San Francisco Bookselling Landscape Shifts

Two iconic booksellers are altering San Francisco's literary landscape as one closes a store and the other puts a business up for sale and opens another. Andy Ross, owner of Cody's Books, Inc., with three stores in the Bay Area, has announced the closing of the Telegraph Avenue location in Berkeley on July 10. Neal Sofman, who founded A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books 31 years ago, has put that store on the market, effective immediately, but will open an entirely new business in the neighborhood of West Portal.

The 50-year-old Cody's includes three other businesses -- Cody's Books on Fourth Street in Berkeley, Cody's Stockton Street in San Francisco, and Cody's School and Book Fair division. According to Ross, these remain open and healthy, "providing the best of independent bookselling." The Telegraph Avenue store is the oldest, with 43 years at its current location.

The largest of the three Cody's, a 22,000-square-foot space on Stockton Street, opened in the fall 2005 in the bustling, profitable Union Square area. Ross opened the store after other strategies to raise the company's bottom line were unsuccessful. The new store is doing well, the Fourth Street store is "making money, and the book fair division is booming," Ross said. But the Telegraph Avenue store has experienced a fifteen-year sales decline, doing only one-third of the business it did in 1990, according to Ross. Losses have totaled over a million dollars.

"This is the saddest day of my life," Ross told BTW. "I love this store so much -- it's very painful. I was hoping that, with the new Stockton Street store, I could spread my costs around and make all three stores work. But I just couldn't. It's a combination of chain store competition and the loss of scholarly and academic book sales to the Internet. To college students, bookstores mean Amazon and B&N. Our neighborhood, which was once considered the heart and soul of hip America, has become shabby and with a crime problem. The city hasn't treated this area as a big opportunity for improvement -- it's been left to deteriorate."

Employees at Cody's are unionized, and they will be placed in other positions according to seniority, whenever possible, Ross said, "but there will be layoffs." Until the doors close on July 10, "I'm going to try a revolutionary idea -- selling my books at retail. Some we'll send to our other stores and I'll do returns for some."

On Opera Plaza in San Francisco, after years of declining sales, A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books awaits a buyer. According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, owner Neal Sofman said, "My long-term partners want out, and I don't have the capital to buy them out. I'm talking to a couple of interested parties."

Sofman founded A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books in the nearby city of Cupertino, three months after Apple Computers opened its headquarters there; that store closed in 1997. A second store in Larkspur opened in 1978 and closed in 1992. Both were weakened by the loss of active partners to retirement and other commitments. The Opera Plaza location opened in 1982. Although the store is near city hall, the symphony hall, and opera house, walk-in traffic is insufficient for strong sales. Sofman told the Chronicle that the area's pricey parking meters, at a quarter for six minutes, are a deterrent to customers.

Sofman's next venture, a new, smaller store, opening this month, is called Bookshop West Portal. Located on West Portal Avenue in San Francisco, the 2,300-square-foot space is "a neighborhood store, totally different from A Clean Well-Lighted Place," Sofman told BTW. "The only common thread is me. They are two different companies -- different ownership, different staff. I had to fill out new credit applications.

"I love the new neighborhood -- people keep sticking their heads in the door asking, 'when are you opening?' It's a mixture of old and young people, families, little children, teenagers. There are a number of restaurants right on our block. We have 300 square feet in the back of the store that we'll use for book clubs, workshops, and community activities."

In the meantime, the level of activity hasn't flagged at A Clean Well-Lighted Place, Sofman said. Events coordinator Wendy Sheanin is running six readings a week, featuring authors such as Gay Talese and Edmund White. Sofman knows that the staff is "scared and upset, as I am," he said. "I can't tell them what will happen. I'm working on it." --Nomi Schwartz