Book House owner doesn’t think books have expiration date
The Book House
Michelle Barron, owner of The Book House at 9719 Manchester Road, forwarded this link to a story about whether the book and bookstores will survive.
The Book House is a great, unusual store that carries both used books and some new ones. In the past few years, some used-book sellers have gone to selling only online. But Barron loves having a store (in a 19th- century Victorian house, nonetheless) where buyers who love to look through stacks can poke around for treasures they didn’t even know they wanted.
Barron is carrying some new books, which she admits move a lot faster than older titles, which she may have in her store for a decade before someone buys it. She also orders books for customers and has an online book search. For Barron, giving books a chance - not sending them back to the publisher after a mere three months on the shelves - is important. Good titles don’t have an expiration date.
Of the 300,000 or more titles Barron carries, only about 10 percent are onsite at the store. This kind of store is, needless to say, increasingly rare these days. To learn more about The Book House, go to www.bookhousestl.com
I love the Book House. It was a sad day for me when I found out they closed their store in Gray Summit. The first time I ever went into the Manchester store was a Saturday, around 1 p.m. It seemed like I had only been in there a short time, but when I left, I glanced at my watch and it was already around 5 p.m. I found one of my favorite books there: `The Greatest Thoughts,’ by George Seldes.
You know, I just thought about reading `Blue Highways’ by William Least Heat Moon. In that book, he talked of having a method of telling if a mom-and-pop restaurant was a good one. The more calenders it had on its walls, the better. I think the same goes for used bookstores, but with cats. The more cats, the better the used bookstore. It seems I recall the Book House on Manchester having several.
A great book is Boy Dates Girl by Gay Head. Tell me you have that title, Michelle …… and I will be at the Book House in a matter of seconds.