Bookstore Writes Success Story With Volume, Discount Prices

When Bill Wirt and his sister, Diane Sharrar, took over the management of their parents’ used-book store in Van Nuys 10 years ago, they gave themselves a year to put the large, badly backlogged inventory in order.

“We’re still at it,” Wirt said, gesturing to the hundreds of books in stacks of varying sizes in the back of the store waiting to be catalogued, marked and placed on the shelves.

The pair’s store, Bargain Books on Friar Street, is one example of how the book world, like many businesses, is changing.

Unlike in the past, almost all used-book stores in business today deal in huge volumes of books, both old and new. New books, including best-sellers, are bought at publishers’ warehouse sales and from reviewers, and are sold at below-market prices.

Giant Used-Book Stores

Several small used-book stores, forced out of business in recent years by rising rents and competition from discount chains, have been replaced by larger, independently owned stores that offer wider selections of books at lower prices. Three giant used-book stores have opened in the Valley within the past 10 years and other previously established stores have expanded their stock or have acquired other stores.

Bargain Books, which started as a bookshelf in an antique store in 1959, is one of the oldest and largest booksellers in the San Fernando Valley.

Books fill every available space in the store. Although separated into categories and alphabetized by author, the books are displayed in the kind of disarray that pleases the serious book browser.

About 250,000 titles that are sorted and ready for sale have been placed in double rows on shelves and in piles of various sizes on counters and tables. A few books are stacked on the floor, intruding into the aisle space.

“We buy an average of 200 volumes a day,” Wirt said. “Our biggest buy in one day was 20,000. I doubt we’ll ever get all our books sorted.”

Second Store Obtained

The store has been so successful that, three years ago, Sharrar and Wirt took over a store a door away in which to sell their paperbacks. That store, too, has grown and now includes many hard-covers.

“We tried to make that our fiction store,” Sharrar said. “But we’ve had to put some other books over there too.”

The brother and sister love books so much that, Wirt said, “everyday we want to take books home with us.”

Both personally attend to their customers and their requests. On a recent busy day, Wirt spent almost 30 minutes trying to fill a customer’s request for a children’s science-fiction book for his third-grade daughter.

Wirt said that almost every day, the store receives calls from nearby movie studios looking for books to authenticate story plots of film and television shows.

“They don’t even have a title in mind sometimes,” he said. “Once, I had to find a certain kind of dinosaur without knowing what book to look in. It took a while but I finally found it.”

Besides its stock of fiction and technical books, Bargain Books has large sections on auto repair, art, math, physics, computers, literature and religion.

Book lovers are as loyal to their favorite store as fans are to movie idols.

“When you get hooked on books, you’re really hooked,” Sharrar said. “And, once you get hooked, it’s easy to spend a lot of money.”

Sharrar said one customer collects railroad books and buys two or three a week. Another has 2,000 to 3,000 cookbooks.

Since the store is near the Van Nuys courthouse, many lawyers come into the shop every day, Sharrar said.

“We also get people on jury duty,” she said.

Roger La Manna, a Panorama City art teacher who visits Bargain Books several times a week, describes himself as a book addict.

“A book is like a friend,” he said. “I buy between 100 and 150 a month.”

As might be expected, La Manna collects art books.

“There’s always that chance of finding that rare book you want,” La Manna said. “I bought one for $1.50 that’s now worth $100. I spend lots of money on books. They are something you have with you the rest of your life.”

One visitor who was in Los Angeles on business had taken the bus from his hotel to the Valley on this particular day.

“I come here every time I’m in Los Angeles,” he said. “It isn’t easy to get here. But it’s well worth the effort. The Valley has far better bookstores than the other cities I travel to in my work: Miami, Detroit, Atlanta. All you can get in those places are the latest paperback best-sellers.”

The shop was established by Lauren Wirt, a plastics engineer, as an antique store for his wife, Kathryn. The store first was called Bargain Bazaar. In the beginning, it had but one shelf of books. However, books took over the store within two years.

“The books sold a lot better than the antiques,” Sharrar said. “Every couple of weeks, Dad would have to build another shelf. Within two years, he quit his job and went into the book business full time. Both Mother and Dad were in their 50s then. Dad really had a feel for the book. That’s one of the reasons for the good technical section the store now features. Most stores have only two or three. We have 1,000 or more.

“Dad developed a huge clientele of people who wanted technical books of some sort. It’s so nice. People come in now and have such nice memories of him.”

Lauren Wirt died two years ago. His wife, Kathryn, who is in her 70s, still visits the shop occasionally and mends books for her son and daughter.

Family Backs Her

“Mother can repair books that seem almost beyond repair,” Sharrar said. “She works miracles.”

Sharrar said she had reservations when she and her brother first took over the store.

“My kids were 8 and 10 then and I thought I needed to be at home,” she said. “But the kids and my husband backed me 100%. Now I can’t imagine being in any other business.”

Sharrar’s brother, who lives in a book-lined garret above the bookstore with his 16-year-old cat, Shecky, is equally devoted to the shop and to books in general.

“I was a psychology major in college,” Wirt said. “But that seemed like such a depressing field. This is much better.”