- Categories:
On the Frontline as an Honorary Bookseller at Community Bookstore
Printer-friendly versionCommunity Bookstore is a quiet oasis on a busy Brooklyn street, where co-owner Stephanie Valdez and children’s book specialist Amanda Bruns greet every customer walking through the door, some pushing strollers, others looking for a soft leather chair and a book. Not to be confused with Community Bookstore in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood, which is closing following owner John Scioli’s sale of the building, Park Slope’s Community Bookstore, which is co-owned by Valdez and Ezra Goldstein, is thriving after more than 40 years in business.
Every customer is given the opportunity to feel at home and to become part of the conversation brewing among the staff at Community Bookstore, and my visit to the shop, alongside ABA’s Member Relationship Manager Catherine Cusick, was exactly that — completely and utterly welcoming.
“People want to feel they can participate like a regular,” said Valdez, and not only did Catherine and I become instant regulars, but we were also honorary booksellers for the day. Following Valdez and Bruns around the store, we learned about the inventory, received some pointers on hand-selling, observed a massive book delivery, looked up items in the point-of-sale system, and then generally wandered about in awe.
On this sunny summer Friday morning, Community Bookstore was bustling. As a customer looking for an out-of-stock title (Passing by Nella Larsen, Martino Fine Books) made her way toward the door, Valdez deftly re-captured the sale by offering a special order and a quick delivery. Later, I watched Bruns hand-sell a copy of The Terrible Two by Mac Barnett and Jory John (Harry N. Abrams) to a young mother looking for something to match her son’s current insatiable interest in wild antics.
The store didn’t always have this perfect indie vibe. When Valdez came to work at the shop in 2010, it was, as she put it, “a fixer-upper.”
Community Bookstore has retained some of its original charm. Once full of animals — dogs, bunnies, and bearded dragons, to name a few — it is now home to a turtle and Tiny, the not-so-friendly cat that roams the store and deliberately occupies prime real estate on the cash wrap. But ancient carpets have been replaced by gleaming wooden floors, and dark shelving now offers a robust selection of new and quality literary titles. The Children’s section in the rear of the store regularly transforms into an events room, where authors can sit with microphones in front of a big red piano and French doors that lead to a peaceful back patio.
Independent bookshops, Valdez feels, should never be sold, but should be granted the intervention of book lovers who want to see such iconic institutions flourish in their communities. “I always want to see bookstores taken over,” said Valdez, who with Goldstein purchased Community Bookstore in 2011 and went on to open Terrace Books in Windsor Terrace in 2013 in the former location of Babbo’s Books.
Valdez and Goldstein learned in the year leading up to their purchase of Community Bookstore that its relationships with publishers had lapsed. They quickly worked to establish contacts with sales reps, and with these new connections came author visits. A full program of events is now managed by Community Bookstore’s events coordinator, Hal Hlavinka.
Community Bookstore recently coordinated an event to celebrate the release of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman (Harper), where authors read their favorite passages from the new book and from To Kill a Mockingbird at Brooklyn Bridge Park.
With a customer base that’s passionately literary, educated, and savvy, Community Bookstore’s popular picks are not what you’d find at the Barnes & Noble six blocks down the street, explained Valdez. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau) has outshined Harper Lee at the bookstore — on the day I was there, it sold five copies in the first hour and a half of the store’s opening — and Bruns pointed out the number-one hand-sell at Community: Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels quartet (Europa Editions).
While Valdez and Bruns tended to customers, Catherine and I perused the tables of books at the front of the store, commenting (loudly) on titles as we mentally added them to our to-be-read piles. A customer overhearing our conversation chimed in to ask for our recommendations; five minutes and $40 later, she left the shop with Judy Blume’s In the Unlikely Event (“The book Blume always needed to write but never could until now.”) and Matthew Thomas’ We Are Not Ourselves (“This. Is. Epic.”). High-fives abounded.
As honorary booksellers, Catherine and I helped restock the front tables as stacks of books, like The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson (Penguin) and The Seven Good Years by Etgar Keret (Riverhead), dwindled. Overseeing our efforts, Valdez made notes in “the Ezra book,” which lives on the counter by the register for Goldstein to sort through. It’s filled with handwritten notes from staff about books diminishing in inventory and ones needing to be returned.
Goldstein and Valdez manage the frontlist buying for Community Bookstore, processing orders four days a week through publishers, Ingram, and Baker & Taylor. Bruns, who handles the children’s frontlist, worked throughout the day in the Children’s section, tidying and re-shelving books sent astray by very young browsers. Valdez and Bruns both agreed that Saturdays are their favorite days in the shop. “The nice thing about Saturday is that you don’t have to think about publishers or orders — you just get to work with customers,” said Valdez.
Bruns has a passion for poetry and finds that children’s books hold, for her, similar elements. “I never stopped reading children’s books,” said Bruns, who worked at a bookstore for several years and then as a nanny. Now at Community, Bruns employs a clever tactic in hand-selling to her young customers: “I try to sell to the adult they will become,” she said, offering challenging but appropriate titles for children while always leaving room to give them something to strive for. “I find it fascinating to give kids books as they hit different development levels.”
As customers perused the Children’s section, Bruns swiftly addressed inquiries from those looking for something to interest the little ones in their lives. “What do we know about the four-year-old in question?” I heard her ask, and an intriguing array of picture books came off the shelf for the customer’s consideration.
Books can often serve as a form of therapy for customers — both children and adults — said Valdez, and hand-selling at Community Bookstore provides an opportunity to share books that can have a notable impact for the right person at the right time. “Some days you are keenly aware of the importance of the situation,” she explained.
It’s more than neighborhood customers who have benefited from the bookstore, however. Much of the inventory from Terrace Books, which packed thousands of used books into a 500-square-foot space before Valdez and Goldstein transformed it with a fresh vibe and new titles, was donated to Housing Works, a nonprofit organization in New York City that works to combat HIV/AIDS and homelessness. Now, both Community and Terrace Books donate damaged books to Housing Works on a regular basis.
Community Bookstore does face challenges, said Valdez, especially Brooklyn’s ever-increasing rents. The less obvious challenge comes from within the neighborhood, which is occupied by readers who work in publishing and other media outlets, for whom one of the perks of the business is free books.
Maintaining a stellar staff of booksellers has also been a learning process, said Valdez, who called her ownership of the bookstore, which employs a dozen or so people, a “five-year crash course in staff management.”
“This is basically like a ship; we work in very close proximity to each other. It’s very important that the crew gets along,” she explained. “I think staff culture is one of the most important parts of a bookstore. We’re not here for glory or finance — we’re here because we love selling books and we want to sell them with each other.”
As we concluded our day as honorary booksellers, the best part was still in store. Browsing the shelves, I picked up my own copy of Between the World and Me, plus A Cure for Suicide by Jesse Ball (Pantheon) and a copy of The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin (Puffin), hand-sold to me by Bruns herself, and added to them a copy of A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes (New York Review Books Classics), a gift from Valdez and Bruns. With yet another bookstore tote bag — bursting at the seams — slung over my arm, I made my way home.