Squid Ink Books – Tucson, Arizona

I was always an avid reader: fiction, science fiction, natural history, dinosaurs, and on and on. I grew up in a dirty and dull steel mill town in southern Illinois, and was an introverted nerd with my nose usually stuck in a book. On Saturdays my mom would sometimes drop me off at the public library, where I’d spend hours reading, browsing, and wandering through the stacks. I do have the collector gene, but its early manifestations focused on stamps, coins, seashells, and even rocks. At that time I did not accumulate books, other than a long shelf of the Hardy Boys mysteries. However, a high school graduation present was prescient: a framed print of “The Bookworm” (painted in 1850 by Carl Spitzweg), that now hangs on the wall at Squid Ink Books.

I went off to college, eventually receiving a degree in meteorology, and started working for the U.S. Weather Bureau. Then, after only a few months, an Army draft notice came in the mail, motivating me to enlist in the Air Force. This was in the mid-1960s when the Vietnam War was heating up. As a military weather forecaster, I spent all of my eight years of service here on the mainland. Two tours of duty at the weather center near Omaha, Nebraska, were separated by 18 months when the Air Force sent me to Colorado State University for graduate studies. Eventually I earned both an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science and worked at NOAA Research Laboratories in Boulder, Colorado, and Norman, Oklahoma. I spent most of my Federal career as a severe storm researcher, but there was a decade lost to mind-numbing administration.

Beginnings of Squid Ink

Squid Ink had its beginnings in Norman, Oklahoma, in the summer of 1994. It was a hobby business that my wife and I started in rented space at an antique mall. We hoped to sell off some of the many antiques we’d accumulated over the years, along with some primitive oil paintings and several hundred “old books” that I’d picked up while antique hunting. I knew far more about antique furniture at that time than I did about books. Our first sales tax permit was for, “SQUID INK – Antiques – Art – Collectible Books”. My wife had been diagnosed with advanced breast cancer, and our shared business venture served, at times, as a welcome distraction from the grim medical situation.

You might be wondering, as have many of our customers, where the Squid Ink business name came from — especially since neither Oklahoma nor Arizona are very close to an ocean. It’s pretty simple: during the 1990s our oldest son was doing intricate drawings of various marine creatures, and we were inspired by his vivid drawing of a squid. It was a good choice, since it catches people’s interest and they tend to remember it.

During 1995, as my wife’s medical situation worsened, we lived part-time in Arlington, Texas, in order to be near a well-known cancer clinic. I remember quite specifically that it was April 4th, 1995, a Tuesday, when I heard author and bookseller John Dunning being interviewed on “Good Morning America.” He was promoting his second Cliff Janeway mystery, The Bookman’s Wake, and I listened to him with fascination, my interest especially aroused by his mention of many titles that I had bought and read over the years. Of course, I had always purchased cheap, BOMC copies and recycled them to other readers, but Dunning was saying that the first editions of these books had real collector’s value. Naturally, I went right out and bought both of the Janeway books and read them through. When there were breaks in my wife’s medical treatments, I started browsing and studying the books in used bookstores around the Dallas-Ft. Worth area.

Sadly, my wife lost her battle with cancer, and I became a grieving and lost soul — my grieving, for better or worse, channeled itself into the world of books. They say a person should avoid making major decisions too soon after losing a loved one, but this is easier said than done. Feeling that I couldn’t deal with my mind-numbing administrative position anymore, I put in my paperwork for retirement, and proceeded to shift the focus of Squid Ink from antiques to books, which became a way of helping me through this time of personal and family tragedy. Before long, I was acquiring hundreds, and then thousands, of books, which accumulated throughout the house, in boxes and piles and stacks. Then, in what I can only explain now as the manifestation of some form of temporary insanity, I purchased the entire inventory of a fantasy, science fiction, and horror bookstore that was closing its storefront. I had never read fantasy and had only read a couple of horror novels, but I became a kind of instant specialist.

An internet romance

Eventually, I met a new love, Katie Hirschboeck, a professor in the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, in Tucson. We shared a love of weather and climate, and most importantly, books. Following a long-distance internet romance (we may have been pioneers in that regard) I moved to Tucson, along with my now thousands of first editions, and Katie and I were married in the Fall of 1997. The Mayflower movers who packed up my house in Oklahoma were amazed at the boxes and boxes of books they were loading. Then I directed them to my full-sized storage garage, which was completely filled with still more books. When I raised the overhead door, the two movers just stood and stared until one finally said, “My God, man, you must really read a lot!”

We had an authentic mud adobe house built and modified the plans so that what had been designed as a separate garage became our book casita — the home of Squid Ink Books. Not surprisingly, the space in the casita (Spanish for “little house”) proved inadequate, and the books spilled over into the main house. So, as part of our settling in, I had to wholesale several thousand books to Bookman’s (a local version of Half Price Books).

How the business evolved

Inspired by the Dunning books, I began studying first editions, collectible books, book terminology, etc. I subscribed to AB Bookman’s Weekly and Firsts. I ordered booksellers’ catalogs and pored over them. Of course, I continued to buy books. When AB would come in the mail I’d rush through the ads and get on the phone to various dealers, hoping to be the first to claim some desired item. In retrospect, I feel lucky to have jumped into bookselling at the tail end of its classic period, as some traditions were coming to an end and new ones (courtesy of the internet) were starting to develop.

For most of Squid Ink’s history I have focused on modern first editions by authors that I had read and enjoyed – with the notable exception of that crazy purchase in Oklahoma. When I began trying to sell some of the books I’d accumulated, I would send out price lists to dealers who advertised in AB Bookman’s. My first catalog was patched and pieced together — literally cut, pasted, and Xeroxed. As I look at it now, I see that it was frighteningly naive, almost embarrassing. But, it was a start and an important part of my learning the trade, which of course has continued right through to today. One thing I learned from sending out catalogs was that I needed to pay closer attention to my pricing. This happened when Malcolm Bell, of Mystery & Imagination Bookstore, called one day and said, “I’ll take everything on your list.” That’s a lesson I can’t forget!

After we were married, Katie pitched in to help me and Squid Ink join the digital revolution. She is technically adept, while I am a plodding dinosaur who does not take naturally to technology. We signed up with ABE during the Spring of 1999, and I’ve been uploading books ever since. I tried buying and selling some on eBay, but always ended up angry. I’ve been a member of IOBA since its early days, except for a self-imposed hiatus in reaction to the presence of Flatsigned as a member. (When he vanished, I returned.) We now list books at ABE, Biblio, IOBA, and on our own website (www.squidinkbooks.com), which was designed and is maintained by Katie. I compose a couple of catalogs each year and mail them out directly to folks on our customer list. Although stuffing envelopes is even more of a drag than uploading new books, direct sales amount to more than 60% of our business each year, so I’ll continue with catalogs, though it might seem old-fashioned to many.

For the last several years I have been trying to cull low-priced books and focus on higher priced, more collectible books. This has resulted in significant donations to the local Friends of the Library. Perhaps the biggest mistake I made during earlier times was buying signed mysteries. There are a couple of mystery bookstores in Arizona, and I bought numerous brand-new books that had been signed by their authors. This made sense because these could be sold, at a reasonable profit, to folks in the hinterlands who didn’t have easy access to signed books. However, I did not keep close track of what was happening online, and that market changed significantly as mystery bookstores across the country began advertising signed stock at flap price. Squid Ink ended up with hundreds of new books that couldn’t be sold at a profit.

Would I do it all again? Definitely! But of course I’d do it better, and concentrate right from the start on higher-end, more collectible books. And maybe not pick up quite so many of those brand-new signed mysteries.

Bob Maddox Squid Ink Books 2979 E. Placita Santa Lucia Tucson, AZ 85716 squidinkbooks.com

Bungalow Books – Pueblo, Colorado

I fell into bookselling quite by accident. I had been a bartender in Toronto during the 80’s, but relocated to Southern California in the early 90’s when my dad became ill. I took a job at a Crown Books retail store as a stopgap until I could find a suitable bartending position. Little did I know at the time there was no turning back. I think bookselling appealed to me in part because my fellow employees at Crown were an amazingly eccentric and brutally funny bunch — one of those mixed groups of wannabe screenwriters, actors, and the usual migratory folks that help make SoCal a very stimulating place. It didn’t help that the original store manager was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident before the store was set to open, thereby allowing the inmates to run the asylum for what seemed like the better part of a year. Bookselling struck me as a glorious clusterfuck thanks to my first experience with it, and aside from a brief few months reading electric meters and dodging pit bulls, I’ve done nothing else for the last 20+ years.

My wife and I attended the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar in 2000. Later that year we purchased the inventory of a modern firsts mail order dealer. My wife has since decided that antiquarian bookselling isn’t for her, but she still puts on a mean Brodart. In addition to IOBA, I’m a member of the Rocky Mountain Antiquarian Booksellers Association (RMABA), and the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA).

Beginning in 2003, my wife and I began planning our Great California Escape. We lived in a nice neighborhood, but my wife had this silly idea that a house should be where people lived, rather than a warehouse for books. So we started to look for a place where we could afford larger living quarters, and Southern California didn’t fit the bill. We looked at places we had visited previously, like Oregon and Ohio, but neither was quite right for us. We recalled enjoying our time in Colorado Springs when we attended CABS in 2000, so we started doing some research. We liked what we saw, and my wife flew out to Colorado to meet a realtor, who took her around Colorado Springs. Afterwards they went to Pueblo, which is about 40 miles south of Colorado Springs, or just “the Springs” as the locals call it. My wife fell in love with Pueblo’s old architecture, the area was more affordable than the Springs, and voila! Our mid-life adventures began in 2008 in Southern Colorado. I could ramble on indefinitely about what a great place Pueblo is, especially for a bookseller like me, but if readers have gotten this far I don’t want to punish them unnecessarily.

I’ve been very fortunate along the way to have met a number of great booksellers, and I can share a couple of anecdotes that have guided me in this business. There was a bookseller in Southern California with an open shop that my wife and I visited quite frequently. No doubt I made a pest of myself, but he was a very patient man. He said there are two things a bookseller never asks a colleague. One, who his customers are, and two, where he gets his books. Most anything else is up for discussion. He also mentioned that a courtesy discount is up to the seller to offer, not for the buyer to ask.

At one of my first book fairs where I was exhibiting, I got to chat with a very knowledgeable bookseller from Northern California. I must have been lamenting my sales, or lack of sales, and I think my lament might have sounded like belly-aching. “Son”, he said to me not unkindly, “you can always buy your way out of a bad fair….but it takes nerves of steel!” Advice that I try to remember, especially when sales are slow. I can’t sit here and claim that my nerves are any steelier today, but I do try to practice the flip side of bookselling, and that’s book buying.

It strikes me that being a good online bookseller requires a different skill set than working in an open shop. Some booksellers are good at both, but one skill that seems essential for all booksellers is the ability to buy intelligently. As one of my colleagues puts it, any knucklehead can sell online. The major online bookselling venues make it reasonably easy to sell. More than one of my generous mentors has told me that the skill, or the art, or the simple difference between profit and loss comes from knowing what to buy, and how much to pay for it. I’d also say that in my experience the only thing a bookseller likes more than selling books is buying books. So rejoice, brother and sister booksellers! After all, didn’t we get into this business in part because we love to buy books?

Mike Tuck Bungalow Books P.O. Box 369 Pueblo CO 81002-0369 bungalowbooks.com

Warwick Books, South Pasadena, California

Being around books, and buying and selling them, makes me happy. I sometimes try to enumerate the reasons why. There are the obvious explanations, like loving books both as physical objects and as embodiments of information and world views; getting satisfaction from pairing a particular book with a person who wants it; respecting and perpetuating our literary heritage; enjoying scavenging; appreciating the freedom and responsibility that comes from being my own boss in a field that chose me, delight when the hunt goes to new neighborhoods or through new landscapes; stimulation from constantly having to learn new things; and the great satisfaction of being able to earn an income from such commonplace items (which sometimes makes me feel like a magician, plucking money out of thin air).

There are also more elusive and personal reasons. I constantly see books by writers I knew or worked with in my earlier career, so book scouting sometimes seems very social. At book sales I am transported to a zone of deep concentration: I lose track of time and worries, and emerge at the end as if from a short vacation. I’ve made friends with other book dealers out in the book-buying jungle and enjoy our obsessive discussions about the minutiae of the business. There’s also the special sense of self-validation that comes from a long shot that pays off—in fact, each sale feels like a validation (“I chose this book and now someone is willing to pay more for it than I did to get it!”). I love the sense of preserving the past that comes along with neatening up a book and dust jacket with eraser and alcohol and protecting it in Mylar. Even something as simple as using a single-edged razor blade and metal ruler to neatly trim a mailing label connects me with my art student days and makes me feel as if my life has a logical narrative, a coherent thread running through it.

But somehow a list, no matter how detailed, fails to capture the pleasurable essence of my online bookselling business, which until very recently I conducted out of my house (and garage and and basement) on Warwick Place in South Pasadena, California. I started Warwick Books in 2002. I began tentatively and moved ahead slowly. I thought I knew books pretty well when I began: I had handled books my whole life, and handling books is how the pros tell you you get better and better at bookselling. For years, by the very nature of my jobs, I was the daily recipient of myriad shiny new review copies. For most of my working life books just came to me; I couldn’t escape them even when I wanted to, and whatever office I occupied always ended up with stacks of books on shelves and floor. And because the books came so easily, I gave them away readily: family, friends, and casual acquaintances were the recipients of volumes I knew they would like or hoped they would be interested in. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, for instance, went straight to a friend who liked to keep up with current fiction. Number lines? They were not something I paid attention to. All the books that passed my desk were first editions. Author’s signatures? Publication parties were routine after-work events, and though I enjoyed going to them, I seldom bothered to get an author to sign his or her book for me.

Eleven years down the road, I am amazed at how much I’ve learned—and how little I knew when I started. I am also amazed to find that I am the envy of many of my non-bookselling friends because I am doing something so meaningful to me. Not only that: I’ve gained admiration and respect for carving out a niche, sticking with it, making it into something viable. Making a business. I’ve begun to see that this is no small feat.

I still have a fair number of books from my early inventory, and sometimes when an order comes in for one of them I cringe a little: my standards in the beginning had yet to be formed, really, and who knows what I meant back then by “fine” or “very good”? I certainly don’t trust my earlier self. Now, I’ll seldom pass up the chance to buy a signed book, no matter what it is. I might not have cared back then, but now I do. A signed book is special, and in my experience will always sell. And though unsigned books obviously sell too, they seem less complete than a signed book, undressed, naked.

But it wasn’t until last year, when a colleague and I bought a vast private library of books on military history—a subject totally alien to me—that I began to understand what the market is capable of. There are serious collectors out there for books relating to war—not e-books, not trade books aimed at a broad audience, but highly specific accounts of very specific things: a general’s strategies in World War II, memoirs by decorated ace flyers, books depicting uniforms, insignia, airplane nose art, and the like. My most surprising sale to date from this collection was a U.S. Security Forces telephone directory for the Army, Navy, and Air Force personnel in the area of Kanto, Japan, published in 1956. My business has perked up since I started adding these books to my inventory.

I had no idea when we bought this collection how transformative an experience it would be. (We estimate there were between 20,000 and 30,000 books, though we never calculated precisely; we do know it filled nearly 900 file boxes and took three men about five days to pack the books from the three-story condo they were housed in, all neatly stored on floor-to-ceiling shelving deep enough to allow for rows double and sometimes triple deep.) The first step was just to come to grips with the sheer volume of the collection: our interim solution was to rent a large storage unit, but it soon became obvious that we were going to need a more accessible space and a person to handle order fulfillment, so that we could reserve enough of our time to be able to actually catalogue and list the books. This has led us to lease a huge warehouse space in nearby Los Angeles and to hire a helper.

It’s not just about the scale of the collection. It’s about the man who amassed it. He was a truly outstanding collector—limitless in his dedication and passion, shrewd in his buying habits, and willing and patient enough to get what he wanted. As we work through the boxes it is not unusual for us to find an ex-library copy of a scarce title, then a later printing, then a first edition without a dust jacket, then the first with a tattered or clipped jacket, then a fine copy in fine condition and, finally, a signed copy. (Sometimes he went above and beyond and found laid-in correspondence from the principals involved, or a signature not only from the author but also or instead of from the subject of the book.) And while the presence of so many duplicates might pose a problem in a lesser collection, in this case it’s a bonus: because he was collecting books that were hard to find in the first place, even his “inferior” copies find eager buyers. He would only buy a paperback when no hardcover edition was available, and he kept his collection in great condition by putting Mylar on many of the books.

I am in awe of this gentleman’s collecting prowess, and enjoy being in his presence through working with his books. Being surrounded by this kind of passion is exciting and contagious, and has added to my daily pleasure. People from all over the globe get in touch about books from the collection, and the boundaries of my world have expanded. I really can’t ask for anything more than this, but who knows? Maybe there’s another collection of even better quality out there somewhere in my bookselling future. I ardently hope so.

Suzanne Mantell Warwick Books 101 Warwick Place South Pasadena, CA 91030