William Knox, The Penang Bookshelf, Penang, Malaysia

William Knox, The Penang Bookshelf, Penang, Malaysia

The Penang Bookshelf specialises in buying and selling fiction and non-fiction, both new and old, principally about Malaysia, but also about the rest of Asia.

“Hello bro, do the book ‘kongsi’ n ‘darurat’ still available?” So ran the text I received on my phone one day last week. Four years ago, I wouldn’t have known what the sender was trying to say. Now, however, I understood right away that my potential new customer was enquiring about two of The Penang Bookshelf’s more popular titles (not stocked by any other Malaysian bookseller), written in Malay, a language I don’t understand. The whole deal was concluded by an exchange of texts, and the books were soon on their way to the customer.

The next day, I was conducting negotiations with a bookseller in the U.K. to buy what is probably the most expensive book written in English about Malaysia. The day after that, I was in the middle of negotiations between another new potential customer in Shanghai and my client in another part of Malaysia for the sale of a rare book on Chinese ceramics.

Those three transactions give a fairly accurate picture of what life at The Penang Bookshelf is like – serving both the general public and the more rarefied collector. Although I started the business as a retirement pastime, selling in a once a month local street market, I soon realised that the response to what The Penang Bookshelf had to offer was sufficiently strong that I decided to either make a serious go of it, or give it up.

When I made that decision, I didn’t have any bookselling or business experience, but books had always been an important part of my life. The first present I can ever remember receiving from my parents was a reward for being able to read a few sentences, heaps of members of my father’s family were published authors, my father himself was a journalist, my grandfather was a renowned magazine editor, and my aunt was a Booker Prize winner. So a passion for books, and a lifetime as a consumer of books (and dealing with booksellers of all sorts), had given me some ideas about the type of bookselling business I’d like to set up.

In my last two careers, as a lawyer and then as a community peace worker, my most enjoyable, and usually more successful, moments were when I allowed my anarchic tendencies to show themselves. I took a similar approach when setting up The Penang Bookshelf. I looked at what I didn’t like about bookselling in Malaysia and bookselling online and tried to do something different.

Within Malaysia, most in-print books are sold through national chains, which concentrate on what sells quickly, i.e. popular fiction and self-help books that transform your life before you’re halfway through the book. Any substantial selection of books about Malaysia in these stores is rare, and if a book is difficult to get hold of there is seldom anyone to help you find it. In contrast, at The Penang Bookshelf I try to stock as wide a range of stock about Malaysia as I can afford; a significant portion of my inventory is unavailable in the chain bookstores. If a book appears to be out of print, there’s a more than reasonable chance I can find it with the help of my network of supportive customers, publishers and distributors.

To date I have sourced most of the used books sold by The Penang Bookshelf from online booksellers in the U.K. and the U.S. Sadly, it wasn’t too long before I realised that I was often dissatisfied with online bookselling practices. Few book listings included pictures, very often there was only a meagre description of the book’s condition, and a description of a book’s contents was a rarity. There was an assumption that the buyer knew what s/he was looking for. But when I visit a bookstore I seldom go in knowing what I’m going to buy — so my reasoning was: shouldn’t an Internet bookseller be trying to cater to similar customers?

So at The Penang Bookshelf, I have tried to do this. All book listings have pictures, descriptions of condition, and some description of contents. Of course, this limits the amount of stock that The Penang Bookshelf can have online, but that hasn’t proved an obstacle to the success of the business. A year ago sales averaged one a day, but in the last eight or nine months that has increased to five a day. Although it’s probably a temporary spike, this February the average has been more like ten a day.

I’m not sure that decent descriptions, etc. have been the main reason for The Penang Bookshelf’s success. It may well be because my business splashes about in a small pool and is a bit of a rarity. However, I would like to think that The Penang Bookshelf gets noticed because it’s an antidote to more common curmudgeonly bookseller. (I have a theory that there are so many grumpy booksellers because they have to wrestle with a split personality: they love books, but also have to continually let go of books they love.) Facebook, Google+, a blog and a newsletter have all been a great help, but direct communication with every customer has been even more helpful. I’ve noticed that most times when I buy from a website, whether it be the bookseller’s own or via a third party site, I never receive any direct communication from the bookseller. And yet I have found that establishing such communication with my customers, more often than not, results in increased sales.

A Chinese New Year parade passing by the original street market location of The Penang Bookshelf.

The only real drawback to being an online bookseller is loneliness, particularly in The Penang Bookshelf’s unusual environment. Joining IOBA was a must and has made me much more comfortable with the business. Although most members are in the U.S. and U.K., and have issues to deal with that are alien to me, there is enough common ground to cure my isolation and, more importantly, to improve my education.

Despite being principally an online seller, I would immediately give up the business if I didn’t have a chance to meet my customers in person. I am fortunate enough to have an average of a visitor a week to the apartment from where I work, and I still religiously return once a month to the street market where The Penang Bookshelf began. The profits from sales there are negligible, but the camaraderie with customers and friends gives me a boost to launch into the next month of my online existence.

William Knox The Penang Bookshelf, Penang, Malaysia

Pistil Books Online, Seattle WA

I’ve always been an avid reader and bibliophile.  I have been selling books since my first job in a used bookstore right after graduating from the University  Of  Washington with a degree in  Comparative Literature in 1987, which makes for twenty-four years of bookselling.

My partner, Sean Carlson, who also worked in the same used bookstore and was an English major, cab driver, and student activist when I met him in college, and I opened  Pistil Books & News, a retail bookstore in 1993. Pistil Books & News was located on Pike Street on Seattle’s Capitol Hill in an area that was in transition from “auto row” (warehouses and repair shops)  to independent small businesses, bars, coffee shops, clubs, and restaurants during Seattle’s “grunge” years. Pistil Books & News was a 25,000 volume used and new neighborhood bookstore which also sold magazines and zines and was known for its support of alternative publications and culture. During our seven -and-a-half years as an open retail shop, we held regular author readings, displayed art on the walls by local artists, and published our own zine, Pistil Prose, with its popular feature “Retail Hell,” which is excerpted on our website. During this time, we also exhibited and sold books at book fairs such as Northwest Bookfest,  Seattle Poetry Festival, and the Bumbershoot literary stage. We learned-by-doing all aspects of running a retail store including purchasing, supervising employees, and the joy of bookkeeping and taxes.

We began selling books online during our time as a retail store, first beginning to list on Abe in 1996. By April of 2001, internet sales were about a third of our business and when we could not renew our lease on terms we were happy with, we decided to close our retail store and become an online-only business. In just a month and a half,  Sean transformed the unfinished basement of our home – in the same neighborhood as our retail store – from a low-ceilinged space with a dirt floor into our current lovely 13,000 volume warehouse/office with parquet floors and eight-foot shelves moved from our store.  We now sell our books on a dozen different bookselling websites. We joined IOBA in 2006, and I worked on the membership committee for about a year in 2009.

Although we were sad to close our retail store, and miss the daily community involvement and human interaction of a retail store, we have found  running an internet-only bookstore to have its own rewards. As a retail bookstore, we were open 80 hours/week. I worked full-time and supervised a number of employees, including one employee, Tim Ridlon, who still works for us part-time fifteen years later. Now both Sean and I work about half-time, and we also employ Sean’s brother, Troy, part-time as our packer and shipper (he takes all our packages to the local post office on foot with a handcart).  We now have more time to travel, both for business and for pleasure (usually we combine both), and to read. In addition, running an online-only store has substantially lowered our operating costs. We have found  closing our retail store to be a sound business decision; we have watched as numerous local brick-and-mortar bookstores have closed over the last ten years due to the changing nature of the book business and increasing overhead costs.

As an internet bookstore, the kinds of books we stock has changed quite a bit. We have learned over the years what kinds of books hold their value in a marketplace of intense seller competition, megalisters, and robot pricing. We carry a lot of books that we have a personal interest in – Sean picks up titles on alternative building and energy (he has five acres at the edge of the Cascade Mountains he is working on putting a garden and cabin on), and alternative/radical politics. And I can’t pass up vintage children’s library bindings with their buckram covers and cool illustrations. We also like period books of pop culture. One of our favorite finds was a copy of Andy Warhol’s Index Book, discovered in a box under a table at a library sale.  This is a piece of pop art itself, with pop-ups, a vinyl record, and other objects of the time (1967), including supposed LSD tabs. We also have a copy of  the controversial 1975 sex education book, Show Me by photographer Will McBride.

We have our own website, www.pistilbooks.net, which includes virtual readings by local authors in the form of audio files, a blog on reading and bookselling, and  The Museum of Weird Books. We also have an annual outdoor book sale, which gives us a chance to get back in touch with the community and neighbors. In addition, we have recently begun co-hosting salons  with another bookseller friend in which small groups of people come together to  eat, drink, and converse on themes with a literary bent. I have also been quite interested in  printing and the book arts, and have taken classes on bookbinding and printing, including letterpress, monoprints, and screen printing. I re-bind old library books into blank journals, with the help of Troy, which I sell online and in a local shop. I was also able to take the class The History of the Book, 500-2000 at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, thanks to an IOBA scholarship.

For us, the biggest challenge in online bookselling has been the advent of the megalisters and digital versions of books, which have driven the down the value of books that we used to be able to sell for $5- $15 to nothing. It’s not easy to predict the changes that will occur in the trade in the next 5 – 10 years, but we have a hard time believing that the megalisters’ business practices are sustainable, even with a large portion of their stock being gathered for free or next-to-free. Also, if many people read digital versions of books and fewer physical books are printed,  we could see “common” books actually increasing in value down the road. Our biggest problem right now, guess what, is storage space. Maybe we’ll move to the middle of Montana and sell everything for one dollar from a huge automated warehouse.

Pazzo Books of West Roxbury, MA

My brother and I started fooling around with the idea of starting a shop in early 2002. He was finishing up at Rutgers and my days of fruitfully mucking about with the stock market (back when you could do that – and even say it out loud) had ended with a gasp and a sputter. Before that I’d been a (para)paralegal, a telephone operator, a line cook, a dish washer, and, very briefly, an 11th grade English teacher. I used to tell people that we were aiming to explore our ambivalent relationship with capitalism, but really, I just didn’t want to go back to work for someone and I was fast approaching an age where doing something as self destructive as opening a bookshop was going to be difficult (or at the very least, a difficult sell to my lovely, supportive, but ultimately sensible, wife). So for the better part of a year, with no earthly notion what we were doing, my brother and I went (separately: he in New Jersey and me in Boston) to weekly FOL sales, yard sales, barn sales, library downsizings, and the occasional dump, collecting the books to open our store with.

Did I mention that we didn’t know what we were doing? The problem was, that we both had studied English Literature (I’d even bombed around graduate school in Albuquerque to the tune of 38 credits), so far from recognizing how little we knew about the book business, we thought we might be experts. We also knew next to nothing about selling books online. I had been selling some “first editions” on Ebay, my sole reference being the little McBride’s pocket guide, but we didn’t really game plan for the internet (insofar as we game planned for anything). This was going to be, we supposed, a bookstore where humans walked in and bought books. Ah, youth.

Where were/are you located?

At the time we were living in Jamaica Plain, a Boston neighborhood that at the time was teetering on the line between colorful and gentrified, but rents had skyrocketed there. We looked around and settled one neighborhood further out from downtown in Roslindale, a subwayless urban neighborhood of triple deckers and single family homes. It was a quirky space and over the years we experimented with art openings, coffee shops, and even a skee-ball machine, but what it really had going for it was a 2000 sq. ft. dry basement. As you might imagine, we quickly realized that if we were interested in paying our bills, we were going to have to either open a speakeasy down there, or embrace selling online. So the basement was piled high with boxes of books from clearing out houses as people cashed in on their rapidly appreciating properties (this was 2003) and moved out of the city. We were indiscriminate and vigorous in those days, and our education in the book business was grimy but effective. When we first went online, we sold general stock like crazy on half.com, but as our stock diversified (and Ebay killed half.com only to replace it with zombie half.com) we added ABE and eventually Amazon, Alibris (since abandoned), Biblio and others.

In the middle of 2008, we moved the store one more neighborhood out (running away from rent increases) to the West Roxbury neighborhood. By 2025 I should be in Rhode Island. And in 2010, my brother moved on to work with the social enterprise bookshop More than Words, so now Pazzo is me and the occasional local urchin tricked into shelving some books.

When did you join IOBA?

I joined IOBA in the Summer of 2011.

Describe your business. For example, do you have any specialties?

Early on we decided not to really specialize, wanting to stay relatively omnivorous, but years of buying books that interest me has led to areas of concentration in early science and medicine, literature (some 20th but generally 18th and 19th) and illustrated books. A strange sort of a hobby cooking from old cookbooks has led to a specialization in early cookery books (which I can go on and on about, be warned!).

Size of stock?

I’ve had right around 8,000 books online for years – culling, space issues, and acquisition speed seem to conspire to keep it right around there. After 8+ years of running the walk in shop and the internet as increasingly parallel businesses, they each definitely have their ups and downs. Without the internet the shop would have long ago ceased to exist (putting aside the notion that without the existence of the internet, the shop would be fine), and the internet does allow a 24 hour business that is very appealing (especially for pathological order checkers like myself who get a charge out of every $25 order). No matter how often I try, adding better books to the shelves rarely draws more customers in, but if you add more online stock, it certainly works which is appealingly simple. If it wasn’t for the store, the anonymity of selling online would get to me, I’m sure – once in a while it’s nice to put a face to an order – but consistently, my least favorite aspect of selling online is finding a place for all the books. Real Estate in Boston being what it is, it’s a constant shuffle to find somewhere to put all of this stock, and since the move to smaller, more affordable quarters, it’s been a squeeze getting all of the books situated on site.

Biggest challenge currently facing the trade?

Though used bookstores seem to have weathered the storm of closings better than new shops, rents, disinterest and the internet have thinned our ranks considerably. With libraries increasingly leaning towards the multi-media, I sometimes wonder where new readers and collectors will come from. It’s possible that new technologies  will allow the sort of discovery online that you can now only find in libraries and shops – that moment of serendipity when your eye passes over a neighboring shelf and finds something that you never imagined existed, but I’m not holding my breath. Maybe a new generation of book fairs and festivals will pick up the real world slack? But I remain incautiously optimistic.

Tell us about an interesting item you currently have in stock.

A reprint of Lohrmann’s 1878 masterpiece “Mondcharte in 25 Sectionen” (he completed the chart ca. 1824 but it was not  published until Schmidt collected it in 1878) one of the loveliest 19th century moon maps. The actual map that he drew is in one piece, but it was published in 25 sections and, somehow, seems more lovely and moonlike for it.

What was your best or favorite find as a book dealer? How and where did you come across it?

Certainly not my most profitable, but I dug a pamphlet out of a table lot at a “pick” auction years ago that still warms my heart to think of. The great utopian socialist Robert Owen, famous for his rejection of religion and superstition as elements of control and repression, wrote this crazy spiritualist piece late in his life called “The Coming Millennium” (1855). It was as if all his striving and hard work at creating a world where workers weren’t exploited left him with this grand, nebulous hope that was expressed in this pamphlet that was everything he had spent his life railing against. Splendid and confounding.