Barbara Smith is trying to sell the Whately Antiquarian Book Center after 25 years of ownership.
For more than 25 years, dozens of booksellers have set up shop within the red brick walls of the Whately Antiquarian Book Center. Loyal customers have grown accustomed to the rows on rows of used books, acquired by the hundreds and thousands in auctions or from estate collections.
Now its owner, Barbara Smith of Northampton, is moving on.
"You're looking ahead and kind of getting tired of dealing with the rigors of a brick and mortar book shop," Smith said. "It's an every-man story - call it an every-store story -- about what's happening to book stores."
Smith has co-owned the book center since 1990 with business partner Eugene Poverk. Now, she is looking to sell, and has two main reasons why: age and money. Smith is 63, and her husband, an antiquer and seller of what Smith describes as "paper ephemera" - old post cards, magazines, posters, newsprint - is 10 years older. And the Internet has upset the delicate financial balance that kept the store afloat, with business steadily declining since 2000, she said.
"The price of oil last winter and paying for plowing nearly bankrupted us," Smith said. "We're just not getting supported by customers like we used too."
Smith and her partner have not paid themselves a salary in years, she said. While the center does do some online business, its core customer base has been thinned by the popularity of e-readers and competition from online stores like Amazon.
When Poverk was diagnosed with bone cancer several years ago, the day-to-day store operations fell more heavily on Smith. Between the money and the health issues, they decided to sell. No buyers have bitten yet; Smith blames tight financing after the financial crisis, and her desire to make sure the store ends up in the right hands. But there has been interest, and she has been showing it to potential buyers this spring.
Smith got her start in the book business in the 1980s, after a whirlwind decade of travel and varied jobs. A native of Bethany, Conn., she spent time in the Virgin Islands, Europe, Indonesia and the West Coast. The daughter of a woman's clothier and the granddaughter of a tailor, she gravitated towards retail jobs, with a focus on her main passions: books and gardening.
She worked at Whitlock's Book Barn in New Haven, and then at a series of Pioneer Valley businesses after moving to Amherst to study at the University of Massachusetts. She got a job at the Amherst Food Co-Op in 1982, and was tasked with overseeing the end of the dying business.
"We just had to put it to sleep responsibly," Smith said.
Her next gig, at the Good Things Collective - a clothing co-operative located in the building that now houses Florence Savings Bank on Northampton's Main Street - ended abruptly when the business went bankrupt. At professional loose ends, Smith visited a flea market in Hadley, saw collections of used books for sale, and had an idea.
"I started finding they had these boxes and boxes of books that went really cheap," Smith said. "I then found that you didn't need to have a store to sell books."
She began flipping used books, bought in bulk, at book fairs, flea markets and antique shows. At the business' peak, Smith was traveling to 35 shows per year, from Baltimore to Portland, Oregon.
Her barn and carriage house, next to a yellow Colonial tucked between fields on a potholed Northampton dead end, are full of that business' overflow. Rows of stuffed bookshelves and overflowing boxes of books create narrow, snaking pathways through the storage rooms. After Smith married her husband Peter Boody 10 years ago, his collection added to the clutter; piles of postcards, strangers' wedding photographs, decades-old Life Magazines and Saturday Evenings Posts and other historical miscellanea cover barn tables and armchairs.
For decades, Smith has held a yearly or twice-yearly yardsale to help manage the extra goods. This Memorial Day weekend, she put a sign up in the yard, promising "Books and Paper," and curious customers gradually thinned the stock.
Before the sale, "you could not walk through any of these aisles," Smith said.
The sale of the Whately Antiquarian Book Center will not mean retirement for Smith and Boody, she said. She plans to continue selling books online, and traveling to the occasional book fair - though not the 35 a year she attended when she was younger.
She will miss the store when it is gone. And Smith's customers will miss her; many are sympathetic to her troubles finding a buyer, but, she said, confess they are glad it has forced her to stick around.
But like the owners of the Jeffrey Amherst Bookshop and the collective workers of Food For Thought Books, both closed in recent years, the business has not left her much of a choice.
"It's kind of a sign of the times," Smith said.
