Secondhand Success

The four used bookstores on a two-block stretch of Colorado Boulevard are surrounded and outgunned--but unbowed.

Within almost a stone’s throw are the newly expanded independent Vroman’s, a Super Crown, the future home of a Borders superstore and a Barnes & Noble in the heart of bustling Old Pasadena. Longtime used bookseller Cliff Gildart is worried, but not for his own future.

“I don’t see how they’ll survive,” Gildart, 66, said of the battling superstores while glueing the binding of a volume of Winslow Homer reproductions. “Giving up all that space with those couches--I just don’t understand it.”

It may sound naive for the owner of a musty shop without a whiff of coffee beans, but Gildart’s old-fashioned ethos has made him a survivor. And he’s not alone.

Though the literati wring their hands about the future of books in an era of mega-stores, tell-all tomes and cable TV, there is plenty of evidence that used booksellers in Pasadena and across the country are more than holding their own.

According to Book Hunter Press, which publishes guidebooks on used bookstores, the number of used booksellers has risen dramatically in the past four years--as much as 40% in some regions. Cities from Tulsa to Daytona Beach are starting used book festivals, and cities in California’s gold country and Texas are trying to build international reputations as “Book Towns.”

Unlike new bookstores, which may fear competitors in their proximity, used shops seem to thrive when clustered. It creates a browsing environment that lures bibliophiles from distant points.

That’s what happened on Colorado Boulevard between Madison and Oak Knoll avenues, an area once described by a city official as a “dead zone” for business. Compared to neon-soaked Old Pasadena a few blocks west, the area remains relatively low-key.

The magnet was Vroman’s, a neighborhood fixture that attracted Bill Turnilla’s House of Fiction in 1981, which has since moved across the street. Gildart opened his shop in 1986, and other stores began popping up.

Gildart, a lanky man who proudly tells a visitor of a piece of a German rocket embedded in his leg from his World War II boyhood in London, opened his shop while working days as a probation officer. He has never been in a superstore and was aghast to hear that those businesses devote ample space to couches so comfortable that Pasadena’s Barnes & Noble was named “Best pick-up spot” in a local paper.

“I don’t think a used bookstore is a good pickup spot,” Gildart said with a hint of pride.

It’s books and only books that draw customers to Gildart’s store. Jeff Klein, 32, makes regular pilgrimages from the Mid-Wilshire district to Pasadena for photography books.

With the Huntington Library to the east, Caltech to the south and museums all around, central Pasadena has always been an oasis for book lovers.

Gildart and others in the district can rattle off names of other booksellers through the decades who have gone out of business or, in what many call an increasing trend, started selling their books via the Internet from their homes. Still, the recent history of the region shows how used bookstores have survived trends that would seem to spell their doom.

A new Laemmle movie theater is being built next to Vroman’s, displacing two used bookstores.

One of the stores, House of Fiction, has moved and held its grand reopening party Saturday night. And Book Alley promptly moved into the neighborhood from Old Pasadena to replace the now shuttered Browser’s Bookstore and keep the number of used bookstores at four, including Prufrock Books.

The theaters are part of a broader plan to revitalize the area that includes the Pasadena Playhouse, but the used bookstore owners are somewhat wary. They say they would welcome more customers, but do not want to turn their backs on the intangibles that have helped them stay in business.

“It grew naturally. You cannot plan these things,” Turnilla said of the neighborhood.

Miguel Covarrubias, a 26-year-old high school teacher from Highland Park, sums up the small successes of used booksellers. On Sunday he emerged from Gildart’s store with an obscure volume on Egypt under his arm that he said he could not have found elsewhere.

And there’s another reason he regularly shops at used bookstores. “They have the same books as at Vroman’s, but they’re cheaper.”

Those are two of the factors that may be fueling the resurgence in the used book market nationwide, experts say.

Ironically, two of the bogeymen of the book business--the Internet and superstores like Barnes & Noble--are credited by many with helping used booksellers.

Says Susan Siegel, co-publisher of the Used Book Lover’s Guide at Book Hunter Press, “The publicity is all about the [demise of] independent bookstores, they get all the ink. More and more people are discovering the used bookstores.”

While many owners of used bookstores are sharp businesspeople who carefully monitor their stock and sales, they generally are in it for the love of books rather than the traditionally meager money.

“It’s basically a slow-acting disease and this is the last stage,” said Peter Hay, a former USC drama professor and author who in 1992 opened Book Alley, which now is across the street from Gildart’s shop.

Still, across the country many used booksellers are expanding or simply basking in the financial security of an uptick in sales.

There are a host of explanations cited--nostalgia is a favorite, with Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and Dick & Jane books big sellers--but the one most often mentioned seems paradoxical: the Internet.

But book lovers say that nothing will replace the joys of strolling through shelves stacked with treasured tomes from years ago.

Turnilla, the owner of Pasadena’s House of Fiction, recalls talking with a customer once who said, “I wish we had a place like this back home.”

“Where is that?” Turnilla asked.

“Manhattan,” the customer replied.