Chris Oakley founded her bookstore on little more than
a whim. A slender woman with long brown hair and a lively manner, she appears
to be about forty. Yet she grew up in Louisville, Kentucky and Chadds Ford,
Pennsylvania in the 1950s and 60s. At the University of Delaware, she helped
produce an underground newspaper and poetry readings. In Wilmington, she worked
in printing and magazine layout. In 1993, she visited her sister in rural
Virginia.
“I fell
in love with the countryside,” she says. “I was certified in prepress and a
member of the typographers’ union. A printer hired me.” After a year or so, it
was time for a change.
“I had been in used bookstores that were dark,
dusty, poorly laid out, and crammed with books that nobody in their right mind
would buy, books that were tattered, stained, and had pages torn out. How about
a clean, well-lighted place, as Ernest Hemingway wrote, stocked with recent
titles in good condition?”
There
were already two used bookstores in the small town of Charlottesville,
Virginia. Both matched her description of what was wrong. The historic center of
town was reviving, with a new pedestrian Main Street Mall. And on the Mall, a
new mixed-used building was opening—York Place, named for the black slave who went
with Lewis and Clark on their 1804 expedition. The African-American owner Chuck
Lewis needed tenants for the street-level arcade. With a partner, Krista
Farrell, Oakley leased a space. With a few hundred books and no financial
backing, they opened for business in November 1995 for the Christmas shopping
season.
Oakley’s Gently Used Books still occupies the
same space, plus the one next door. The store doubled in size in 2011, and now
has 15,000 books on its shelves. Farrell left after a year to take a job with
the public library, and another partner came and went, but Oakley carries on. She
is true to her mission.
“I’m selective
in what I buy,” she says. “No textbooks or romance novels.” Oakley keeps up
with trends. She reads trade magazines like Goodreads
and Shelf Awareness. She has
subscribed to the New York Times Book
Review since age thirteen. She snaps up hundreds of titles at an annual
sale by the public library. More come from people who are weeding their home
libraries. The books she accepts are clean, free of underlining, with spines
intact. Most the stock looks new. Oakley offers cash or store credit, which
keeps them coming back for more. And she asks what they like: “My customers taught
me what to buy.”
Charlottesville may be small, but it’s international,
with a mayor from India and street vendors from Tibet. The University of
Virginia attracts students and faculty from all over the world, and Thomas
Jefferson’s home of Monticello attracts tourists. Accordingly, Oakley’s store has
sections for foreign languages and travel. A locked glass case protects a few
dozen collectable books.
“I
don’t carry rare books,” Oakley says. “Several dealers in the area have expertise
for that. In the glass case are some signed first editions, scarce Virginia history
books, and sets like the original Codex
Alera series of novels by Jim Butcher. Theft is not an issue, but accidental
damage is. I learned the hard way.”
Apart from the glass case, customers can
browse to their heart’s content. Prices are low, half the original retail price
or less. “This is a store for readers,” Oakley says, “people with a passion for
reading.” A few minutes of talk reveal that reading is Oakley’s passion, too.
“Authors
go in and out of fashion,” she says, “especially when a book inspires a movie. Joyce
Carol Oates is up and down. The seafaring novels of Patrick O’Brian and C. S. Forester
were best sellers for years, but now they’re in a lull. Earlier writers on the
sea like Jan de Hartog and C. Northcote Parkinson are sailing back. I thought I
had a handle on mystery writers, then people asked for books by Louise Penny, a
Canadian whose mysteries are set in the province of Quebec.”
The
store’s specialty is science fiction and fantasy, to judge by the amount of shelf
space they rate. Mystery and crime are not far behind. Customers are aware of this
bias. They drop in for specific titles and to chat with like-minded
enthusiasts. Oakley knows with uncanny accuracy what she has in stock and what is
flying off the shelves. She attends genre conferences like LibertyCon in
Chattanooga, Tennessee, and RavenCon in Richmond, Virginia. The latter name alludes
to the poem “The Raven” by Richmond’s Edgar Allan Poe.
Oakley has met best-selling authors, and she
counts a few as personal friends—Kim Harrison, for example, who wrote The Undead Pool, published in February
2014. Oakley hosted a book signing for her last year, an unusual event for a
used bookstore. Harrison was in town for the annual Virginia Festival of the
Book, held a block away in March. Oakley has long participated in the festival
as the moderator of a discussion panel for science fiction and fantasy.
She
also hosts a Kids’ Book Swap on Saturday afternoon during the festival. The
book swap spills into the arcade, with thousands of books to share and trade,
and about twenty excited children. Strangely, there are always more books left
over than when the event started. Oakley has learned to bring extra boxes.
Inside the store is a section for kids and young adults, with books displayed
at their height, and a beanbag for them to browse in.
Oakley tried
advertising in the early years. “To be effective, ads need to be well-placed
and frequent,” she says. “Shotgun ads that run only once, for example, are a
waste. I sent an email newsletter. But it took hours to write and edit, and
time is precious. With no employees, all the chores fall on my shoulders. I’m
listed in business directories, and book lovers know I’m here. Downtown is a
great location. Tourists find their way here, and people come on book buying
binges.” Seven bookstores now cluster within a few blocks.
Success
comes from more than location and luck. Oakley logs every book sold in a
notebook next to the cash register, she straightens shelves daily, and she
checks for books that migrate to the wrong section. “I take inventory once a
year,” she says. “I purge damaged books and ones that have been here too long.”
She donates the slowpokes to charities like Goodwill and the SPCA.
An unusual move was to offer display space
to John Ruseau, who paints watercolors of architecture and marine subjects. Now
retired, Ruseau taught art at the University of Virginia, and for years he had
his own gallery. His colorful, detailed paintings of Venice and classical
architecture draw people inside. In return, Oakley is glad to help her friend with
a sale now and then.
Other than fine art, Oakley resists adding
non-book merchandise. Near the front are two revolving racks filled with
miniature books, like postcards. At a few dollars each, they make perfect
gifts. As for coffee and snacks, a Cuban café and two Asian restaurants are steps
away in the arcade. To placate fans, she sells a T-shirt printed with her
slogan “Gently Used.”
After dabbling in online sales, Oakley saw
that she was competing with online retailers that have huge warehouses. “At the
moment, I have 450 books listed on Amazon. Online sales are a small percentage
of my total.” When asked about e-books, e-readers, and the death of print, she
shrugs.
“Sometimes,
I think I’m selling widgets, a product that’s obsolete. But the store has always
paid for itself, even during recessions. People keep buying books. Staying open
seven days a week, however, is getting old. I’ll close Sunday and Tuesday as an
experiment.”
The main attraction,
of course, is Oakley herself. She asks each customer how she can help, and a
conversation ensues. On one occasion, the customer was a man visiting from out
of town named Jim Beall. An engineer and inspector of nuclear power plants,
Beall was attending a four-week training session at the Federal Executive Institute
in 1998. A science fiction fan, he canvassed all the bookstores on his first
free day, ending at Oakley’s.
“None of the staff knew much about the subject,”
he says. “They couldn’t answer questions, and their shelves were disorganized.
I walked in here and hit the jackpot. We got to talking, and I was even more
impressed.” Recently divorced, Beall thought he detected a reciprocal interest.
“Let me see that left hand,” he said.
Oakley smiled and held up a ringless hand. By the time his training session
ended, they were engaged. They married in 2000. Beall retired and stopped
commuting to Washington last year. He helps out in the store, especially in science,
mathematics and military history, but he says Oakley makes all decisions. And
he loves to tell how they met.
“I came
in looking for science fiction, and I found a fantasy.”
___
Robert Boucheron is an architect in Charlottesville, Virginia. His academic degrees are Harvard, B. A. in English, and Yale, M. Arch. His stories, essays and book reviews appear in 2014 in Belle Rêve, Bangalore Review, Coup d’État, Digital Americana, Digital Papercut, Lowestoft Chronicle, Outside In Literary & Travel, Piedmont Virginian, Poydras Review, Ray’s Road Review, Short Fiction, Work Literary Magazine, and The Write Place at the Write Time.
___
Robert Boucheron is an architect in Charlottesville, Virginia. His academic degrees are Harvard, B. A. in English, and Yale, M. Arch. His stories, essays and book reviews appear in 2014 in Belle Rêve, Bangalore Review, Coup d’État, Digital Americana, Digital Papercut, Lowestoft Chronicle, Outside In Literary & Travel, Piedmont Virginian, Poydras Review, Ray’s Road Review, Short Fiction, Work Literary Magazine, and The Write Place at the Write Time.
