There's a passionate love affair with paper and ink and words on a page that draws people into book-selling.
Then there's the realization that it's still a business and you have to make money.
Ellen and Michael Tenney appear to know both sides of the story well. They own the largest used bookstore in southern Vermont, Brattleboro Books, at 34 Elliot Street in the heart of downtown Brattleboro. There they maintain a general inventory of between 75,000 and 80,000 used books crammed into 3,600-square-feet of selling space on two floors.
Memorabilia from past owners, old libraries and other bookstores hang on the wall. Right by the front door is an old and yellowed George Aiken campaign poster. The store is literally stuffed with books in piles on the floor, on shelves. The aisles are narrow, and every space that could possibly have a bookshelf has one. And then there's the basement, even more hopelessly crowded but less well organized.
Ellen likes to tell the story of how, one winter evening, she found herself snowed in at the store.
"For anybody who loves books, who wouldn't love to be alone in a store with 80,000 books?" she said. "I went down to the Co-op and got a salad, and got flashlights and candles and batteries from Sam's (Outdoor Outfitters), and got back here and thought, 'Wow, I can stay here and read all night.' Then I walked around saying, 'Oh, I've always wanted to read that,' and 'Oh, I always wanted to read that one, too. So many to read."'
Customers have suggested - not always facetiously - that Ellen and Michael put a bed in the store and turn it Into a Bed & Breakfast.
"Call it Bed and Books," Ellen said. "But you know what people would find? What I found that night I was snowed in here. You've got one night. How much can you read in one night? But just to be surrounded by them is marvelous."
It may be romantic to think of being snowed in in a bookstore, but the Tenneys also know that all those books are unsold inventory. And when the roads clear, there will be at least 10 more people coming in with banana boxes of books to sell. And they have to hope there may be at least 20 more people coming in to buy them.
That's the yin and yang of the used book business, and the Tenneys seem to strike a good balance.
Ellen, 50, is a warm, gentle, comfortable, slow-speaking woman with long dark hair and big round glasses. Michael, 56, is quieter and more retiring. He wears his white hair pulled into a long ponytail, and his expressive face often registers humor as well as intensity.
The last thing you would think when you meet them is that they were both truck drivers for United Parcel Service when they met in 1984.
"I was working for UPS at Christmas," Michael said. "I did that for a month, applied for a regular job and they transferred me down to Brattleboro. One thing led to another and we ended up in a bookstore. You know how life leads you. It takes you down stray paths and you end up where you should have been all along."
They married in 1985 - a first marriage for both of them. They live in Saxtons River and have two children, now 21 and 17. Ten years after they got married; Michael had a back injury and was dropped by UPS. The pair then gathered up what little money they had saved and opened Village Square Bookstore in Bellows Falls. They started out with only 1,000 books, but they were successful and the store grew rapidly.
In 1998, they had the opportunity to buy their current store in Brattleboro, too. According to Ellen, the cost of the store was "not over $100,000, not under $50,000. And it was ownerfinanced, which was wonderful."
After running two stores in two towns for two years, the weary Tenneys sold the Bellows Falls store and began devoting all their energies to Brattleboro.
The couple works hard. The store is open seven days a week, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., all but six days a year.
"Because in Brattleboro, it just makes sense to keep it open," Ellen said. "On the weekends we have tourists. And a lot of people don't have a chance to get into town during the week. In retail, I think it's important to be consistent with hours and always be open."
The building, which from the outside looks like a clapboard cottage, used to house a restaurant, a furniture store and a toy store. With rent, utilities and taxes, it is not a cheap store to run.
"Brattleboro is an expensive place to have a retail shop," Michael said. "You're very limited downtown in terms of the number of places you have to choose from. But it's where the customers are. You get a lot of people going by the store every day."
The business does a little over $150,000 a year - as with any privately owned business, the real numbers are proprietary but with an average retail price of $6 a book, the Tenneys have to sell a lot of them.
"There's not much left over at the end of the year," Michael said. "For most retailers, Christmas is the big event. That last week is what you'll have in your pocket. After all your bills and taxes are paid, and you've paid yourself, that last week's money is what you'll have as walking-away money. You work all year for that. You've spent the whole year paying your bills, paying your bills, paying your bills, so you can keep that last week's revenue. That's crazy, but it's retail. Think about the dollar stores and how much they have to sell. This is a 86 store. And no returns."
The best parts of the business are the people, the conversations and the books. Ellen and Michael get to talk with many writers.
"Some writers come in and say, 'I'm happy to see none of my books are in here,"' Ellen said. "And others say, 'Wow, I'm pretty popular, you've got a lot of my books.' Writers get paid diddly, so for, them to look at books on a shelf being sold used that they're not going to get any part of, it's consequential."
The store attracts people from all over the world.
"We had a woman from Jerusalem who came in," Ellen said. "When she walked in she just got the greatest smile on her face. She walked around the stacks with this great peaceful smile. It brought me to tears when she said she travels the world and always goes to bookstores, and she just loved the energy in this place. She said she had never seen a bookstore with such a homey, welcoming energy. People have compared us to Shakespeare & Co."
The store's conversation often turns to politics.
"I've always been a talker, always expressed my opinions, and there are a lot of people who need that," Ellen said. "Anyone who lives in town knows they can come in here and get into a conversation about politics with me."
Ellen is perhaps best known around New England for being the person who took the Vermont Town Meeting impeachment petitions against George W. Bush and Richard Cheney down to Washington, where she presented them to Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert's office. Newfane selectman Dan DeWalt, who spearheaded the impeachment drive, said that the Tenneys' progressive politics probably help their business.
"A lot of businesses are just scared to death of possessing any politics or personality for fear of driving away that last customer with the 50 cents," DeWalt said. "Ellen doesn't make any bones about what's important to her. She understands that her life is legitimate and just as valuable as her business. Her business operates and her life operates and the business doesn't suffer. People appreciate candor. Who's discredited in our society? (BS-ing) politicians. Who has credibility? People who speak with candor."
Owning a used book store is a lot of work. Michael can't move through the aisles without straightening a book here or shelving one there.
Books come to the Tenneys in floods of boxes and stories.
"People will say, 'My great aunt moved' or 'My grandmother died,'" Michael said. "Or, 'My roommate moved out and he didn't pay rent or electricity but he left me all these books and I'm trying to make some money out of it.' We hear that a lot. The books come from all over. We open our doors and I feel like a little kid with his finger in the dike. If we let in all the books that came in here, you literally wouldn't be able to walk in here. On average, we take only about 10 percent. Some loads it will be 100 percent, other times two books out of 10 boxes. For all the books we sell and stock, there are at least ten times that many we look through in the course of a year. It can be overwhelming. That's why we see our primary goal as gatekeeping."
The Tenneys buy books outright for cash or store credit. Then they have to deal with them.
"The important thing is to handle the books as little as possible," Ellen said. "But we have to get them on the shelf. We have to price them, shelve them, alphabetize them, organize them, and weed through them every now and then."
The Tenneys price their stock at about half or less of the cover price. Any given book's price is decided by its condition, cover price and replacement cost. They try not to have too many copies of any one book on hand at one time.
Occasionally they come across rare or antique books. To price them, they check with antiquarian book sites on the Internet.
"Michael and I have a philosophy to always treat people the way we would want to be treated in the retail business," Ellen said. "So if someone were to bring in an expensive book, we wouldn't say, 'Well, we'll give you 50 bucks for it" and then turn around and sell it for a thousand. We have contacted people in the past when we found that a book was worth a lot of money. We had an instance when someone brought a book in and it was worth several thousand dollars. We lined them up with an auction house. They were very happy."
Shoplifting adds to the price of the books.
"I caught a guy in here one day, just happened to look up as he went around the corner with one of our more expensive books, and then I heard the Velcro on his bag," Ellen said. "And not five seconds later he came back around the bookcase and didn't have the book in his hand. I walked up to him and said, 'Please, would you give me my book back?' He opened his bag and he had close to $300 worth of antiquarian books that he took from us."
Ellen asked him to leave. Then she called the police and the other bookstores in town to warn them. The Tenneys also occasionally get warnings from other bookstores, in and out of town, asking them to keep an eye out for stolen books.
"If valuable books are stolen, it's inevitable that one of us used book stores will be contacted," Ellen said. "But I've gotten to a point where I feel that's the thieves' karma. I can't worry about them."
When books have hung around the store for too long, they are moved downstairs to the basement, which is more haphazardly organized. But just because a book is downstairs doesn't mean it's unwanted.
"We had a guy spend almost three hours down there," Ellen said. "He comes up waving a book with a smile on his face, saying, 'I've been looking for this book for 20 years.' I bet it was down there for 20 years."
The store is the Tenneys' life, and their life happens in the store.
"I know a lot of people and I have a lot of friends, but I don't spend time with people," Ellen said. "We spend a lot of time here. We're here until nine or ten or eleven at night."
Truck Drivers In Love
Ellen was born in Greenfield, Mass. She never went to college. Instead, when she was 18, she took a job as a waitress at a famous truck stop, the Whately Diner in Whately, MA.
"It was such a great place to work - a real place with real people who wanted real food," she said. "There was great energy The people I worked with have had a lot. to do with where my life went. We were a really tight group."
For example, when she was 19 she fell ill and had to take six weeks off. Although her boss promised to hold her job, it was gone when she was ready to resume work.
"I came out from the office upset," Ellen said. "And the two waitresses up front asked what was the matter. I told them what happened and they said it was ridiculous - and those were not their words. A little later I got a phone call saying they had contacted all the other waitresses. They all went down to the diner and said to the owner, 'If Ellen doesn't have her job back, you don't have a waitstaff.' And this is a 24hour-a-day seven-days a week operation! I got my job back."
While talking with her customers, the truckers, Ellen got the idea to try it herself.
"I got my license to drive a tractor and trailer in the '70s through CETA, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, the program good old Ronald Reagan did away with," she said.
She moved to Boston and worked for an art moving company, traveling around the country assembling shows for museums and galleries. Then, on a whim she moved to Florida. She disliked it so much that five months later she moved back to Greenfield to live with her parents. Two months after that, her father unexpectedly died. She stayed with her mother for the next year and a half.
In the meantime, she went back to work at the diner, where a trucker told her that Brattleboro Haulage was hiring.
"They didn't want to hire me because I didn't have tractor trailer experience - I had large straight truck experience," Ellen said. "But when I mentioned the name of the guy who sent me up there, they took me out for a test drive. And they hired me."
She was driving for Brattleboro Haulage late one night when, on her way to Keene, NH, she stopped off at a donut shop. There she fell into a conversation with a UPS driver.
"He said, UPS would love you,'" she said. "And within a week I was driving for UPS."
Meanwhile, in central Vermont, Michael was also driving for UPS.
Michael was born and raised in Central Vermont. He has a BA from the University of Vermont.
"Then I worked in food service for a lot of years, waiting tables, cooking, bartending, washing dishes at some really nice restaurants," he said. "I even managed a restaurant. The real kicker, though, came 30 years ago. I was at beautiful restaurant in La Jolla. A very nice gentleman came up and waited on us. He was 55 or 56, and I came out of there having seen my face on his body. I said, 'I don't want to be doing this.' Nothing wrong with it, it's a great career, but for me that was the last straw."
Michael met Ellen when they were both transferred to the Brattleboro UPS center. They immediately became friends.
"On weekends we'd commiserate and do laundry together and hang out," Ellen said. "We were good friends for a year and a half before we came together as a couple and decided to get married. At UPS at the time, you couldn't both work for the company if you were married. And since I was the one who was going to have the babies, it made sense for me to leave."
From Trucks To Books
After 10 years, when Michael had his back injury, "UPS dropped him like a hot potato," Ellen said. "So we took the little bit we'd saved and tried to decide what to do. We felt a bookstore in Bellows Falls would be a good idea. We spent some time in town talking to people and watch ing the traffic. A lot of people laughed at us. Bellows Falls is a great town, but it's a town that everybody loves to kick for some reason. It used to be the wealthiest town in the state, per capita. It has a lot of great people."
Their first bookstore was tiny.
"We were like Bedouins," Ellen said. "The floors were uneven as could be. The walls were terrible. They barely had any studs behind them. We threw fabric up onto the walls because we couldn't nail anything into them."
They opened with about 1,000 books.
"When I look at the videotape of our opening now, I think if I had known then what I know now, I never would have opened it," Ellen said. "We didn't announce the opening. We just took a cloth off the window. And people started coming in. That place became jam-packed within nine months. Then we moved to another space, and we were there for about eight years, from 1992 to 2000."
Over that time,, they slowly moved from selling new books to used books.
"I feel good about it because we're recycling," Ellen said. "We started dabbling in used books because you'd hear people walk buy and kids would say, 'Mom can we go in?' and the mom would say, 'No honey, I don't have the money today.' Now a lot more people can read because they can afford these books. We've seen mass market paperbacks go from $3.99 in 1992 to $7.99 now. And now there's a larger format for us Boomers that costs $9.99. You can come in to a used bookstore and get them for half or less."
When the founders of Brattleboro Books were ready to retire, they specifically asked for the Tenneys to buy them out.
"It was magical," Ellen said, "They liked us. They wanted to sell to us. We ran the two stores for two years, with our wonderful kids, but it was hard. So we sold the Bellows Falls store in 2000 and put our energies into this one."
The Used Book Business
The store's previous owners got a lot of their inventory from stores that were closing and the remainders of library sales. The Tenneys get most of their stock from their customers.
"Mostly, our customers are our suppliers," Ellen said. "People freeing up their shelves to make more space for books. We pay cash or store credit, just to encourage people to turn that back into purchasing. When we do book buys, there's a lot of educated buying. We know what we're looking for. We know what sells."
Some books "speak to them," Ellen said.
"One example, Michael bought a book on a totally obscure subject, I wish I could remember what it was," she said. "I was pricing it and said, 'What in the world possessed you to buy this book? There are probably only three people in the world who would like it.' He said, 'I don't know.' Not three days later a guy came into the store. The book was face out on one of the shelves, and I hear this gasp. The guy leans over the book and says 'I can't believe you have this book!' He was just happy as could be. He walked out with the book and I looked over at Michael and we both just threw our hands up in the air and laughed."
The Tenneys sell books from almost every genre.
"The topics are endless," Ellen said. "What people are curious about is endless. What I love about the store and the people is that you really can't judge a book by its cover. We see people from the whole socio-economic gamut. People who would appear to not be readers read some of the heaviest, deepest stuff People's interests are amazing."
There are few subjects they won't handle. Pornography is one of them.
"We dont have a secret closet for porn," Ellen said. "We have a sexuality section, and the Kama Sutra, and books on sensual massage. We don't do porn, and our gay-and-lesbian section is mostly older books. I had a woman get upset with me because we didn't have much, but Everyone's Books is across the street, and they have a great, more contemporary gay-and-lesbian issues section."
Brattleboro has four independent book stores, and the Tenneys have friendly, cooperative relationships with all of them. Nancy Braus, who co-owns Everyone's Books, says that sharing customers isn't unusual.
"If people need an out-of-print book, we send them to the Tenneys," Braus said. "If people need a new book, they send them to us. We're friendly. We surely help each other out. I respect them both a lot."
Mrs Tenney Goes To Washington
Brattleboro is known for its liberal politics, and it's one of the reasons people visit the town.
"It's amazing how many people appreciate Brattleboro because they can speak about their political beliefs here," Ellen said. "We get people up from Connecticut all the time. Once a guy was commenting on a van outside with a bunch of liberal bumper stickers on it - my van, as it turned out - and he said, 'I wish I could do that in Connecticut.' And I said, 'You can.' And he said, 'No, I can't.' Another man said, 'I'm surrounded by a lot of right-wing Republicans, and sometimes I just need to get up here and breathe the beautiful liberal Vermont air.'"
Ellen never intended to become an activist, but the disturbances in electronic voting that brought Bush to power and his administration's policies so upset her that when DeWalt asked her to present a resolution to the Rockingham Town Meeting asking Congress to impeach Bush and Cheney for "high crimes and misdemeanors," she agreed.