Mary Brown - Seattles Used Bookstores: 1999 and 2019: A Love Note to Book Culture and the Pre-Digital Age

SEATTLES USED
BOOKSTORES:
1999 AND 2019

A Love Note to Book Culture
and the Pre-Digital Age

Photos and Text

Mary Brown

Copyright 2020 by Mary Brown.

Cover photo: Twice Sold Tales cat, East John Street, 1999.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020901312

ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-7960-8325-5

Softcover 978-1-7960-8326-2

eBook 978-1-7960-8335-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,
and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery Getty Images.

Rev. date: 02/05/2020

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CONTENTS

For Mom (the painter), Dad (the builder), and Jessie (the reader).

For Tommy, whose readings of Taffy Sinclair I will never forget.

For Gus and Penny.

And in memoriam, John Stamets (19492014), Seattles photographer.

Liz Reutlinger, my mother, in an unidentified
downtown Seattle bookstore, 1999.

I am very grateful to all the bookstore owners who permitted me to photograph their stores, answered questions, and wished the project well. I would also like to acknowledge the people in the photographs, readers and booksellers, who are not named, as they are the essential part of the ecology of bookstores and create some of the most interesting photographs.

Charles Fischers 2013 article, Seattles Disappearing Bookstores, from Seattle Magazine , is a gem of insight into his experience working in a used bookstore and is quoted at length herein.

Special thanks to Roxi Kringle for her excellent feedback on the photos and essays as well as unfailing warmth and good cheer as a friend and neighbor. Elizabeth Reutlinger, my mother, helped fine-tune the final draft by freeing me of my attachment to commas, semi-colons and unnecessary phrases.

Further thanks are due to Ellen and Tom Flynn of the Art Establishment in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, for operating a multipurpose art studio with a first-rate darkroom, the only public darkroom within a ninety-mile radius. Dans Camera City in Allentown also deserves credit for not giving up on the print and continuing to sell photo paper, even if it is kept in a closet.

To contain the project within workable boundaries, many notable used bookstores in Seattle have been omitted: Lion Heart Bookstore and Left Bank Books in Pike Place Market, Mercer Street Books in Queen Anne, Pegasus Book Exchange in West Seattle, Twice Sold Tales in Ballard, Horizon Books on First Hill, the three locations of Third Place Books (a mix of new and used books) in Ravenna, Seward Park, and Lake Forest Park, Estelitas Library and Bookstore on Beacon Hill, and B. Brown and Associates between Fremont and Northlake. Sea Ocean Books, once a neighbor to B. Brown selling rare naval and marine-themed titles, shuttered at the end of 2019. All of these places have stories and collections as interesting and valuable as those featured in this project, and I hope my readers will discover them.

There is no death, only a change of worlds.

Chief Seattle

Dont it always seem to go, that you dont
know what youve got til its gone.

Joni Mitchell

If you are taking in these words, you already understand something about why this project came into being and recognize the pleasure and edification obtained through reading. Every book is a conduit to other worlds of thought and experience that, once assimilated, become permanent mental keepsakes. While the magic may reside in the books, the libraries, bookstores, and personal collections that house them possess their own transformative power. Book-filled spaces offer both a refuge from exterior chaos and the thrill of possibility within their rows and nooks. Fiction, mystery, world art, religion, sexuality, biography, gardening, parenting, humor, horror, and countless more topics are ensconced in portable, often beautifully designed and illustrated bundles possessing a pleasing tactile permanence.

Seattles Used Bookstores focuses on one element of book culture: the used bookstore. My aim is to show, in photographs and brief essays, what makes used bookstores unique and interesting, to reflect on their contribution to urban street life and the larger community, and to recognize what is lost when they disappear. Used bookstores provide a brush with the numinous rarely found within other venues, as they possess a particular alchemy of time and place: the lives of their books and the setting in which to explore them. Used bookstores also remind us that there is much to appreciate about the experience of slowing down, making the effort to visit places outside of home and work, stumbling upon the unexpected, and finding a bookor five, ten, or twentyby interacting with another person.

Seattle

Seattle, Washington, is situated in one of the countrys most extraordinary landscapes. Rugged and silvery, the Pacific Northwests mountains and sea have long been the areas backbone and lifeblood. The city grew up on a series of steep hills and rocky shorelines between salt and fresh water, with Puget Sound and Elliot Bay to the west and twenty-two-mile-long Lake Washington to the east. As the Emerald City of the Evergreen Stateso named for its many varieties of conifersSeattle is replete with trees that appear to blanket all but its downtown business district. Further to the east stretch the snowy peaks of the Cascade Range, and looking west across Elliot Bay, the sun sets over the Olympic Mountains. Lake Union, with its human-made canal system connecting Puget Sound to Lake Washington, opens up the land just north of the downtown business center, creating an expansive oasis tucked right into the urban center.

This stunning setting, coupled with Seattles series of hills, means that water and mountains are rarely out of sight. Traces of wildness can still be felt in even the most urbanized zones: a blast of salt air from an early spring squall on downtowns bustling First Avenue, the smell of the trees along numerous urban greenbelts, and tangles of blackberry bushes making their way into otherwise well-kept lawns and urban landscapes. Washington State Ferries carry thousands of people a day across Puget Sound, accompanied by seagulls, often porpoises, and occasionally southern resident orcas. Travelers are seen off and greeted by cormorant colonies gathered on the waterfront dock pilings. Seattles oceanic climate creates a long, prolific growing season, spectacular sunbursts throughout the year, and clear, cool summer air. It also brings in the areas rain and infamous gray cloud cover that lasts from early fall to late spring, from which Seattleites find comfort in coffee, movies, chocolate, andof coursebooks.

Project Origins: Seattle, 1999

At the turn of the last millennium, Seattle was in a comfortably mellow lull following a surge of cultural and commercial activity. Grunge music, born in the northwest in the eighties as an underground, alternative sound, had become wildly popular and commercially successful by the middle of the nineties. A building boom from 1990 to 1997 brought significant new construction to the downtown district, including five new skyscrapers, the Seattle Art Museum, and the bus tunnel. Starbucks Coffee, hatched in Seattles Pike Place Market in 1971, was already a national chain and poised on the brink of global domination, yet dozens of smaller, independent coffee shops were still thriving. The University of Washington had opened new campuses in nearby Bothell and Tacoma and continued to lead the world in fields such as medicine, computer science, and engineering. Bookstores, used and new, seemed to be everywhere. University Way, the main thoroughfare in in the university district, had five stores selling only used books.