cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Since I bought the bookstore Since assuming stewardship of Daedalus Books in mid-November, I've watched our revenue increase by over 50%. This is really important because we need to get revenue up over that in order to keep existing as an institution. Folks from other bookstores in Charlottesville have been asking what has made Daedalus get hot lately. I break down our work to increase revenue into two categories. Getting people into the store, and maximizing sales to people who are in the store. We are not selling online yet. I have not had the two to four hours in front of a laptop necessary to start the process of selling online. Daedalus is on the corner of 4th Street and Market Street. The 4th Street window was covered decades ago by a book case filled with gardening books. I cut half of our education section, which sold poorly, and rebuilt the shelves on that bookcase to hold the taller gardening books. Moved gardening over, solving a sales problem with carpentry. I razed down the bookcase covering the Market Street Window, winning it back and setting up a display facing outwards as well as one facing inwards on the windowsill. Now anyone walking or driving by on Market Street knows that there is a book store here. We set up a chalkboard sign on the Downtown Mall telling people that there is a used bookstore a block away. That has done wonders to increase our traffic. Inside, I have been ordering about 50 bookends and 30 book display devices every week. I had no idea that I would need so many or else I would have ordered 400 of each immediately. Displayed books make up about 20% of sales on busy days. I've had to replace books on a single point three times in one day. And replacing them really does make a difference. Any displayed book has a week maximum before it is rotated if it does not sell. Unless it is being displayed for other reasons. I kept a copy of the book-only sequel to ET for a month just because it represents our own brand of weird. We rotate displays religiously. A new window display towards each street every week. The ones of Market Street represent my own six-year-old mentality. Aliens, ducks, extinct species, Dr. Seuss, rebellious women, currently cannibalism. We solve problems with carpentry. The first bookcase when you walk into the store was built with shelves about eight inches high, intended to hold paperbacks in the 1970's. What possible category of thing would you put there? They are going to get sun-faded after a month, anyone browsing them has to crouch down and block the door. We did less than $20 a day off of that shelf a week. At best. I tore out the old bookcase and replaced it with a new system of shelving with individual shelves tilted upwards. So we don't need to hunt around for a book display unit anymore. And the shelves are about six inches in depth. Just the right size for shelving side by side or face-out. Doing this usually involves an all-nighter. We are open seven days a week. Any carpentry project that I undertake needs to be done in time for the store to open at noon the following day. When I re-built the shelves along the basement stairs to accommodate trade paperbacks up to nine inches tall, I wasn't finished until 4 am. The challenge was that it still had to look like vintage DIY work from the 1970's. Photographed from above or below, that is the most classic Daedalus shot for anyone to capture and post. I had to reclaim all of the top shelving, pull the nails, and rebuild the whole thing from the bottom up with ten inch high spacing so that we could file all of the books vertically and keep them in alphabetical order. It looks the same now to most regulars, but for anyone who has ever filed books here this is a sea change, one that increases sales from the final third of the alphabet to the tune of probably 5% of gross. If a section isn't selling, try the following: Cull, consolidate, and display. Our humor section had not sold a single title in the previous six months. I culled about a third from it -- old, dull books, a lot of Dave Barry and Kinky Friedman -- put a bit of work into pulling the remaining books down so that the survivors were close to eye level, and displayed a bunch of David Sedaris, vintage Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes. All of that displayed stuff, which had done nothing for ages, sold within a week. Like the other local used bookstores, this one had been stocked for years solely from what people happened to bring in to donate or sell. I changed that right away. About 25% of our sales come from about 3% of our inventory, which are books that I go out and hunt for. We need Poe, Doesteyevsky, Jane Austen, Asimov, Barbara Kingsolver, Stephen King, Tolkein, Lovecraft, CS Lewis, Agatha Christie, Anthony Bourdain, Tolstoy. These are our best-sellers. Daedalus customers are their own types. Every Saturday I go on a trip to some other city to hunt for books we need in thrift stores or in private collections that I've been asked to come look at. I will be increasing this to twice a week, at least. Every single day I do a once-over of the entire store. That means every book shelf. Straightening shelves, replacing displays, re-homing misplaced books.That used to take 45 minutes. We have so many displays now that it takes about an hour and 15 minutes. One of my maxims is, "no dungeons." I read once in some home decorating book about the idea of dungeons in the home. A garage. The guest room into which a piece of exercise equipment was moved, and then a few boxes of junk and then it becomes a dungeon for stuff that one has no idea hat to do with. Daedalus had a lot of dungeons. Easy to have happen when you occupy such a convoluted piece of real estate. Every single section in this bookstore has a constituency. A group of people who care about something and may be looking for books about it. Maybe it is Antarctic exploration, or flower arranging, or gender studies. For any of those people, they may feel like people look down on them for being into their thing. The way that we present the books in their section is, like it or not, a message to those people. Do we care about them? The way that we care for the books in any part of the store, and the work we have done or not done to cull and display within that section, tells those people what we think about them. That is true for the books on the Holocaust, and for Black History, and for Zen Buddhism, and for everything else in the store. We show people how we feel about them by the way that we have cared for their books. So, no dungeons. If we have decided to have a section of books on a given subject, then we should care for those books and for that section in a thoughtful and attentive way. I am still working to apply this fully to horses and fashion, but I know that it needs to be done and I am working on it with carpentry where needed. Our basic character is unavoidable. Daedalus is the weirdest bookstore in Virginia. We have several dozen representations of giraffes within the store. We have a very small section for books about snouts. The boarded-and-bagged Playboys are labelled, "For the Articles." Our instagram is filled with weird shit that we have found left inside of books. Like a recipe for fudge from the 1950's, a child's crayon drawing of a house in the 1890's. and an address label sent to Alan Ginzberg care of City Lights in the 1950's. We're weird, and old-school, and the cool people work here. In addition to me -- and I usually wear all black and play Leonard Cohen or Beta and or Joy Division -- June or Katie or Anthony are working. June is my right-hand gal. She works her ass off. Today she was finishing up putting mylar covers on old hardbacks, which I never told her to do, when I came back from a book-buying trip. June is trans. Her face looks like something that any girl would ask for. She's about 5' tall. Knows modern science fiction and YA in and out. I've been pushing Sandman on her. We have the same sense of humor. Honestly, she's like having another daughter. I feel very protective of her. I trust her implicitly. June does not feel cool to herself. But she looks cool and punky and like Death and she knows books well enough and she inhabits the office in a way that makes her cooler than she realizes. I have given her instructions that she is to take no shit from anyone and she is empowered to kick anyone out at any time for any reason. There will be another customer along any minute but there will not be another June. I gave her a dollar an hour raise as soon as I had bought the bookstore and I would like to give her another bump if there is any sign that January will not be awful. Katie is a poetry MFA who always wears skirts or dresses. She was born in South Korea and was adopted as a small child. Her boyfriend uses "they" in spite of having a shitty moustache. I am going to confess to a prejudice: People who insist on a pronoun different from their biological pronoun in spite of putting no effort whatsoever into appearing like that pronoun. I have so many friends who live with body dysmorphia. Wonderful people who live with a body identity different from the one that they were born with. When some moonchild asshole who grows a moustache and wears men's clothing asks to be called "she," I cannot take that seriously. There are so many people who actually work at appearing that way and change their lives at great personal risk to themselves. Some of my favorite people right now are trans people who take a huge risk every day just being themselves. These dipshits who borrow a pronoun to seem edgy just make it harder for people who are actually transgender. Anthony has been working here for ten years. I had thought that he might be dead weight, but really he has been waiting to blossom. A good-hearted weirdo in a motorcycle jacket who recognized a paperback by Nick Cave. Invariably kind, he has the thoughtfulness of a bartender who knows that drinking a lot is a bad idea but doesn't have the opportunity to do something five days a week. I know that he knows that drinking to excess is destructive. And he knows it. Something going on with our interplay is me wanting him to acknowledge that and do something about it. The good Lindsay is still here. She dresses like a bag-lady and wears no makeup and is totally devoted to me but I just wish that she would take some slight care in ho she looks. She is so sweet. She honestly does absolutely nothing to look good, ever. She runs and exercises a lot. Every time that I try to take her out to dinner she eats nothing and sips water and I am starting to think that she literally has an eating disorder. Like, I feel embarrassed because we are taking up a two-top and she will not order any food. I don't know what to do about her. She is a very good person but she makes no effort whatsoever to look nice or to be a good date. She just showed up and followed me around. She also introduced me to the people who sold the bookstore to me. She gives good massages and I like going down on her. Aside from that, I mostly just listen to her problems. 3:50 a.m. - 2024-01-07 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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