Rewriting Bookstore’s Ending

What first looked a lot like another death in the funeral-heavy world of independent booksellers is beginning to resemble a resurrection.

Dogged by debt and unable to pay publishers, the owners of Gaia Bookstore and Community Center threw up their hands during the crucial holiday shopping season and admitted defeat. The Berkeley institution with a feminist, metaphysical bent was to shut its doors on Valentine’s Day, done in by the likes of Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

But a funny thing happened on the way to liquidation: On Christmas Eve, a longtime customer walked in and pledged $400,000 to bail out the bookstore where “Circle Round: Raising Children in Goddess Tradition” shares shelf space with “The Zen of Eating.”

By New Year’s Eve, Gaia’s angel had come partially to her senses. I’ll give you $200,000 if you can match it with donations from the community, said the woman with a yen for privacy, a Berkeley address and (no, these are not redundancies) interests running toward liberal politics, feminism and the environment.

So this week Gaia--named after the ancient Greek goddess of the earth--begins its long fight back, one of a small number of independent booksellers throughout the country that industry leaders contend have a good chance of reversing the decade-long trend of plummeting sales and closures.

Hoping not to become Meg Ryan in “You’ve Got Mail” (boy meets girl, boy’s big bookstore gobbles girl’s little bookstore, boy gets girl anyway), Gaia co-owner Patrice Wynne has planned a string of fund-raisers starting Sunday.

She and partner Eric Joost are exhorting their customers to pitch in and help save the singular shop, where the air is scented with the faint tang of incense and tabletop fountains burble softly in the background.

“Every day we’re bringing in $300 to $500” in donations, Wynne said, shortly after the farewell letter came down from the store window and the benefit posters trumpeting the matching grant went up. “This is the bookstore whose customers won’t let us die. . . . People know when a bookstore closes there’s a diminishment of human life.”

But believing it and doing something about it are two very different things. In the past decade, the nation’s smaller booksellers were pummeled--first by behemoths such as Borders Books and Barnes & Noble and more recently by the increase in Internet purchasing.

In 1991, the American Booksellers Assn. figured that there were nearly 252,000 small stores or chains, making up 59% of the new-book outlets in the nation. By 1997, that figure had decreased to 40%, and it’s still dropping.

“Independents are facing a lot of challenges, and people do need to recognize that if they don’t support the local businesses, we’ll go away,” said Hut Landon, executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Assn. “But one of the things that the Gaia potential rebirth shows is the incredible loyalty that independent bookstores and other local stores engender in their community.”

When Gaia called for help, Landon noted, its customers began to respond. “It’s unclear that they’ve responded in sufficient numbers to save it,” he said, “but they may well.”

Mani Feniger of Berkeley is among those who have stepped forward with modest donations to help rescue an establishment she views as “a significant part of this community.”

“Gaia has been providing books you couldn’t find elsewhere and a chance to meet the authors who wrote them,” Feniger said.

If the store raises less than $200,000 from the community by the unofficial deadline of late February, Gaia’s angel promises to match that smaller amount. Then, however, Joost and Wynne would have to decide whether they could afford to stay open with less than the $400,000 they now say they need. If the store closes, donations would be refunded.

“We are obviously under intense financial pressure, having lost $175,000 in revenue last year,” Wynne said. “But I’m pretty hopeful.”

Sales at the 12-year-old Shattuck Avenue establishment--where departments include “Shamanism” and “Tarots, Runes & Oracles,” along with the more pedestrian “Travel”--had been strong until 1997, with annual growth of 5% to 10%, said Wynne.

Then 1998 hit. From January through March dampened sales were blamed on El Nino. But they continued to decline, Wynne said.

So she called together consultants, advisors and investors in a series of “wisdom circles” to plot strategy. Their wisdom, however, was of the painful sort. “They said the bookstore was not viable,” she recounted.

The farewell notice went up on Dec. 15: “GAIA Bookstore has stood for the highest aspirations of the human spirit, grounded in the model of socially responsible business. . . . Surely Berkeley will not be the same without GAIA as a source for books of substance and as a cultural center where wisdom is gleaned for living consciously in these troubling times.”

Apparently customers agreed. They filled lavender sheets titled “TELL US WHAT GAIA HAS MEANT TO YOU” with mostly anguished aphorisms, some more on point than others:

“The heart that breaks open can hold everything” and “Bummer!! I will think strong thoughts about GAIA’s future” and “What happened in Congress & Iraq is directly related to our inability to put soul matters first--thus GAIA closes. Blessings” and the (understandably) anonymous “Yuppie New Age Hell.”

Then came Christmas Eve, the day the angel (who so far wishes to keep her identity a secret) walked in, offered up her gift and caused Wynne’s jaw to drop.

“I’m very disturbed at the loss of Gaia as an incubator for ideas outside of the mainstream,” Wynne recalled the woman saying. “It would be a shameful thing for Berkeley to let this place close.”

Although Gaia’s potential reversal is dramatic, there have been other independent bookseller successes around the country, said Len Vlahos, American Booksellers Assn. communications director.

“It’s as simple in many cases as focusing on their core competencies: knowledge of their community, knowledge of their core customer, knowledge of books,” Vlahos said.

In other cases, it takes much, much more. In November, Solar Light Books on San Francisco’s Union Street persuaded the city to deny a permit to Borders, after waging an exhausting petition drive that contended a mammoth chain store would dwarf all other shops and not fit in with the area’s flavor.

And in 1996, when Wellington’s Books outside Raleigh, N.C., was about to fold, a group of concerned customers raised $150,000 to buy the beleaguered store. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the newly incarnated Wellington’s is set to close after all on Sunday, the same day Gaia holds its first fund-raiser.

Nancy Olson, who owns Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh and mourns the demise of the nearby Wellington’s, said that Gaia’s rare good news has raced through the tightknit independent bookstore community. And what does she think of the mystery benefactress?

“I would believe there are angels if that happened to me,” she said.