Congratulations to The Bookstore in Lenox, Mass., which celebrated its 40th anniversary under the ownership of Matt Tannenbaum on Friday "with an all-day party including story-telling, poetry, jokes, music, food and beverages," the Berkshire Eagle reported.
Tannenbaum discovered his true calling in the early 1970s when he landed a job as a stock boy at the Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan: "It was the key to the rest of my life," he said, adding that after moving briefly to Washington to be a shipping clerk at a small-press wholesaler, he returned to the East Coast in 1975, and moved to the Berkshires without a job, but figuring that "somehow I could always stay in the book trade." A year later, he learned The Bookstore was for sale and took the leap.
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| Matt Tannenbaum celebrating The Bookstore's 40th. (photo: David Wilk) | |
"There was always a comfort level that you couldn't find in other stores," Tannenbaum said while conceding that "we had some bad years. I was new, had bought too many books and made a lot of mistakes. I wasn't going wide enough in my choices, I had a learning curve.... Recessions have affected us a bit, but basically we kept growing. I had a daily dollar amount in mind that we should average. At the start, a couple of hundred dollars a day. But that was never my driving point. My job was to have good books for the people and I didn't know how much you had to sell the bestsellers to afford the core books we need to have. These are my 'Gotham books'; my gold standard."
Encouraged by the resurgence of indies in recent years, he observed: "The most important thing I've learned was not to compete with something I didn't need to compete with, because their product was never my product." With local orientation and loyal community support, "my business was getting better every year." He credited his survival to "location, reputation and good will. That has just increased, and it's completely intangible, you can't put a dollar value on it."