resources to advertise.

“We’re trying to get local authors in,” said Hess, “but the problem is that they need more publicity. At least, we think.”

This is not to say that Bookman isn’t already a big part of the community.

“Twenty-seven years is a long time to be around, so we’ve got to know a lot of people,” Hess said. “We’ve had little kids come here with their parents and come back as adults with big beards.”

And though the community bookstore business model has not been fully implemented, it is not uncommon to see a family camped in an aisle corner as they read cross-legged on the ground, or for one of the clerks to read a passing customer a few lines from a Khalil Gibran poem. Often, small groups will form by the front desk as people who were in the same writing workshop or book club run into each other while shopping there.

Community aside, Bookman has kept many of its customers by virtue of the used books themselves.

“There will always be people who like books,” Hess said.

“There is something about the design of a book that has been around since the 1500s that makes people want to read them. I don’t think that’s going away any time soon.”