Bucking the trend

For a downtown surrounded by a state university and two colleges, it’s puzzling that Columbia’s centrally located bookstores keep going under again and again.

Get Lost! Bookshop has defied that ugly reality since April 2008. Amy Stephenson labors every day to keep it that way.

Stephenson is a risk taker. She had to be to move to Columbia without a certain business plan. Then, despite knowing the casualty list of downtown bookstores, Stephenson purchased Get Lost in March 2010 from founder Meghan Gilliss, who was moving away and did not want to see her dream of a successful used bookstore in downtown Columbia die concurrent with her departure. Stephenson decided to become the savior.

Stephenson chose Columbia after years of searching for just the right town to call home. She had been born in mid-Missouri, but reared in Memphis, Tenn. The mother of a baby daughter (Jane, now age 6), Stephenson wanted to locate somewhere new and delightful that would also allow an easy drive to the homes of Jane’s grandparents. One set resides in Memphis. The other set resides in Paducah, Ky.

Columbia was “the first town that exceeded our expectations,” Stephenson says, “and we’ve never been sorry. It’s such a great community here, and a great place to raise a child.”

The tiny storefront at 8 South Ninth St. is apparently invisible to a significant number of downtown denizens. A couple of years ago, Gilliss scheduled me to read from my newest book, inside the store. I sent email invitations to about 200 friends and acquaintances, all of them readers — about half told me they had never noticed the store previously or had glanced at it but never entered. Stephenson says she had some sense of that invisibility.

Making a profit
Stephenson could not be called naïve about the difficulty of making a profit from a bookstore. She had owned a bookstore in Memphis with her then husband.

When choosing Columbia as her new home, Stephenson had no guarantee she could purchase a bookstore here. She entered Get Lost on a hunch and learned Gilliss wanted to sell. “She had someone else who was interested, though, so I had to sweat it out for about a week,” Stephenson says. “I really wanted it.”

Once Get Lost became hers, Stephenson did not rush to revamp: “Meghan did such a nice job setting up an affordable used bookshop for downtown Columbia,” she says. “I just try to honor what she started and make sure to acquire great new books every day. I have also started making online sales, mostly out-of-print fiction.”

Bookstores attract or repel customers in part because of the books they carry. A store like Barnes & Noble in the Columbia Mall can cater to almost every taste — at least somewhat — through sheer volume. Get Lost is smaller by many orders of magnitude, so a discerning book buyer is the key.

I am the author of eight nonfiction books, and I review books professionally for newspapers and magazines. As a result, new books arrive at my home office almost daily. That means when I step inside Get Lost, I am not looking for current bestsellers. I am looking for something obscure or offbeat that I missed in the past. Or I am looking for books by local authors; Stephenson has established professional relationships with many of them. In addition, at the front of the store there’s a small but thoughtful collection of periodicals..

Selling personal libraries
Stephenson is transitioning into a part of the book business that will be mostly unseen by customers — helping sell entire personal libraries of “people who are retiring or who have lost a loved one or who are moving away.” She says the new venture “fit in well with one of the things I love the most about bookselling: putting hard-to-find or out-of-print nonfiction in the hands of someone who really needs or wants it.”

“Even though many of these sales are online and I never meet the people face to face, I love seeing all the books on various topics getting placed in homes,” Stephenson says.

So far, Stephenson calls her stewardship of Get Lost a success. “It provides me with a lot of flexibility,” she says. “I get to be home with my daughter in the afternoons after school, and I hope to be spending lots of time with her this summer walking the trail and swimming and laying in the grass in our back yard.” During those hours, she entrusts the store to the “wonderful, enthusiastic employees I’ve been blessed to find.”

Not so incidentally, Stephenson says, “I get to buy lots and lots of books, which is a pretty great job.”