Annie Bloom's Interview

Michael Keefe (store publicist) and Will Peters (manager/buyer) from Annie Blooms Books in Multnomah Village, were gracious enough to sit down with me last weekend to discuss how Annie Bloom’s got started, how the small indy stores still play their role in the industry, and whether or not the owner (Bobby Tichenor) has ever thought about writing a memoir.

Reading Local) What’s the creation story behind Annie Bloom’s?  How did it get started?

Will Peters) Bobby Tichenor whose the owner, has been now for over 30 years last fall, went through law school and became a lawyer, practiced for a short time and decided she liked books a lot more.  So she decided to start a bookstore in the [Multnomah] village.  She came up with the name from one of her original partners, Susan Bloom, and Annie is Bobby’s middle name.  Lucid Interval was also in the running.

RL) How did she choose Multnomah Village as a location?

WP) She and her husband lived nearby, and it lacked a bookstore at the time. It seemed like a good location, although it wasn’t as built up at the time.  It primarily consisted of antique stores and a few restaurants.

RL) Was it smooth sailing as soon as she opened the doors, or were there rough patches along the way?

WP) It had its up and downs in the early years.  She originally opened up across the street and was there for four or five years, before they bought this building and moved over here.

RL) Does it help being on this side of the street versus the other?

Michael Keefe) Yeah, the foot traffic is better, the parking is better, and being next to two restaurants that have been here forever versus an empty lot.

RL) Is this a bigger location?

WP) It’s a little bigger, plus she owns the building, which helps control the costs.  No need to worry about a landlord deciding one day to raise your lease, which has happened to a lot of bookstores.

RL) Do you know the story behind 23rd Ave Books?  Is that what happened to them?

WP) I believe it was just a gradual decline in business over time.  It’s a very tough location being close to Powell’s, which is such a big draw.  That neighborhood has also changed a lot over time. It used to be primarily smaller independent businesses and now larger chains have increasingly moved in, which has changed the neighborhood dynamic and identity.

RL) What’s the best part about being in Multnomah Village?

MK) I think people feel like the Village is a small town within a big city.  People are extremely loyal to the idea of shopping in their neighborhood, it’s a big value for them to have a book store they can walk or ride a bike to.  We get people all the time saying, “We’re just so glad you’re here.”

WP) We seem to have a lot of teachers in this area too, who I’m sure enjoy seeing the local tax dollars stay here.

RL) Multnomah Village seems to be “hyper-local” to a certain extent, with your customers even considering stores here versus hopping on I-5 and heading downtown.

WP) It’s also a cultural meeting place. We get a lot of input from our customers.  We really listen closely to what our customers are interested in, and try and respond to that directly, which is something that, on our scale, we’re able to do.

RL) How do the events held here come about?

MK) We get a lot of offers, from publishers and independent authors.  We just have to sort through them and try and decide which we think will best fit the community, and which will draw in people and be worth their time, and worth the author’s time, as well.  Sometimes we get really big offers and it’s obvious that it will be a big success.

RL) Being a local bookstore, do you guys try to lean towards bringing in local authors?

WP) I don’t know that we lean one way or the other.  We take each event individually as to whether our customers will get value out of it.  Regional authors, like Molly Gloss and Garth Stein, have been some of our biggest draws.

RL) That’s been the fun thing about Reading Local, is discovering just what a treasure trove we have here locally.

MK) Yeah it’s almost disproportionately high, which is good for us here locally.  We’re probably in the top 10 in the book markets in the country, almost always being on the stops for author events.

RL) How do you feel the internet has changed your business at Annie Bloom’s, and/or the industry in general.

MK) For the industry in general, it’s affected it a lot, but it hasn’t affected us a whole lot.

WP) It’s everybody’s biggest competitor now. Getting people in to physical bookstores is much more of a challenge now than it ever has been.

MK) I think, going back to customers wanting to support local, on one hand we have probably lost some business to Amazon, but on the other it sets up this kind of “evil empire” thing that our customers respond to.  We get a lot of positive response from being the “little guy” again.

RL) But you guys offer the ability to purchase books over your website as well?

WP) We do, its more of a convenience thing for customers.  Most of our online orders come in after we are closed, when they can’t stop in.  Additionally, it’s for customers who want to have a book shipped somewhere else, or if they are living somewhere else and want a book reserved in the store for someone locally to come pick up.  For us it’s here for the convenience of the shoppers and for disseminating information.

MK) I think a lot of people use the website just for the information, because they really enjoy coming in the bookstore for the experience which you can’t get online.  So they look at our website, print out the list of books they’re looking for and then come in the store and check them out.

RL) It seems like a bookstore is unique in that you can be here all day if you have the time.

WP) The browsing experience is so important with books, maybe more than any other retail environment.  A bookstore is somewhere where you can spend the afternoon, discover things you would have never thought you would find, ideas you never thought you would find.  Just by coming in, that tactile experience I think is unique with books.

RL) Being an owner of a bookstore would be a dream job for me, and a lot of Reading Local readers.  What’s it really like, is it as dream like as we envision?

WP) Bobby is kind of on call seven days a week, fourteen hours a day.  Which takes a certain personality, which she has.  She is very good at it, very connected to it.

MK) I think there is this very cyclical thing that happens, where because she is here so much she has made it very home like.  That homelike feeling extends to customers and employees, making it a more comfortable environment to be in.  It sort of feeds on itself, and becomes, I would imagine for her, a home away from home.

RL) Having been here for 30 years is Annie Bloom’s pretty well known to those outside of Portland as well?

WP) Surprisingly, yes, we are on the major publishers’ radar.  For a variety of reasons, including drawing well for events.  They know that they can send literary authors here that might not draw well in other places.  We have always had that recognition.  As a specialty, we do well with children books.  I think that in some ways we’re one of the last of a breed.  We’re bigger than a lot of the old smaller bookstores, were in a city, in a neighborhood.  They like to do a lot of tests with us too. If a book does well here, it may do well elsewhere.  So we’re fortunate in that.

RL) We talked a little bit about 23rd Ave Books, have you guys had to adjust things here with the economy being the way it is?

WP) If you look back to last fall when the economy became “a topic”, things were bad for awhile and then they picked up.  I think part of that was the election. It gave people a little more optimism.  The weather in December ended up being more of an obstacle than the economy.  There is a story going around about Broadway Books having a good Christmas, in part due to the owner’s son blogging about the store and offering burritos for buying a certain amount of books from them.  So when things are going bad, there is always opportunity, too.

RL) I’m sure you guys are readers.  What are some of the favorite books you have read this year that maybe have gone overlooked?

WP) Forever War by Dexter Filkins, who is a reporter that over the last decade has covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  It’s really “right there, what it feels like to be there” – the tragedy and folly of an empire occupying a country, and how the people their respond.  The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein as well, speaking of the economy.  It’s about how when things turn bad, governments have used that as an excuse to change the social order of things.

MK) 2666 by Roberto Bolano is probably a little under read, it’s a great, masterful work.  Portland’s Multnomah Village was also a big seller for us, though not a big seller elsewhere.

WP) Back to the question about being known outside of the area, I hear publishers talking about “why even go to the smaller independent bookstores, when we can go to the half-dozen biggest book accounts in the country,” but they do it because books still get established at the independent bookstores.  Books like Water for Elephants, Three Cups of Tea, or 2666 really took off at independent bookstores first, and then became bestsellers everywhere else.

RL) What are some of the ways you guys try to reach out to the local literary community?

MK) We send out email newsletters to announce new books that have come out, with staff reviews, as well as another one with next month’s events.

WP) We do a lot of events out of the store too, whether it’s a public book show like Wordstock or bringing books to an individual reading, which is what we do more frequently.  Also we do book fairs at schools, helping schools raise money for expanding libraries or other [projects].

MK) Just allowing people from outside of our location to hear the name Annie Bloom’s that may not have heard of us before.

RL) Lastly, do you know if Bobby has ever thought about writing a book about her experiences with Annie Bloom’s.

MK) We ran it by Bobby, and the response was “uh, no.”  She loves the written word, but doesn’t like writing very much.  We have to twist her arm to get her to write a review for the newsletter. She’s reading constantly and loves talking about the books she has read, but a memoir is probably not in the works.

I would like to thank both Michael and Will, as well as the Annie Bloom’s staff for being so gracious with their time. You can see my review of Annie Bloom’s here.