The Final Page : Business Gamble Fails for Used-Book Store Owner

The Book Raj on Firestone Boulevard had yet to open on a recent morning, not that it mattered. The aisles, seen through a front window all but covered with going-out-of-business signs, were dark. The owner was in the back room, where the bookstore’s failure forced him to live.

“I’m busted,” Rex Jones said, as he lit a Marlboro. His little room, lined with books, was furnished with a bed, television and coffeepot. His golf clubs were in a corner.

“Business has been going downhill the last two years,” he went on. “You get tired of losing, losing, losing. Norwalk is not a book town. It’s not an affluent enough neighborhood to support a bookstore.”

A former anthropology professor, Jones is a short, trim man of 53, with a white goatee, tinted glasses and a slightly crusty nature. He and his wife, Mary Lou, the co-owner, won some recognition in 1991 when, in an effort to get literature out to the public, they instituted an honor system whereby customers could select a book from a case outside the front door and slip the money through the mail slot.

But they never sold enough books, outside or inside the store, to survive. They lost their house when they could not keep up the mortgage payments, and they were behind in their rent at the store. Rex Jones, author of a book on poker, tried to play cards to stay afloat but was unsuccessful. “I was playing poker just to pick up a few bucks, to pay some bills, but I never had a big enough bankroll,” he said.

“It’s kind of sad,” Mary Lou Jones said from the Industry convalescent hospital where she works as an activities director. “We had gone into it with a lot of high hopes. We had a good time running the store, learning the business, meeting interesting people.”

The Joneses finally sold the contents of the store to a man who is starting a combination bookstore and coffee shop in the San Fernando Valley. The price was $5,000 for 10,000 used hardbacks, 15,000 paperbacks, shelves and office equipment.

But a few days before the sale, Rex Jones’ heart was still attached to the bookstore, and it was evident that he was departing reluctantly. “I’d like to move the books and open somewhere else,” he said, “but I just don’t have the money.”

When the Book Raj opened 3 1/2 years ago, Jones envisioned making a decent income at something he had always wanted to do. Now, he realizes he made some bad decisions.

“I’m not a businessman, I’ll have to admit,” he said, managing a laugh. “It’s a tough business as it is, and you have to really operate on the edge. I’m in a bad location, with no walk-around traffic.”

At first, the store took in $1,500 a week. But in recent months it was down to less than $500. “I needed $2,000 a month to survive,” said Jones, who was forced into personal bankruptcy. “I didn’t have the money to restock. If your steady customers don’t see anything new, they don’t come back.”

When the financial noose got too tight, he lost his car, and then his house in Norwalk. He was living in the back of the store during the week, away from his family. Mary Lou and their two sons moved in with her mother in La Habra. “It was a pain for her to first take me to the bookstore, then drive to her job,” he explained. “I stayed with them on weekends.”

Jones, who grew up in Texas, received a Ph.D in anthropology from UCLA in 1973. He taught at the University of Wisconsin and for five years at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. He wrote two books, based on his field work--”Spirit Possession in the Nepal Himalaya” and “Himalayan Woman”--but could not get tenure.

He returned from New York and worked in 1978 and ’79 at the Gardena Club (now out of business) as a “prop,” employed to keep a poker game going when there are too few players. “I had a very small bankroll, so things got tight there,” Jones said.

He then was an assistant curator for a year at the Riverside Municipal Museum. After that, he began writing free-lance articles for gambling magazines and was a dealer at the Bell Card Club until 1987.

Unable to find a teaching job--he had applied to 300 universities and got one reply--Jones was hired at the Book Baron in Anaheim, where he became inspired to open his own bookstore. His mother, Mary Hale of Corona, put up $40,000 for the store, which, drawing on his anthropological background, he named the Book Raj (Raj is Sanskrit for kingdom).

It opened in 1989, farther west on Firestone, in a small shopping center near Pioneer Boulevard. In order to devote all of their time to the store, Jones quit a decent-paying job writing for a Las Vegas card magazine, and his wife quit as an activities director at a nursing home.

At first the store had mild success, but not what the owners had hoped. And the rent of $2,500 a month was too high. Two years ago, the Joneses moved to the present location, an old building near San Antonio Drive. The rent was only $650. “But then, as you can see, it’s not a real busy area,” Rex Jones said.

The sidewalk is often deserted in front of the bookstore and its neighbors--a dance studio, a Mexican bakery, a typewriter repair shop, a bait store and the Calvary Chapel.

Dick Bass, director of the Norwalk Chamber of Commerce, sympathized with Jones’ plight. “He needed foot traffic for what he was selling,” Bass said, adding that it’s not unusual for small businesses to go under these days but that it’s not an epidemic. “With consumers not buying and rent not being lowered, the small businessman can’t make his overhead,” Bass said.

As Jones talked about his troubles on that recent day, Harry Miller, who owns the Aviation Bookmobile just down the street, came in.

“We have the largest stock of aviation, military and space books, over 15,000, and 200,000 back-issue magazines, 60,000 World War I Aerial Historical Society Journals, and a research library over 10,000 volumes, 30,000 magazines, 50,000 photos, etcetera,” Miller said.

Miller had come to console Jones and buy some of his shelves.

“The reason Harry’s hung in more than I did,” Jones pointed out, “is because he does a lot of mail-order stuff, so he doesn’t depend on people walking into his store. You have to do something to attract outsiders. I tried to start building a little mail-order business in gambling books, but it never got off the ground. I was always two steps behind the bill collectors.”

“The big trouble,” Miller chimed in, “is the little guy is always underfinanced.

“Always,” Jones agreed. “I always had problems with money. A lot of it’s my own fault. When I first started I saw that there wasn’t a bookstore around here, besides Harry’s. I thought this might be a decent area to draw from. I should have taken a little more time choosing a suitable location, and I should have kept that outside job until I got established.”

“Everybody’s hurting,” Miller said. “No reflection on Rex that he couldn’t cut the grade here. Rex is a good book man.”

“Maybe I had the potential to be a good book man, Harry,” Jones said. “I might try it again one of these days.”

When Miller had left, Jones turned on the lights--those fluorescent tubes that still worked--in the store’s narrow main room. He walked among the shelves of jacketed first-editions, the sections on metaphysics and crafts and science fiction, the whole row of history books, and the seldom-browsed literature and poetry sections. “John Updike, Hemingway and Shakespeare didn’t sell,” he said. “My biggest market was romance books. And Westerns, Bibles, cookbooks, books on auto mechanics and Spanish-English dictionaries.”

The posters and plants that were once in the Book Raj had been removed, and recently, Jones’ cronies, who come in to shoot the bull, outnumbered the customers. “It’s sad,” he said. “I’ve let it run down quite a bit the last six months. I had it fixed up real nice.”

Pondering his future, he said, “There are so many Ph.D’s in anthropology working part-time, teaching two or three courses a week for very little money,” Jones said. “I can make better money going back to the card room and working as a prop. Matter of fact, that’s probably what’s going to happen.”

Outside the store, near the front door, the case of honor-system books was there until the end. “I made $50 to $60 a week from it,” Jones said, adding that very few books were stolen. But lately, when he checked each morning, nothing had been slipped through the slot.

Jones looked across the street at a Beauty and Nails shop. “I guarantee,” he said, “that if you drive from here to the freeway you’ll see 10 hair and nail places. That amazes me. People will go in there and spend $15 or $20 to get their hair and nails done, but they wouldn’t pay $5 for a book.”

It was now midday and the bookstore, for one of the last times, was open.

The owner scanned the sidewalk through rose-colored glasses, but it was still deserted.