As The Bookloft Changes Hands, Eric Wilska Reflects on Keys to Its Success

Forty-two years after the founding of The Bookloft in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Eric and Ev Wilska have turned the reins of their iconic bookstore over to new owner Pamela Pescosolido.

The Wilskas put the bookstore on the market in December 2015 and enlisted Paz & Associates to help with the sale. They received more than 20 inquires from people interested in purchasing the store, Eric Wilska said, but chose Pescosolido, who has a law degree and previously ran an art supply store and a small bookselling business.

“She really understands the heart and soul of The Bookloft,” said Wilska, who told Bookselling This Week that he is extremely proud of the store’s longevity and success.

“Ultimately, by hiring good people and staying with it, we became a really beloved town institution,” said Wilska. “At least three or four other bookstores came into the immediate area over the years, but for whatever reason they didn’t survive and we did.”

One key to the store’s survival, said Wilska, is the fact that it is located in a strip mall.

“We’re in a shopping center with a grocery store,” he said. “I’m convinced that was part of what made us a successful store — because of the traffic. Our building is owned by a Fortune 500 company so the rent is not cheap, but we take advantage of that constant traffic. Even on snowy days we can have good days. People will always need bread and milk.”

Back in the 1970s, Wilska thought his love of books and his desire for self-employment would lead him to start either a free school or a bookstore. In the end, he managed to start a bookstore business with the paltry sum of $4,000, mostly a loan from his grandfather, with Wilska himself constructing the shelves and fixtures. When the store first opened, he said, some of the biggest sellers included Helter Skelter and the Pentagon Papers.

The Bookloft — now 3,500 square feet — began in 1974 as a 1,200-square-foot storefront. Ten years later, the bookstore doubled in size when it moved three doors down the strip to a larger storefront. Six years after that, the laundromat next door went out of business, so The Bookloft expanded into the space and redesigned it.

Other keys to the store’s success over the years include its huge inventory of books, its touristy location in the Berkshire Mountains, and its foresight in cornering the market on self-published Berkshire history books. In addition, Wilska said, The Bookloft has always been an early adopter as the book business has changed. This includes being one of the earliest stores to put a strong emphasis on staff picks, and making sure they were prominently and strategically displayed.

“Our staff picks are 20 percent of our business,” Wilska said. “Also, we had one of the first computerized inventory systems in the country with Ingram. We’ve always kept up with the technological aspect of bookselling.”

Wilska also credits the store’s success with the incredibly loyal following it has built up over the years, even in the face of the e-commerce boom and the widespread influence of Amazon.

“We did lose some customers through it all. I’m not naïve about that; still, enough people chose to stay,” said Wilska. “These days, I think the localism movement is really resonating, but you absolutely have to be nimble.”

But most of all, Wilska said his store’s success has been a credit to his amazing staff, including longtime book buyer Mark Ouilette, booksellers Zazu Galdos and Linda Cysz, and many others over the years. Each Bookloft employee has exemplary customer service skills as well as his or her own distinct literary interests and strengths, he said.

The store has been able to keep on such a high quality staff because he has always made sure to provide for his employees, Wilska added. The Bookloft offers above average pay and benefits to its staff, including three to four weeks’ vacation, generous Christmas bonuses, and health insurance.

“We always had a really good and caring staff,” he said. “I think we understood, and still do, the value they add to a good retail place. There are so few places in your life — I can count them on one hand — where before you go in, you can say, I know this is going to be a good experience.” 

The author and Great Barrington resident Simon Winchester wrote about The Bookloft in My Bookstore, a 2012 anthology of essays by authors about their favorite bookstores (Black Dog & Leventhal). Winchester praised the store’s unique charm amid its inauspicious location: “It has an architectural style that, to put it kindly, is entirely consonant with the look and feel of the mall around it,” Winchester wrote. “But once through the door — a positive Aladdin’s cave! A sanctuary, a private and never-seething lectorium. It is just packed, with groaning shelves jostling against shelves, with thousands upon thousands of just-what-I-always-wanted and I-really-must-take-a-look-at-that and the-review-said-it-was-brilliant books.”

Winchester’s essay also offered praise for the Bookloft staff: “They Know Books at the Bookloft, as the best of the independents do and as most of the chains never need to. The staff there read; they know; they anticipate. They scan all the trades, the blogs, the Twitter feeds. They know their customers; they know their tastes.”

The local community had a chance at a May 28 open house to say goodbye to the Wilskas and welcome Pescosolido.

“My family has had a home in Mount Washington in the southern Berkshires since 1910,” said Pescosolido, who moved to Massachusetts from California after her son left for college. “My great grandfather, then grandfather, and then their children and grandchildren inherited it as a shared family house, so I have spent many summers of my life in the Berkshires.”

For now, The Bookloft’s new owner plans to keep on the store’s eight staff members and maintain the shop’s current operations as is. The Wilskas will stay for about a month to ease the transition after the sale, which closed May 17. While she doesn’t plan on changing much about the store at these early stages, Pescosolido said she does know she would like to enhance the store’s selection of non-book offerings.

“Working with sidelines is an easy way to put my stamp on the store,” said Pescosolido, who attended the Paz School’s “Owning a Bookstore” workshop as well as this year’s BookExpo America. “Other than that, everything here seems to have been run quite well for it to have lasted this long.”

During his newly found downtime, Wilska said he is looking forward to reading more, as well as actually trying out that old retirement cliché — fishing. However, Eric and Ev Wilska will also continue to run their other store, a used book and antiquarian bookstore in nearby Stockbridge. Formerly called Found, the store, now known as Shaker Mill Books, recently moved to a new space by the historic Shaker Mill.