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Powell's in Portland boasts the largest inventory of books anywhere with about 1.5 million volumes. Now, that's one for the record books.
By MARGO HAMMOND, Times Books Editor
© St. Petersburg Times, published July 7, 2002
PORTLAND, Ore. -- Taking up a whole city block in the trendy Pearl District in Portland, Powell's bookstore calls itself a "City of Books."
A "World of Books" is more like it.
"Do you have a book on the Falklands?" a customer once asked founder Michael Powell.
"History or language?" he asked.
Miriam Sontz, Powell's CEO, told me that anecdote as she showed me around the store, not an easy task: Powell's is so big, it actually offers customers a map to help them navigate their way through its color-coded maze of bookshelves.
Dressed in blue jeans and sneakers, Sontz is not your usual pin-stripped CEO. But then, Powell's is not your usual bookstore.
I had heard people rave about Powell's, one of the most successful independent bookstores left in America, before my visit, but nothing had prepared me for the on-site experience.
This is not just a bigger version of Border's or Barnes & Noble. In fact, in the battle between the megachains and the independent bookstores, Powell's redefines the 800-pound gorilla: The store boasts the largest inventory of any bookstore in the world: about 1.5-million volumes housed in the three-story main location, three branches, three specialty stores (featuring books on technology, cooking and gardening and travel) and two warehouses.
With six aisles devoted to Christian books, it carries more on that subject alone than most Christian bookstores.
Powell's is not only big, however; it is utterly inventive in how it shelves that inventory. For starters, new titles are placed side by side with used copies of that title and then all are shelved within the specialized categories.
New and used books, for example, on Great Britain (found in the Purple Room) are arranged chronologically (Pre Tudor, Tudor, Stuart, Hanover) and thematically (politics, empire, economics, nature and travel).
"When the Soviet Union collapsed, we had to completely re-organize the shelves, making room for all the new republics," said Sontz. "It was quite a challenge.
It can also be a challenge to find a book with such anal-retentive cataloging, but that's where the 200 Powell's employees come in: All are knowledgeable book lovers, Sontz assured me. Anyone working the floor at Powell's has had to first work shelving books, she added.
The bookstore, at 10th Avenue and W Burnside Street, is open 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. 365 days a year. Every day book sellers line up at the NW 11th Avenue and Couch (pronounced Cooch) street entrance to sell used books: The store buys 3,000 a day.
Powell's pays the seller about 1/3 of what the store will get for it.
Although now a Portland institution, Powell's actually began in Chicago when Michael Powell was a University of Chicago graduate student in the '70s. Encouraged by his professors, including Saul Bellows, he borrowed $3,000 to open a bookstore near campus. The loan was repaid in two months.
When his father Walter, a retired painting contractor, came to visit, he was impressed by how much fun (and profit) could be had owning a bookstore. So when the senior Powell returned to Portland, he opened his own bookstore in the then run-down Pearl District, which was a jumble of automotive repair shops, old warehouses and the Blitz-Weinhard Brewery. It was Walter's idea to combine used and new books in his store.
One of the treats at Powell's main store is the Rare Book room. Carpeted, and with sconces and pictures of visiting literary lights on the walls, the room has the feel of a gentlemen's club library.
On a marble-top bookcase I spied a brochure describing how to correctly open old books: Under the supervision of Powell's employees, visitors may indeed handle books that date back hundreds of years.
Just before I arrived, the "librarian" in charge informed me, a first-edition copy of Moby-Dick had been sold for $5,000. "It was a pretty beat-up copy," she said. "It smelled of the sea."
Still available was a four-volume set of Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin for $35,000 and a two-volume set of the Journals of Lewis and Clark for $100,000.
In 1994, the bookstore went on-line and now gets 30 percent of its revenue from cyber sales, Sontz said. The bookstore also has a coffee shop (this is the Northwest, after all), a gallery featuring local artists and a spot that seats 25 comfortably -- and up to 250 uncomfortably -- where authors come to read from their books.
Three years ago, the Blitz-Weinhard Brewery pulled out of the Pearl District, making way for the current burst of high-rise and high-income renovation in the area. That places Walter Powell's bookstore in one of the hippest neighborhoods in the Northwest.
However, Powell's, part of which stands on a former automobile showroom, still retains its old warehouse charm. At the 11th and Couch entrance, there is a concrete stack of books. The foundation is a book called The Whale, the title of Moby-Dick when Melville first published it in England. Powell has his own first edition, culled from a lot he bought at an auction in Chicago.
The other titles on the pillar of books are classics whose titles are printed here in their original languages: The Odyssey (in Greek), War & Peace (in Russian), Mahabharata (in Sanscrit), A Thousand and One Nights (in Arabic), Psalms (in Hebrew) The Book of Changes (in Chinese) and Hamlet (in English).
It is a fitting monument to a bookstore that claims to carry books in every language of the world.
-- For more information, call toll-free 1-800-878-7323.