BOOK BINDING The Resilience of St. Louis Independent Bookstores Written by Rob Levy
The COVID-19 crisis has made things tough for the already hardscrabble life of locally owned businesses. This is especially true for independent bookstores like The Book House, Left Bank Books, Main Street Books, The Novel Neighbor, and Subterranean Books, each of whose tenacity and resourcefulness are helping St. Louisans get their read on. When the lockdown hit, these stores quickly turned the page on old business models and utilized new technologies to engage customers in a world without foot traffic. Now, as businesses continue to reopen with restrictions, these devotees of the written word are again writing their own chapters as they seek new ways to interface with consumers. After reopening to foot traffic in May, Main Street Books in St. Charles is still getting its legs back as it adapts to an evolving retail landscape. Co-owner Emily Hall Schroen described how the pandemic affected her business. “Bookselling is a very hands-on craft and when you remove the in-person element of getting the right book into the patron’s hand it then becomes very impersonal. That is not how bookselling was meant to exist. It is harder for us to sell our favorites or promote that independent bookstore experience.” Commenting on the challenges bookstores like hers are facing, Schroen cited how supply chain issues, diminished revenue from author events, the lack of school visits and reopening with limited capacity have hurt the bottom line. “It is really difficult to operate a business when every single thing about your industry is constantly changing. However, I think all of us have been very smart and very clever. We are all operating in a completely different way and trying new things. We’ve had to invent a new business model from scratch.” A fixture in the Central West End since 1969, Left Bank has faced the pandemic with activism and determination. As part of their commitment to community involvement and social justice, they recently became the nation’s first independent bookstore to implement an e-commerce system that accepts preferred names rather than official legal names, a move aimed at helping transgender patrons checkout with their post-transition identity. While their doors just recently reopened to foot traffic, Left Bank Books remains passionately engaged with their supporters virtually via author events, social media posts, a ramped-up store newsletter, and a recently launched YouTube channel. Co-owner Jarek Steele addressed how the pandemic changed store operations. “We’ve had to reimagine what a bookstore is several times over and also reevaluate our business model. Although this has been a very stressful time, it has forced us to really look at what was working and not do things because that is the way we’ve always done them. We had to come up with a different way and that was kind of cool.” Steele also touched on the types of books that have become popular during the pandemic. “Fiction always outsells everything, but I think in this particular moment people are buying books about racial injustice and politics that they normally wouldn’t because they are waking up to something they didn’t necessarily know. They are educating themselves which is a beautiful and wonderful thing.”
24 slmag.net
