Round the Corner World

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Why are independent bookshops important? – Powell’s Books – Portland, Oregon

This bookshop is huge! It is hard not to feel overwhelmed – where do you start??

Before I knew it this bookshop ended up becoming my base in downtown Portland, The Pearl District. We were staying in an AirB&B in the Boise Area, on the outskirts of Portland for about a week, exactly a year ago (Feb 2018), having spent a few days in Seattle first. I had started writing a travel blog about what is round the corner from where you are. I had become very interested in finding out more about the concept of what is ‘Local’, inspired by what I experienced in Seattle (see http://www.roundthecornerworld.com/how-it-started/) – how do you define it, what is it? It could be things of local interest when you are travelling but could also be about what is round the corner from where you live when you are not travelling – usually things that are not mentioned so much in tourist literature.

In Portland I soon found out how to take the local bus from the Boise Area into downtown Portland and then it was just a walk across the Steel Bridge over the Willamette River to get to the Pearl District.

The Powell’s bookshop is a paradise for book worms and well, for anybody interested in books and stationery. It also has a great cafe where you can sit and read the books you have found in the shop – it was very easy to spend most of a day in there.

It is the world’s biggest independent bookshop, covering 6,300 m2 – it was selling books online in 1993 before Amazon. Founded in 1971 by Walter Powell and his son Michael Powell and situated on the corner of NW10th and 11th Avenues and between W. Burnside and NW Couch Streets, it specialises in new, used, rare and out of print books – an interesting fact: they buy around 3000 used books per day.

There are different displays of books in the foyer area mounted up in small peaks of books, grouped according to themes/types such as new arrivals, rating of used books, new books for used prices etc. The one that caught my attention was the collection of books where individual members of staff had each chosen 5 best books from 2017, and ranked them. There was a display of all the first ranked books and a card, listing the 5 books in raking order, with a small paragraph by the staff member who chose it as to why they recommend others to read their chosen no 1 book. Fascinating reading, the criteria for choosing varies so much from person to person, ensuring scope and diversity.

This is a great way for staff to get engaged with what they are selling – imagine if you had a day or more every month to read a book and write about it … Apart from the 5 best books, there was also a ‘staff’s pick’ display in specialized themes, – so the staff members would have had a lot to read every year in order to be able to do that.

Moving on from the foyer into the different areas of the building, I was tempted to see if I could find a map of the building, but soon let that thought go when it was not immediately clear where to find such a map. I decided to just go by intuition instead. The next area had a sign listing the direction to different colour zones – great, that was a good beginning.

I walked straight forward and found myself in the pink zone, which turns out to be a children’s section. My attention in the children’s section was drawn to a book display with the heading ‘Kids are feminists too’ – among the books in the display was a pile of Pippi Longstocking books by Astrid Lindgren and a book with the title ‘Strong is the new pretty – A celebration of girls being themselves’ by Kate T. Parker. I was glad to see this themed section and about being reminded of Astrid Lindgren because I love her books, and her writing has had such an enormous influence on my reading when I was a kid and teenager. Really great to see her work being advertised to a new generation of readers – I swallowed all her books as a kid almost in the same excited way that the generation of kids later on got into Harry Potter books.

As I walked on towards a different section there were many different displays of magazines, strange and weird notebooks, diaries etc. for sale, for example a series of notebooks where you can enter 33 entries about beer brews, wines, and other more quirky things that you’ve always wanted to keep a record of (!), diaries that are for 5 years and where ‘it is ok’ to only write one line a day etc. etc. – this is a lesson in not getting overwhelmed.

I kept finding myself going to the orange zone, which featured the themes of cooking, film+tv, gardening, music and sustainable living and agriculture, and in this section. Used books were placed next to new books, so you had the choice of buying a used copy, instead of a new one if you wanted.

The inspiration behind the book shop started in Chicago in 1970 where Michael Powell was a graduate student at University of Chicago and opened his first bookshop there selling used, rare and discounted books mostly to the academic community. He borrowed $3000 to cover the lease on the bookshop, encouraged by authors like Saul Bellow as well as friends and professors. The bookshop became so popular that he was able to pay the loan back in 2 months and his father, got inspired and opened a similar bookshop in Portland the year after. In 2010, third-generation Powell owner Emily became president of the company.

Just after the Golden zone, there is a big cafe that has a library&cafe feel to it, with long narrow tables lining the window areas, divided into small booths with plugs for power and usb, where you can do serious study if you like, work on your laptop while looking out through the window on people and cars moving by. Then there are larger and smaller tables with chairs where you can sit down with your books too, and the nice thing is that it is fine to chat and have conversations as well.

At several different tables the are people sitting playing Go, (Chinese Chess) and with all the different ‘activities’ going on, there is a nice, inspired feel to this place. The cafe is called World Cup Coffee and Tea and is local to Portland, Oregon – they have two shops in the city and specialize in roast coffee. The coffee is really tasty and so is the chai, which was my favourite with hot milk and honey.

If you want to sit and read in the cafe, you can take up to five books from the store and have a read – my selection, which took me a long time to decide on, includes a Vietnamese Cook book – The PHO Cookbook, by Andrea Nguyen, as I saw a restaurant close by with the same name, that drew my attention, and I was intrigued to find out more about rice paper wrapped vegetable etc. There was a book that I had tried to find for some time by Italo Calvino called ‘Invisible Cities’ and thought that I had a good chance of finding it here. So I went up to the help desk just at the entrance of the cafe and asked for Italo Calvino’s book. I was then taken down to the shelf where it was and could choose between a new or used copy. It worked perfectly – I chose to buy a used copy, felt very happy about my buy.

I spent at least an hour or two every day in there during my stay in Portland and explored more of the Pearl District, with the bookshop as my base 🙂

So what is the future of independent bookshops and why are they so important? Well I see the independent bookshop as a local resource, for locals and visitors/travellers! 🙂 , that helps keep a community vibrant no matter how big or small. I’ve experienced the benefit of both big and small indies bookshops in the UK too.

The Powell’s Book Store has been around for nearly 50 years and stood the test of time, but during the last 20 years or so independent bookshops in the UK have been in decline. Just as I discovered Borders Bookshop in the UK and began to visit it on a regular basis about 15 years ago with my family, enjoying a coffee while being in a heaven of books and magazines, it closed down. Other smaller independent bookshops were around in the area, but they were also struggling.

The good news is that in the last two years there has been a slow reverse of this trend in the UK, seeing the number of independent bookshops increase by 1 🙂 in 2017 and by 15 in 2018 to 883 in total, according to figures from the Booksellers Association and reported by the Guardian.

The new indies tend to be quirky, eclective yet with a strong local identity, reflected in names like the Stripey Badger in the Yorkshire Dales, Lost in Books in Cornwall or Vinyl Fiction in Manchester. Sarah Brook and her husband Peter opened their bookshop BrOOK’s in Middlesex inspired by a “champagne book bar” on an American road trip. In a recent interview with the Guardian she says “It’s an inclusive environment and lots of people come and have a drink on their own and browse the books. Indies are important because they choose their own stock which can adapt to the local community. They offer a personal service and treat each customer as an individual”.

The independent bookshop as a place where you can come on your own or together with friends and family, and explore the world of books, is an ideal community space for me. You can be quiet or have conversations with others, it is up to you. I see the independent bookshop as a space for local potentiality, – it can be like a hub where ideas are hatched and exchanged, just like it used to be in UK pubs and French cafes.

Sometimes it is difficult to define exactly what it is that makes something work, but the combination of a warm drink and a book, in relaxed surroundings, where you don’t necessarily have to buy the book in order to enjoy it there – is a good recipe to start with. Some libraries have also successfully combined cafe culture with the enjoyment of books – I used to spend some time in one of those in Copenhagen, when I lived and studied there, and it was definitely that combination that was all important. If I couldn’t have a cup of coffee there, I would have taken the book to a cafe or home 🙂