Two authors in the same city, each from a large family, each inspired by a grandfather, each passionate about the printed word. Instead of writing great American novels, though, each decides to sell them in a gallant—some might say foolhardy—attempt to keep the love of books alive.
If you put this setup in a novel, nobody would believe it.
The hero and heroine are Jim Reed and Charlotte Powell, operating out of the venerable firms of Reed Books downtown and Book Rack in Trussville, respectively. As purveyors of used books, they face daunting odds in a century hellbent on shifting the paradigm from paper and ink to pixels and screens.
The first salvo against books was fired by the ironically titled Project Gutenberg in 1971. A visionary named Michael Hart proposed to create an electronic library of 10,000 titles, though with only 23 hosts active on what was then called the ARPA.net, circulation would necessarily be limited.
The first e-book format was devised in 1990, but the first device for reading one wasn’t marketed until 1998. It took the sales power of Amazon.com getting behind the Kindle in 2007 to turn electronic books into a mass-appeal phenomenon. In fact, the internet sales machine claims that for every 100 hardcover books it sells, it sells 143 Kindle titles. Forrester Research claims that $996 million in e-books will be sold this year alone.
Cognizant of electronic encroachment on bibliophilia, Reed and Powell have devised clever stratagems to lure book lovers, but it’s their personalities that keep customers coming back.
Charlotte Powell modestly avers that the Book Rack’s generous trade policy is the draw, but her yarn-spinning style will keep any casual visitor enthralled. Raised over on Alabama Avenue in a house full of family, she credits her grandfather with getting her hooked on books. Or, at least, book: “My grandfather would read to me, but he’d get just one book and every day the story would be different. In the first grade I went up to the teacher one day and announced that my book was broken. She looks at it, the book’s fine, and she says, ‘How do you think your book’s broken?’ I said, ‘It’s the same story.’ “He would make up these stories as he went along, and he never had to buy me another book because the story was always different.”
Powell also credits her grandfather with expanding her worldview. “He was a reclusive man in a lot of ways, but he’d hang out with me,” she recalls . “He liked to drink, but my grandmother didn’t want him to. So he’d say, ‘We’re gonna walk up to Tuscaloosa Avenue and go to the drugstore and get a Coke.’ That was fine. But then we’d double back around the alley and go to the Red Top Saloon, and I’d get a Coca-Cola while he sat over there and had a few beers. It was a lot of fun. I could get a Coke and occasionally a pickled pig’s foot.
“And he knew I would never tell on him. Even up till the day he died. He said the one person he could tell anything to and know that it was safe was me.”
Powell’s impetus for merchandising came early: “I started my sales career on Alabama Avenue, selling imaginary butter dishes to real people. They came in three colors. I’d knock on the neighbors’ doors and do my presentation about the butter dishes, and I’d match them to their décor.” As an adult, she had more tangible success selling eyeglass frames for eleven years, but after she married local broadcast personality and voiceover artist Jim Powell, she chose to be a stay-at-home parent for their grandson, Blake. It was at that time she decided to start selling other figments of her imagination.
Powell always wanted to be a writer. “If you’re from the South, first of all, you’re going to have it in your DNA somewhere,” she says. “Nobody told me that it was hard to get published, but the more difficult it was, the more determined I became to do it. Those were the best days of my writing career, starting out, trying to get someone to notice and be interested in my work.” 
The first book she published was Lipstick Traces, a mystery set in the Crescent City, followed in short order by a manuscript sale to Sterling McFadden’s True Romance group. “From there on, the minute I cashed a check, it wasn’t fun anymore,” Powell says. “It was a business.”
Bookselling turned out to be a better fit than book writing: “This is so much fun. Book lovers are a breed of people so unique and so wonderful and I didn’t realize how much until I got the store.”
The Book Rack had been in business in Roebuck for 34 years when Powell bought it in 2009. With considerable help from Jim and Blake, she spruced the place up and refreshed its inventory, but she was uncomfortable with the neighborhood. When a chance to relocate came around, she jumped at it, and three weeks ago the Book Rack opened in a storefront at the Trussville Crossings shopping center, near Kohl’s.
Jim’s still building bookcases for it, but the new store has attracted a steady stream of customers to browse its uncluttered display area. Stocking all manner of fiction, from Harlequin romances to mysteries to Westerns (Powell claims to sell at least one Louis L’Amour novel a day) plus nonfiction, Powell is not drawing a Kindle crowd. “They can barely program their TiVo if they have one, and if they’ve got one, it’s because their kids gave it to them,” Powell laughs.
“One lady told me that she was thinking about dropping her Kindle in the tub accidentally so she wouldn’t have to use it anymore. She didn’t like downloading books, the Kindle was awkward and she couldn’t slip it easily into her purse to go to the doctor’s office.”
In Trussville, Book Rack customers can bring in their old books to exchange for in-store credits on new purchases, and Powell meticulously records each transaction on index cards. It is not a protest against computers. “No,” she says, “it was just, at the old place, all we had were three electrical outlets.”
Down I-59, in the City Center, Jim Reed is totally comfortable with computers, but his bookstore’s ambiance suggests anything but. More than just volumes, Reed Books is “The Museum of Fond Memories”, cram-packed with more obscure cultural references than a Dennis Miller rant.
“That’s just me,” the proprietor explains. “I feel that nobody reads a book in a vacuum. When you read a book, you’re not in a black hole, floating around like The Dude. You’re in your easy chair, you’ve got your blanky, your favorite cat, the TV flickering in the background—you’ve got your stuff all around you. And I thought how boring it would be to have a bookstore that didn’t have stuff around. So when I went out buying old books, I kept seeing these interesting things that should be part of a bookstore…and that maybe I could sell on a good day. So it just happened.”
Or perhaps it’s a subconscious homage to his grandfather, R.L. McGee, who owned the only store in Peterson, Alabama and whose “General Merchandise” sign hangs in his grandson’s establishment: “It had everything in it—the movie theatre, the service station, the justice of the peace, they sold clothing, food. I knew nothing about retail until I left the corporate world, but I think I inherited some of his attitude.”
Reed entered the corporate world, if you can call Tuscaloosa broadcasting that, at the tender age of 17. He moved from radio announcing to TV work at the original Channel 33, then made the jump to Birmingham, where he worked for 16 years in public relations for UAB, Baptist Medical Center and Children’s Hospital. “I stayed in that corporate stuff so long that my soul burned up and spewed out of my ears,” he recalls. “I mean, I did a good job, but it was like Dilbert times ten. People doing horrible things to each other.”
For respite, Reed turned to his hobby of collecting and selling old books. Around 1980, he began running a one-line ad in The New York Times Book Review that brought him business from all over the country: “I had a couple of dozen shoeboxes filled with index cards, and I had to re-alphabetize them every week to send out a new list every week—it was that work-intensive.”
Reed decided he could make a living as a full-time book searcher—he was one of only seven in the country in the Eighties—and he kept overhead down working at home until his wife, Liz, asked to have her dining room back. He rented space upstairs at the Wooster Lofts, but realized he’d have to have an open shop to make ends meet with the mail-order, so he moved downstairs to establish the first Museum of Fond Memories.
One important retail lesson Reed learned was never to judge a prospect too quickly: “One of my earliest customers was a guy just straight out of Deliverance. His coveralls were ragged and scuzzy, and the garlic and onion on his breath—whoof! In my mind, I was, ‘I’ll be glad when this guy is gone.’ So he walks up with a stack of stuff, good stuff, and I think, ‘OK, here we go, he’s gonna think they’re all a dollar each.’ He puts them down, says, ‘Total them up.’ I total them up. He pulls out a roll of hundred-dollar bills. As he walks out, I’m thinking, ‘I hope that guy comes back. I love his smelliness.’ So you just don’t know.”
After thirty years of buying and selling, Reed has come to terms with the changing demographics of the book trade. “I’m obviously more and more selling books as artifacts than as things to read. Some people don’t read books anyway, they just collect them. Like comic book collectors that don’t ever touch the comic book because you can’t have a human hand on it,” he says. “Then there are people who just want nice books on their shelves. Then there are people who are buying old things because they resonate with them. They may never read them. They might buy Pilgrim’s Progress or something just because it’s 200 years old. Then there are readers. We have a little of all those.”
Despite maintaining perhaps the most engaging retail space in the downtown area, Reed is not feeling the love from the city fathers. “Why don’t they give credit to the little one man businesses that add spice and flavor but don’t necessarily add a lot of money? Nobody’s going to want to live downtown or work downtown— this is my philosophy—if there’s no place to shop. A little store, a little bar, a little restaurant, a little whatever.
“The city people are all good people, I don’t have anything against them, but they never see what happens down at my level. They don’t understand that when you get a little old lady coming in from the ‘burbs for the first time, who’s heard that we’ve got these old books, and she spends two hours shopping around for just the right book, and she buys a four-dollar book, then goes out and gets a $30 parking ticket because she stayed downtown too long shopping— that’s shopper’s punishment. Do you have that at the Galleria? Do you have that at The Summit? If they gave out parking tickets to people who shop too long at The Summit, how long would The Summit survive? Probably a month.”
“We’re told we need to be good little merchants and produce tax money. So what are you doing to help me? You’re punishing the people who come down here.”
Reed says that, despite invitations, his council representative has never even been inside the store, nor have any of the last four mayors. “I think it should be part of the job description for a mayor or a city council member,” he asserts. “Come in for five minutes a year. Or once every four years. Can you imagine what that would do? If the mayor would come in for just five minutes, look me in the eye—he’s got my vote!”
To take his mind off the travails, Reed writes. Author of a dozen books or so under his own byline, he is also the editor of the Birmingham Arts Journal, a quarterly publication, and a weekly online newsletter that features some of his astute observations, under the heading, “Red Clay Diary”, and also a fascinating inventory list of the thing he’s sold at Reed Books that week. He remarks, “One of the things that keeps me going as a writer, as just a kid who’s been writing since he was four, is that everybody comes in here bringing stories with them and they don’t even know it. They bring in this book and I like to turn their pages, or they’ll turn them for me, without knowing it.”
As writers and book sellers, Charlotte Powell and Jim Reed have experienced the hard bargain between creativity and commercialism from both sides. If it came down to choosing one or the other, what would they pick?
Powell is down for the store, no contest: “When you’re a writer, you live in your imagination. The cat didn’t care if I wore my pajamas all day. One day I went to a funeral. There were a lot of people there and I realized because I wrote full-time, I really didn’t know any people. All the people I knew were figments of my imagination. Now I’m back in the world, and I love the world. The fun of it now is seeing how a writer’s work can fill up another person’s life. It’s beautiful.”
Reed waxes philosophic: “Everything changes, and obviously I will be selling more books to people as artifacts rather than as things to read, because people will find other ways to read if they want to read. Other than that, I’m stuck in the past. I mean, how much longer can I live? It’s not like I should worry that things are going to change when I’m gone, because when I’m gone, I won’t give a damn.
“But I love writing. It’s kind of a weird addiction, isn’t it, that takes you over. It took me until middle age to learn how to write, so that I felt good about it. But the way that I write, I just want to write exactly what’s in there, get it out, have fun doing it.”
And there it is. Just as for readers, the common denominator for the writers of books and the sellers of books is fun.
Courtney Haden is a Birmingham Weekly columnist. Write to courtney@bhamweekly.com.
Luxury of the 5th highway net CEO Sun Yafei
Capital of loose standing Gucci Clutches grain invests chief inspector Zhang Chunhui
Glamour benefit purchases manager Gucci Evening He Ping
Buy a hand: Sun Duofei
From job time: 3 years many
Buy hand Gucci Hobos criterion: The fun Gucci Shoulder Bags that buys a hand depends on the surprise of as if one find out Gucci Top Handles treasure, and disentomb sealed new move.
China Venture is cast in the findings Gucci Totes report that the group issues shows, mere 2011 first half of the year, the luxury network gucci outlets that already showed buys gucci outlets store company financing case to have 12 cases, financing amount amounts to 283 million dollar, achieve the history top level.
Nevertheless, before luxury is different from this, buy in the net in the masses consumable such as the books that be popular, dress, electric equipment, the brand is oriented feature particularly apparent, the gully between net inn and hypostatic inn is deeper also. In home, what means cuts luxury cable business the can sharpest gain, go the most dovishly?
Buying a hand is " love war " hand
Buying a hand is the activity of eyesight of a test and endurance, I am very happy with it however, wearing high-heeled shoes, go in unfamiliar urban corner, move back and forth in the sea of faces, be good at disentombed eye with a pair, thinking the fashionable element of this city, time difference, natural environment refuses to obey after throwing all heads already, those who receive me is the surprise of as if one find out treasure, and disentomb sealed new move. In below one minute, what you do not know to be able to be cleaned out forever is what good thing.
Buying a hand can be to shop not only so simple, heavy responsibility also bears on our body. Our first job disentombs namely the basic functional requirement of group of consumption of contented and different age is fashionable commodity. There is culture difference between the country, a few abroad's undesirable commodity, going to China also may be to suffer fully chase after hold in both hands.
GUCCI rolled out Boston of heart of peach of edition of Valentine's Day set limit to to wrap 2009. Classical Boston wraps the peach heart that is powdery pink to serve as an ornament, advocate hit 25-30 year old the age group girl, group of this one age breaths out Han to breath out day to slant much, I think this is planted melting model the customer that assures a bag to suit China certainly, we purchased 10 from brand business directly. As expected, this product is very fast on our website with respect to out of stock, and still a lot of clients ask to buy.
I made judgement at that time, this Bao Zhi so good annul, because melting style suited young customer of China,be, the market may not that is in the United States is good, because American girl is most,of pursuit is sex appeal and athletic feeling.
I phone what be in the United States at that time to buy a hand immediately, get in touch very quickly with GUCCI brand business. As expected, although be edition of set limit to,brand business informs this bag, but the sale in hypostatic inn is not ideal, had gotten offline the inventory of the brand, still have a few goods in stock at present. I make a prompt decision, business of American GUCCI brand all inventory of this one bag are purchased entirely, probably 30, china of all carry back. This accurate judgement to the market, let GUCCI brand business be us the following offerred for goods convenient.
The brand of luxury is very much, besides everybody familiar to the ear can the groovy sex brand of detailed, still have brand of a lot of stylist very marvellous also, but they are lacked however in home famous degree. As buy a hand, we dig new brand even with fashionable touch.
Care about Dalifoluolunsa, we discovered old fisher accidentally (Old Angler) this old Italy brand, after then try every means and brand business are contacted, they invite us to go to their factory looking around.
Over, we just know what is true manual edition luxury, I hear the sound that is less than any machines, the point that sees, it is apron of dress of a few old craftsman, manual stitch a gleam of is seamed rise. Uses skin uses bovine abdomen only that one best skin, increased to immerse inside lardy rape oil this special processing working procedure, make portfolio particularly durable. Had delimited with fingernail, average portfolio can leave a mark, but the bag of old fisher should use saliva to had been swept gently only, the trace disappeared.
The Chinese consumer with durable to pursuit bag of this seed coat is sure attraction is very big, but, because the brand of this Italy tradition lacks market promotion, do not have hypostatic inn at all in China, also do not have famous degree. We and brand business free talk about a late night at that time, introduce luxury market of China. The owner of this brand although already 50 years old, but also was full of interest to Chinese market, hope Chinese can enjoy traditional Italy to make.
Carry the sale of period of time, although do not have fame,we discover this brand, but reasonable price, excellent quality, gain the favour of a lot of consumer very quickly, we also undertake negotiating again with brand business instantly, become the total representative that this brand is in China, begin to popularize this brand.
As buy a hand, the job that has challenge sex most is to order new money. I had taken the draft of product hand draw of spring of GUCCI, PRADA to go up in one's hand 2012, I need to begin to forecast, what is the popular trend of next season?
Tall look forward to of cost of trial and error
South: American Gilt adopts a member to make, offer member luxury the discount, gained very great success. A lot of luxury websites of China undertake duplicating to its, undertake reforming according to Chinese national condition. You founded the 5th highway 2009 when, chose luxury however mode of the store on Aotelaisi's net cuts Chinese market, what is the reason of backside?
Sun Yafei: When I do poineering work at that time, luxury net is bought have two kinds of pattern roughly, the first member that is GILT mode invites make, special in a limited time sell. Additionally one kind is Shoppingmall mode, it is a delegate with BLUEFLY.COM and OVER-STOCK.COM.
The Chinese understands luxury close quarters namely recently time of these a few years. If want to make the pattern of Gilt, you can offer the ability of brand scare buying such as GUCCI, LV to do only big. I feel this does not fit Chinese market, the form that chose Shoppingmall so is cut. Such customers can come first our website looks, establish a trustful move first, form the understanding to the brand thereby. I think, this kind of mode suits to still be in luxury to develop inchoate China more.
South: Is is luxury net bought and common net bought what differs? Regard the electric business of channel business as the website, if why form particular competitive advantage doorsill in numerous competitor?
Sun Yafei: Luxury follows other consumable different, other consumable can pass a lot of channel to purchase, spell the price to spell dimensions. Luxury is the brand is oriented completely. A brand wants world-famous, need passes very long time. These brands have the character of unique sex, have very powerful control force, won't cooperate with electric business casually. This kind of character enters a doorsill with respect to what formed luxury cable business.
Although every month has new luxury cable business to appear now, but do not have actually more very much establish cooperative relationship truly with the brand, did not enter a doorsill truly. Some cable business is overseas has bit of medium of communication only, go buying inside inn a few commodity, begin sale, these are had not entered truly " the door " inside. You should enter luxury cable business truly, must build the perfect overseas system that buy a hand, with brand business contact with, the direct cooperation that builds deep administrative levels concerns. Perhaps establish cooperative relationship with brand agent in home. Who can establish this threshold, who gets the person that run with respect to what can make the market.
Brand business pays attention to brand price very much, protect price system, electric business regards channel as business, how going making gift is valuable to them, this is the problem that I am pondering over all the time. The cost of trial and error that luxury net purchases is very high, never buy buy, from buy bought a lot of, need spends a lot of time to build consumptive confidence.
Make a discount transparent rise
South: The Chinese consumes luxury to still be in inchoate phase, pursuit brand, be opposite again however the price is sensitive. You serve as purchase a manager, the consumptive group that whether selects judgement to introduce a brand suit China because of always be?
He Ping: We bought a group to make much market research in the light of the net before the website holds water. We discover major netizen or be willing to buy. Our discovery is bought through the network, consumer is met more apt does not need measures deserve to act the role of kind product, we made the program that introduces category accordingly.
Be aimed at specific brand, we are basises commonly brand before sale outstanding achievement makes preliminary judgement, make judgement next by the experience that buys a hand and feeling. Every introduce a brand, introduce much category product as far as possible, convenient consumer is tie-in.
South: Brand of luxury of a gleam of pays attention to the brand image of oneself very much, more careful to participating in luxury net to buy the market. How do you persuade these high-end brands to enter a net to buy, win the cooperation that stabilizes continuously?
He Ping: The brand that we communicate has do a line to fall retail. Should have only do a line to fall retail, regular meeting has stock, and all companies do not hope inventory is too much, must look for a way to digest. If we can provide a medium of communication, can help them sell already, need not damage brand image again, a lot of brands can be willing to make the online sale of inventory.
After I meet with the brand, the luxury net that can understand with us buys the development foreground that is in China to undertake commutative information with them, a lot of brands can be willing to make an attempt, also some of brand can stem from the development strategy that the brand is in China, reject to enter a net to buy the market.
The Image(brand image that actually the brand values most) with CRM(client the relation safeguards) , want us to be able to act on sincere manner had been done only, can win long-term stable cooperation. We cooperate with the brand, film from the product, product description is made to the webpage, should accomplish excelsior. Such, although commodity is hit,folded, but figure looks or very high end, lessened their worry. We insist to follow a brand only square standard perhaps agent cooperates, want us to sell the product of this brand on the net only, I can let a brand know what we are selling the product certainly, undertake selling with what discount.
"After foretaste is used, buy "
South: Chinese luxury website is in go one year swift and violent development, get the infuse of each capital. How do you evaluate the development condition with luxury current website of China, the development to future, right the person that do poineering work, what proposal do you have?
Zhang Chunhui: At present visible luxury website invests heat all to be centered in the brand to sell a field especially. The development of luxury website has different level. For instance American Gilt achieves certain level in that way, had begun to appear oneself brand, because it manages platform of high-end brand, luxury very well, get an user approbate, can join slowly have a brand oneself.
Another development direction is to buy synchronism of the inn below website and line especially. For instance, vipstore(beautiful tastes a net) this kind purchases a club especially, it is the err season, high end brand that decides code, inventory to give priority to purchases a service especially so, manage through the tradition, after accumulating user of many dutiful brand, also obtained the self-identity of high-end brand manufacturer at the same time, next rejoin electron business affairs, develop the new market new channel of traditional business. I believe future can have quite old proportional product be sold on the net or decide cotter to make work jointly with the pace. I guess, a kind as similar as cosmetic " after foretaste is used, buy " the new pattern that mode becomes below one stage likely appears.
Pursue trade of brand of luxury, high end, no matter be to build a brand oneself, still be the epigone of foreign mode, need to respect a brand, study and deepness understand brand culture, such ability have better state of mind to do long-term work. Need says sincere letter, ground of be practical and realistic has been done supply catenary construction and government, do not use the force of the brand and act of travel mountain fastness, the practice of shoddy and so on.
Course of study of electric trading company is " new economy (Internet economy) " with " traditional economy (traditional manufacturing industry) " be mixed, this industry does not talk to go up so far have the course with normal what and professional education talent, complete out is in the actual combat of two industries, you still must consider to whether have the shirt-sleeve capacity of two industries, be short of one cannot. Poineering group must examine him to whether have Internet sale experience, resource and whether to have the construction that supplies chain and administrative ability.
(Article origin: Author of southern Metropolis Daily: Jade of Xu a round flat piece of jade with a hole in its center)