Publication Date: Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Our Town: As the page turns
Our Town: As the page turns
(May 11, 2005) by Don Kazak
Two of the Midpeninsula's most venerable bookstores, located a half-block apart, are celebrating very different milestones this month.
Kepler's, one of the first paperback bookstores (along with City Lights in San Francisco and Cody's in Berkeley), is marking its 50th anniversary this weekend.
But just across Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park, the shelves of Wessex Books are slowly growing emptier as Tom Haydon gets ready to shutter the place after 30 years.
There is something warm and welcoming about a good bookstore, with shelves stocked with titles that open up worlds of wonder. It's a place to take one's time, to browse, to let one's mind wander.
Clark Kepler remembers "running around barefoot" as a kid in his dad's (Roy Kepler's) bookstore in the 1960s. The place was a rabbit warren of shelves. Psychedelic rock-concert posters adorned the walls, and the cash register area had an impressive collection of peace buttons, he remembers. "All the employees had beards and were barefoot," Kepler said.
As the 50th anniversary approaches, he said customers have been telling him, "My mother wouldn't let me come here." So of course they came there.
It was a bookstore selling more than paperbacks and hardbacks -- it was selling a point of view, of social activism in a world gone a little nuts, which made it a welcome oasis for like-minded people.
Those days of marching-in-the-street activism are (mostly) a memory now, but the spiffy current version of the store has the same kind of literate, book-intensive staff waiting to help customers. And it still has a steady monthly parade of author and other events that make the store an intellectual community center.
"We strive to bring people together and ideas together," Kepler said.
The store is also weathering the rough and unpredictable world of bookselling, which has been changed forever by Amazon.com and online selling.
Despite Kepler's impressive "backlist" -- books it always stocks, besides new releases -- of about 100,000 titles, Kepler isn't sure where the book business is heading, again thanks to the Internet.
"The idea of an enormous inventory may not be the bookstore of the future," he said.
But old values remain firmly in place: Visiting a bookstore is "a slower experience than our faster, electronic lifestyles," Kepler said.
Tom Haydon's bookselling world is far different than Clark Kepler's -- Wessex is a used bookstore.
Haydon stumbled into second-hand bookselling after college, when he would go to auctions and then sell some of what he bought.
"It built on itself," he said. He opened Wessex in 1975 when he was 25 years old, with limited business experience: "I only knew to sell them for more than I paid for them," he said.
He also sells jazz and blues records -- the vinyl kind, thank you. He is watching his inventory march out the door at half price with mixed feelings -- sadness that it's over, but happiness that he won't be running a business seven days a week anymore.
Haydon had about 70,000 titles and 6,000 records, but half the books were snapped up by Powell's, the huge Portland, Ore., bookstore.
His philosophy was, "If I filled up the store with good books, people would buy them." Haydon only bought titles that were, well, good books. No bestsellers.
He was a discerning buyer, accepting maybe 5 percent of the books people tried to sell him.
Because he picked only the books he wanted to stock, Wessex gained a reputation for quality literature.
"There are very few bookstores or record stores where quality is the driving force," he said.
Online buying has leveled the field in used-book selling. A person who once might have to visit 10 or 20 bookstores to find a certain book can now find 100 copies online in moments.
Haydon said he tried for four months to find a buyer for his store, to no avail. "People had romantic notions of running a bookstore," he said.
The store will likely close by June 1.
Many customers have told him how much they'll miss Wessex.
"It's sort of like going to your own funeral and hiding in the back," he said.
Weekly Senior Staff Writer Don Kazak can be emailed at dkazak@paweekly.com.
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