David Unowsky on working to save Ruminator Books — and to enrich the marketplace of ideas
David Unowsky has turned to desperate measures in the last few years to save his St. Paul bookstore from financial ruin. First he sold its old name, The Hungry Mind, to raise quick cash. He expanded to a new literary center on Washington Avenue near downtown Minneapolis, then closed that store when retail activity proved scant. Now he’s pursuing financial backing and trying to put aside his “hippie” mentality in favor of hard-nosed management, all while working to maintain his bookstore’s mission.
“We’re going forward. There are four sources of funding we’re pursuing. One, the city of St. Paul has given us a $50,000 grant. Two, we’re trying to sell our book review. That’s one of our significant assets. That’s pending.
Three, we tried selling stock, because our store has been tied to the community, and we thought there’d be interest in community ownership. There’s been some response. [He stopped the effort at the end of February when sales didn’t reach the $450,000 minimum.]
And we have an investor. There’s a backer and he’s participating in everything. I feel a lot better than I did six weeks ago.
I started the bookstore 33-and-a-half years ago. I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t have a notion about the ways the book business would go. For example, we were one of about 15 independent bookstores around the country that created author tours, in the late 1970s. Now there’s a company called Around Town — their business is to escort authors around town. They get together at the bookseller’s convention and talk about the authors they can’t stand.
Of course you get to meet incredible authors. In the last 10 years we’ve averaged well over 200 events a year. I’ve known the local authors, and many national. We’ve had over 70 Pulitzer winners and over five Nobelists. It’s still exciting.
We’ve downsized a lot during our troubles. I’m now the major buyer again. I hadn’t done that for 10 years. In March 2003 we closed the store in Minneapolis. We went in at the opening of the building in 2000. That building is a unique thing. There’s no other place dedicated to book arts in the country. There should be an independent bookstore in there and it should have been us. It was us.
I could be awake many nights thinking about if that was the right decision. The summary was it was too early for retail there. It’s a destination only if people are going there for an event. During the day it’s nowhere. Five years, 10 years from now, there’s going to be a stretch from Seven Corners to the Milwaukee Road project. It will all be there, but it ain’t there now.
Business there started out well, but it never built. That’s the point at which I say, should I have run buses from downtown? Should I have held readings at 4:30 before people went home from work?
When we changed the name, in 2000, we were not making money and we were having cash-flow problems. This company came from out of the blue. It was an online learning company, and they wanted to call it Hungry Minds. The company didn’t succeed ultimately. But they put a substantial pile of money on the table, and we couldn’t turn it down.
The tough competition is the Internet. The chains are not that tough. We’re right here talking to Minnesota customers. I don’t care how good your computer model or your category control, it’s not the same.
The problem is, just like the FCC wants to limit ownership of TV outlets, the big booksellers control the information like that, too. The buyers for Barnes & Noble and Amazon, if neither buys a book it doesn’t get published.
Our problem was, as our business got bigger, my 1970s hippie management style didn’t work any more. I didn’t control cash. I didn’t control costs. I got educated the hard way.
There’s certain kinds of things I hate. If I had my druthers I’d be out in the store. I like talking to customers, stamping the bargain books. I belong to the Independent Booksellers Consortium, and I’m unusual in that sense. The others like to be in the back room, doing financial management.
I’m an on-the-floor type of person, cranky as I am.
I am also an idea and political animal. One of the many functions of our store is to make available a wide range of stuff. People think it’s some kind of a lefty store, but we go out of our way to include many ideas. We had a panel on the Patriot Act. We had the usual people against the Patriot Act, but we also had the man in charge of enforcing it from the U.S. Attorney’s office.
This is important to us. We do attempt to make available all shades of opinion. The job of a bookstore is to make this available.
It’s getting more important, because of media conglomeration in fewer and fewer hands. There’s a lot of political pressure against dissent. When the bookstore started that was our mission, too. People couldn’t get books. There was civil rights activity, anti-war activity, the women’s movement, the gay movement.
The last couple of years there’s been a resurgence in those attitudes. People put up anti-war signs, and they’re torn down. Or people deface cars. That attitude is there again, you’re un-American if you’re against the war. It’s starting to get like the 1950s.”
— Interview by Beth Ewen
The owner of Ruminator Books in St. Paul and publisher of the Ruminator Review: 651.699.0587; www.ruminator.com
