What will it take for another bookseller to open shop in the Borders/Shaman Drum neighborhood at State and Liberty, and operate a browseable place with content deep and wide? We’re talking about a books-and-mortar store a stone’s throw from the University of Michigan campus. A spot where you arrange to meet up with your husband after the two of you go your separate ways for an hour. Where you hang out until the movie starts at the Michigan Theater. Where you actually buy a book now and then – sometimes a title other than the one that got you in the real, live door.

The No. 1 Borders bookstore at Liberty & Maynard in Ann Arbor.

Keith Taylor, the poet, UM creative writing teacher and veteran local bookseller, says “it will take idealism, a lot of 80-hour work weeks, a willingness to be constantly present.”

Check, check and check. This is Ann Arbor, after all.

And then there’s Taylor’s fourth condition: “A landlord willing to rent space for less than the going rate.”

“Rents in central Ann Arbor right now will not allow for an independent bookstore, or an independent anything,” he says, “until the business owner owns the building the store is in.”

Karl Pohrt concurs – and the owner of the former Shaman Drum Bookshop, but not the building that housed it, should know: “It’s essential to own the building. If they don’t, they’ll be vulnerable.”

“Rent,” replies Nicola Rooney flatly when the proprietor of Nicola’s Books is asked why she won’t consider a move from Westgate Shopping Center to the State Street area.

We knew that, really. This is downtown Ann Arbor, after all. The market apparently won’t bear an independent bookstore in that neighborhood – Shaman Drum, which was located on South State just around the corner from Borders, closed in 2009 after nearly 30 years in business. Its former storefront is now a burger joint.

So the real question is this: If the market won’t bear a full-blown downtown bookstore, how will the community respond?

The Business of Bookstores: Boulevard of Broken Dreams

Pohrt warns, with a laugh, that opening a bookstore is like setting up shop “on the boulevard of broken dreams.” More seriously, and out of respect for his “brother and sister booksellers,” he says that “people need to know how hard this is and what’s at stake.”

Taylor says Petoskey now easily outclasses Ann Arbor as a book-buyer’s town. He has his doubts about whether even a non-traditional bookstore – a co-op, for example – could work. “I’m not sure that the book culture now is such that can support that.” (As an aside, it’s worth noting that Taylor had his doubts decades ago, too. He was working at the original Borders store when Tom Borders announced his grand expansion plans to staff. Taylor didn’t respond favorably, prompting Borders to say: “Keith! Why so negative?” It took a while, but now it’s pretty clear why.)

Taylor estimates that rent at $10,000 a month would require $2,000 a day in retail sales – “and you have to sell an awful lot of books to get to $2,000.”

The distinctive storefront of the former Shaman Drum Bookshop at 313 S. State, now a burger joint.

Especially now that Borders et al succeeded so well in institutionalizing the discount. The profit margin for the book business is 40% to 50%, Pohrt says, which to a bookstore means “2% to 3% after rent, utilities and wages.” So even with publishers starting to factor the discount into list prices, who can survive on selling books alone? Not Nicola’s, though the store never confuses the clearly segregated gifts, cards, pens and chocolates with its main event.

Do we really need to ask how many of us buy online just because we can – maybe not all the time, but often enough? Not to mention the lowest of the low: the “browsers.” Pohrt remembers them well – people who’d head out his door with nothing but an ISBN.

“If you have a bricks-and-mortar store, somebody can always undersell you,” he says. “So why should people buy books from you instead of the Internet?”

The Survivors

Our surviving indies in Ann Arbor have done so by finding more affordable space, serving niches and cultivating loyalty: Aunt Agatha’s on Fourth Street for mystery fans, Common Language at Braun Court for the LGBT community. (Owners Keith Orr and Martin Contreras, who own the neighboring \aut\ BAR, held their second annual Last Bookstore Standing fundraiser on Aug. 25.)

The book selection at beautiful Crazy Wisdom on Main Street, while more varied than you’d think, largely reflects the store’s focus on the spiritual experience. Nearby Falling Water (a little fiction, a little poetry, a little wit amid a lot of gentle self-help) is where you can happen on a lovely book for yourself while buying a lovely gift for somebody else.

Dawn Treader is an adventure; Motte & Bailey is a treasure – but used inventory, while invaluable, is another creature entirely.

But whatever their attributes, none of these sellers are – or aspire to be – what Shaman Drum was before the textbook market collapsed, or what Borders managed to remain for at least a little while until Paperchase, chocolate-covered sunflower seeds, and the long limp toward liquidation.

In Ann Arbor, according to Pohrt, more books were sold per capita in the 1960s than anywhere else in the country. When my husband and I moved here in 1990, it was immediately clear to me that two things mattered most to Ann Arbor: food and books. Ann Arbor is where Borders was born.

Yes, yes – but that was then and this is now. Locally owned Nicola’s Books is left standing; Barnes and Noble, the national chain that’s a relative newcomer to town, is wobbling. Ann Arbor is a plugged-in, uploaded, wired and wifi-ed, downloaded, World Wide Webosphered, test-marketed-for-a-no-newspaper place. We’re victims of our own success, says Taylor, who reminds us that UM faculty sat in front of glowing screens while Shaman Drum was shuttered. Rooney is fully mindful of all those students out there whose podlets are their link to whatever life of the mind they’ve of a mind to search out.

Is this what the community wants – is it enough?

Another Model: The Community-Based Collaborative

As Shaman Drum was reaching its crisis point in 2008-09, Pohrt says, “I woke up one morning and I didn’t know how to fix it.” The nonprofit approach wasn’t tried in time, he says.

But now Pohrt has another idea. “Start with a group of people,” he says. A representative from city government. Someone from the Downtown Development Authority. A person from UM who’s committed to book culture. “A good lawyer, a good real estate person, a good numbers person,” Pohrt says. “And somebody who knows the book business – and there are a number of these in Ann Arbor.”

And a millionaire?

One of those would be useful, too, Pohrt says, “but you also need people to buy into the idea. And this is a test for the community.”

Common Language Bookstore in Braun Court.

Pohrt envisions a community-level project resembling the Michigan Center for the Book, an initiative of the state’s Library of Michigan that’s based in Lansing but, Pohrt says, “belongs in Ann Arbor.” On the local level, such a project would nourish and promote the myriad aspects of a local book culture: Book arts, like those fostered by Hollander’s, the Kerrytown shop. Youth literacy efforts led by such operations as the nonprofits 826michigan and the Family Book Club (Pohrt’s on the board of the latter). Writing groups and “rent-a-carrel” opportunities for authors looking for both a quiet place to work and a way to support a community that will support writing.

It would also include a bookstore, of course, but one that is part of a community-wide operation that involves and fosters all the booksellers in the community: booksellers that serve markets for literary fiction and graphic novels, for antiquarian volumes and used paperbacks, and yes – for ebooks and audiobooks and all those other technologies for which people are going to spend money.

Pohrt admits that “there are problems with what I’m proposing” – not the least of which is making sure that nobody among those dogged booksellers we already have is left out of a wider effort. “Maybe each of these pieces already here would have a stake in it,” he says.

In a recent piece for The New York Times Sunday Review, fresh-off-a-book-tour author Ann Patchett (“State of Wonder”) gave a shout-out to indie bookstores around the country – including her “most beloved McLean & Eakin in Petoskey” (score one for Taylor’s street cred). She’s “so convinced that the small, locally owned and operated independent bookstore was a solid business model” that she and a partner are opening Parnassus Books next month in Nashville. One assumes that Patchett herself was able to pony up at least part of the cool million such an enterprise might require, and that she can afford to lose some of it, as Pohrt and Taylor say is almost certainly part of the deal. And more power to her.

But is Ann Arbor so different from Nashville, or Iowa City, or Milwaukee, or Oxford, Miss.? We can’t support a State/Liberty shop dedicated to selling books at the “reasonable profit” Rooney says she manages at Westgate? Will it take a community project dedicated to preserving a culture of readers and reading to keep a first-class, non-niche bookstore in the downtown neighborhood?

Pohrt acknowledges that his is a daunting proposal. “Say it’s impossible. OK, let’s go.”

The Presence of the Shopkeeper

Rooney does it, and of course the keystone is the fact that Westgate rents aren’t what @Burger had to pay (until students went home for the summer, and that Liberty Street restaurant closed). She even takes time off to visit her nonagenarian mum in England – though granted, those winter visits are in November and February, bracketing the feverish Christmas retail season – and had an honest-to-god summer vacation this year.

She does it, she reminds us, because she’s cultivated a fine staff and can trust them to hold down the fort – rather, to keep the fort open to all those savage readers out there.

Rooney says she’s willing to be there for anybody who “wants a hand-hold” while building a State/Liberty business; she knows how it’s done. In fact, she’d consider an arrangement with a bookseller in it for the long haul who, perhaps, could master the art and science of bookselling under her tutelage and “essentially inherit it from me” when that day comes.

Still, as Taylor reminds us, a big reason for Nicola’s success is the physical presence of Nicola Rooney herself. On a recent Friday afternoon I spent the better part of an hour browsing her shelves for my husband’s birthday presents – I came in for Charles C. Mann’s new “1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created” and collected a few discoveries as well.

Thanks to her distinctive British accent – equal parts charm and steel – it was easy to eavesdrop on Rooney’s sales technique. Somebody was looking for a book whose author recently had a reading at the store. “Oh, yes, a lovely man.” Small talk with shoppers about the massive, damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t preparations for Hurricane Irene. “They’re stopping the buses and the subway!” Another wanted the latest mystery in a favorite series. “If you like we can give you a call when it comes in.” Turns out the customer is from Tecumseh and was in town, stopping in the store just in case. “We could send it to you ….”

Rooney is, in all the fine senses of the word, a shopkeeper. She knows her wares and she knows her customers. She’s trained her crew to be shopkeepers, too – various customers have their various staff favorites. And they all spend lots of time on the other side of the counter, tracking down that title that should be “in history or in The Times’” but might be “tucked behind another one.” And because of all that – and, of course, a rent the market will bear – Nicola’s Books turns a respectable profit.

Rooney and two of her staffers spent a good 10 minutes – a long time in a small shop – determined to hunt down one of the three copies of “1493″ that were, the computer indicated, in the store. None were to be found. So she took my info and promised to let me know when the next copy came in (it was expected, and indeed arrived, on Monday).

I was so grateful for the attention. Once again, I was so grateful for the place. We talked for a while about books and bookselling in Ann Arbor. Then she rang up a couple of history paperbacks for me, and I handed her my Amazon.com Visa card.

About the writer: Domenica Trevor lives in Ann Arbor – her columns are published periodically in The Ann Arbor Chronicle. The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our columnists and other contributors. If you’re already supporting The Chronicle, please encourage your friends, neighbors and coworkers to do the same. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle.

William S. Burroughs looms large for Arthur Nusbaum – in this case, literally. The portrait of this Beat Generation iconoclast hangs in the lobby of Nusbaum's Third Mind Books and Steppingstone Properties.

A real estate guy with a thing for William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and the rest of that reckless crew? Incongruous, on the face of it. But a closer look reveals a certain ironic harmony.

“I used to be an activist,” says Nusbaum. No surprise there – this is a fellow whose dazzling energy will find an outlet.

Born in Detroit, he grew up in the suburbs, attended the University of Michigan and returned to Ann Arbor for good in the early 1990s as the concept of New Urbanism was gathering steam in Ann Arbor and across the country. Those principles resonated with him, and as he made the connection between his own business and the intensifying local efforts to rein in suburban sprawl, Nusbaum says, “real estate became more meaningful for me. And that’s reflected in buildings like this.”

He’s speaking from his second-floor suite of offices in Ashley Square, at 123 N. Ashley St. The building – Nusbaum believes it was an auto showroom in its original incarnation – was rehabbed in the 1980s and purchased in the late 1990s by Nusbaum, who relocated Steppingstone there in 2000.

“To make a long story short, that’s the direction I took for the last decade and a half in my business,’’ he says.

Nusbaum is 51. His passion for the Beats – and, specifically, Burroughs – dates to his days at UM, where he was an Honors English student in the late 1970s and “awakening to the counterculture. I became aware of the Beats. It snowballed,” he says, “parallel with my regular life.” And for 30 years he has been building a personal collection of Beat literature and artifacts that he believes “is one of the most comprehensive and one-of-a-kind in the world.”

Hung carefully on the walls of the Ashley Square suite are pieces from Nusbaum’s collection of original artwork, posters and prints (Jesse Crumb and his father, Robert, are represented) and a carefully edited sampling of counterculture and avant-garde artifacts that date back decades. (Ever heard of The Residents? Me neither. Nusbaum totally digs them.)

Prominent on a wall in his office (and on the website) is a photo of Nusbaum with Burroughs that marks what he calls “the lifetime peak of my Beat experience – meeting the master.” Nusbaum had made an attempt to get in touch with Burroughs via Allen Ginsberg in 1994, when the poet was in town for a reading and was signing autographs beforehand at Shaman Drum. “I met him there and had him sign something, and then I wanted to give him an envelope for Burroughs.” When Ginsberg gently waved him off, Nusbaum didn’t press it.

“I just up and went, and knocked on his door” in February 1995 – Burroughs was living in Lawrence, Kansas – “and the rest is history.”

His account of the day can be found among Nusbaum’s writings on ThirdMindBooks.com, along with an obituary he wrote for “Dharma Beat” about the man he calls the “Big Bang; Ground Zero” – the mentor of the Beat Generation.

“Today it means nothing, but to be an iconoclast during the age of extreme conformity, of the ‘gray flannel suit’ and the Red Scare” – Burroughs was beyond the edge, Nusbaum says. “And he was a junkie, he was gay at a time when that was really shocking. And yet,” he says, “here was this reserved, three-piece-suit-wearing guy.”

Nusbaum says “a really thorough and deep biography has yet to be written” of Burroughs – and he might get to it “if I live to be 500.” For now, though, Nusbaum is “whittling” down his real estate interests to downtown Ann Arbor and some other properties and focusing his energies on Third Mind Books. The store’s logo honors the master.

The logo for Third Mind Books tips its hat to William Burroughs.

“My first idea was a brick-and-mortar store on Huron Street,” Nusbaum says. He envisioned a shop “like Shaman Drum that specialized in the Beats and also had consigned art and a (performance) venue .… I had all these ideas.

“But you know Ann Arbor, of course. They always find a reason why you need to spend an extra quarter-million or so converting the zoning to this and that and what have you, and then I thought, ‘this is not the time and place to do a brick and mortar.’”

Enter ThirdMindBooks.com.

He credits his staff and their technological savvy for getting ThirdMindBooks.com up and running, and applauds them for their willingness to go along for the ride: “They made the transition from real estate to surrealism very well.”

To stock his store, Nusbaum turned to the connections he has made over the years as a collector (his private collection, very emphatically, is not for sale). And on the Web, he tracked down “all of the Beat-related sites – some of which are very active and up to the minute and really of high quality.” Links to and Nusbaum’s comments on some of those sites have led to some sales, he says.

“I’m hoping that somewhere in this world of 6.5 billion people there are maybe 50 to 100 like me who could carry a business like this, who are really passionate about it,” he says.

“I know it’s going to take a while,” but Nusbaum envisions a broad purpose for ThirdMindBooks.com: “I want to combine sales with scholarship and writings and linkages.” As a longer-term project, Nusbaum says he intends to present “a museum-like tour” of his own collection on the Web site – “not for sale, but as a way of cataloging and showing it.”

“The educated customer is important and I want to educate,” he says, “and connect the dots for the aficionado – and that will make a more passionate customer.”

Arthur Nusbaum with some of the Beat literature that's sold online through his business, Third Mind Books.

Nusbaum’s focus and passion is evident in the presentation of his inventory on the website. The Ashley Square suite contains a de facto studio where photos are made of each item in the inventory. That list includes a sharp image of each piece along with descriptive text that details the condition of the item, its history and significance to collectors and, often, its provenance. “We lavish a lot of attention on every single item,” Nusbaum says.

In this new age of virtual browsing, that’s a valuable service for an online bookstore. And the Web is the perfect way to reach Nusbaum’s core market: Beat enthusiasts like himself who know what they’re looking for.

And yet (and here’s an opening to lament the lost Shaman Drums of our culture): Nusbaum made a sale on the day of my visit when a box on his shelves, covered in paper the color of terra cotta, caught my eye. The paper was textured with thin, horizontal folds that undulated like low waves on water; the box was a couple of inches thick and as tall as my hand.

And then I pulled the book itself from its handsome case. “Six-Pack 1-5,” published by Bottle of Smoke Press, gathers in one loosely sewn volume five issues of “Six-Pack,” the publisher’s five collections of a half-dozen very short poems, letterpressed in a range of colorful typefaces onto various shades and textures of cardstock. Each little poem-on-a-card is mounted on its own page with photo corners; almost all the cards bear the signature of the poet. Encountered online, this little jewel wouldn’t have been nearly as captivating, no matter how conscientiously presented.

Luckily for locals, Nusbaum says he’s pleased to open the real-life doors of Third Mind Books to the old-fashioned browser for whom the tactile pleasures are still so bound up in the book-buying experience. Just make an appointment. “I’m not sure,” he jokes, “but this may be the world’s only hybrid real estate office and rare-book store.”

Third Mind Books is gold mine of first editions, photographs and postcards, hand-made books, magazines and literary journals and poetry collections created by the super-celebrated and the sometimes-unjustly obscure. From Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Patti Smith (“She just came to Borders!” Nusbaum crows. “I gave her my card!”) to Irvine Welsh (“Trainspotting”) and, of course, a lavish abundance of one-of-a-kind Burroughs, Nusbaum’s inventory holds hundreds of treasures.

So if you still haven’t tracked down that first-edition complete transcript in comic-book form of Allen Ginsberg’s testimony at the 1969 Chicago Seven trial, look no further. Arthur Nusbaum will be thrilled to help you out.

About the writer: Domenica Trevor is a voracious reader who lives in Ann Arbor and has been known to own a copy of “Howl” and wear a beret, back in the day.

Martin Contreras and Keith Orr, co-owners of Common Language Bookshore, also own the aut BAR, located next door. (Photo by the writer.)

Less than two weeks after Shaman Drum Bookshop announced plans to close, the owners of another independent Ann Arbor bookstore are saying they could be next.

On Friday, Keith Orr – co-owner of Common Language Bookstore – sent an email to customers laying out the situation that his business faces: “There is no easy way to say this,” he wrote. “Common Language is not making enough sales to support itself. Its very existence is in peril.”

After a Chronicle reader forwarded the email to us on Monday, we went over to the store in Kerrytown’s Braun Court to talk with Orr. Sitting in the shaded courtyard in front of the shop he owns with partner Martin Contreras, Orr spoke about why they decided to reach out for help, and how he hopes the community will respond.

Contreras and Orr have been subsidizing the store with their personal savings and with money from another business they own, the \aut\ BAR, which is located in an adjacent building. They can’t continue that indefinitely – sales have to increase to support the store. Though there is a sense of crisis, Orr says, they aren’t planning to shut their doors next week or even next month. Yet they wanted to alert the community that they are struggling, and if they can’t find a way to make the bookstore financially sustainable, they’ll have to close.

Certainly the economy has played a role in the past year or so, Orr says. Longer term, the trend toward buying books online – specifically, the lure of low prices at Amazon.com – has seriously undercut the business of independent bookstores like Common Language.

If judged merely by price, then Amazon.com would be the clear winner, Orr says. But independent bookstores have a much larger function than just delivering product. And because of Common Language’s focus – the store sells books, CDs, DVDs and other items with gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and feminist themes – “for us, it’s a matter of being a safe space,” he says.

Jerri Dodge, the bookstore's manager, talks with customer Shaun Farmer on Monday afternoon. (Photo by the writer.)

Even in the “Ann Arbor bubble,” Orr says, if you’re a teenager starting to discover your sexuality, or if you’re 45 and married and starting to rethink your life, it’s not easy to find your way. You need a place you can go for information and, more importantly, to find a community that accepts you.

Independent bookstores serve another purpose, too. Many authors have a hard time getting published except by niche publishers, and those publishers need independent bookstores as an outlet to sell their books. Orr gives the example of Augusten Burroughs, author of “Running with Scissors,” who got his start with support from the independents. Orr estimates that 95% of the authors whose work Common Language sells fit that category.

Common Language’s support of non-mainstream authors is clear from the books that line its shelves. Equally obvious is the shop’s success in building community, like the customer who showed up Monday afternoon with a plastic cup filled with red roses that he gives to Jerri Dodge, who manages the store. That community is centered in Braun Court, where Orr and Contreras moved Common Language in 2005 – they bought the business from Lynden Kelly in 2003, when it was located a few blocks away on Fourth Avenue. They own four of the buildings in Braun Court, all built in the early 1900s. In addition to the bookstore and popular \aut\ BAR, the buildings house the SH\aut\ performance space and the nonprofit Washtenaw Rainbow Action Project, known as WRAP.

A book on the shelves of Common Language Bookstore. (Photo by the writer.)

The LGBT-focused cluster is a destination spot not just for people visiting Ann Arbor. Over the years the Kerrytown area has become a “gayborhood,” Orr says – it’s included in Wikipedia’s listing of urban areas known as social centers for the gay community.

These are the kinds of things that could be diminished or lost if the bookstore closes.

Orr says they’ve cut costs and tried to find ways to increase sales. They’ve gone to LGBT conferences and festivals, and they’ve tried to capture online sales through the store’s website. They’ve run promotions connected to the \aut\BAR – 10% off an entree if you buy something that same day at the bookstore. (Orr says that while nearly everyone who goes to Common Language knows about the bar, the reverse isn’t true.)

So far, their efforts haven’t been sufficient, so now they’re reaching out. In addition to Orr’s letter of appeal, they’ll try to spread the word in other ways. On July 8, for example, Orr will be interviewed about the fate of the bookstore on Closets Are for Clothes, a talk show on 88.3 WCBN-FM that’s focused on gay issues.

Keith Orr comes through a gate that separates Common Language (on the right) from the autBAR. (Photo by the writer.)

Orr has been quite clear in suggesting the kinds of concrete things that people can do to help. He’s set up an online pledge form for direct contributions. He’s encouraging folks to come to the store and buy books or any of the other products they sell – T-shirts, bumper stickers, cards, rainbow flags, pet accessories, and erotica. Getting people in the door is important: The store has a high ratio of sales to customers, Orr says – when people come in, they usually buy something. He’s also asking that people become advocates, telling their friends about the store and its website.

One thing they haven’t done is to move heavily into pornography, which Orr says is the path that many LGBT bookstores have taken. The store does sell a selection of erotica and other sexually explicit material – its second-floor “playroom” isn’t for prudes – but that section isn’t the focus of the store by any means. Orr says that even if they wanted to expand in that way, he’s not convinced it would be successful in solving their financial problems.

Since receiving Orr’s email, customers have come up with their own suggestions too. A local handyman said he can’t afford to buy books, but he’s offered to donate his services if anything in the building needs repair. Someone else said they’d help set up a Twitter account for the store, and strategize about how best to use it to bring business into the shop. Others who no longer live in this area have pledged to buy their books from Common Language online.

Their strong community ties should help, too.  Orr is a board member of the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority – The Chronicle profiled him as a new member last year. The couple has long been active in fundraising – they were finalists in 2008 for the Ann Arbor News Citizen of the Year award, recognized for their contributions to local nonprofits. Just this past weekend they hosted Tree Town Pride, formerly known as PrideFest – this year, state Rep. Pam Byrnes came and spoke about recent same-sex marriage legilsation she has introduced.

Jerri Dodge, who manages the bookstore, with some flowers brought in by a customer. (Photo by the writer.)

But generating community support was a strategy that Karl Pohrt tried, too, and it wasn’t enough to save Shaman Drum. Orr says there are key differences giving him hope that Common Language will have a different fate. For one, Shaman Drum is a general interest independent, not a niche store like Common Language. Orr says general interest stores are having an even tougher fight competitively, because it’s harder to differentiate their offerings. Shaman Drum was also larger than Common Language, making it harder to adjust.

Orr also believes that people thought Pohrt had “fixed” the situation by moving to become a nonprofit. Well before the decision to close Shaman Drum, Pohrt had announced plans to form the Great Lakes Literary Arts Center – that application process with the IRS is still underway. It’s possible that the effort made customers think the financial challenges had been solved, Orr said.

So they’ll see how the summer goes, and the fall textbook season as well – like Shaman Drum, but to a lesser degree, Common Language sells books used in University of Michigan courses, primarily in women’s studies and gender studies. They’ll reassess later in the year, Orr says, to see if things have improved.

If Common Language isn’t yet self-sustaining by then, they’ll have some hard decisions to make.