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How Not To Start a Secondhand Bookshop!

ecently, I saw an article titled “How Much Does It Cost to Co. Booksellers doing a sporting books catalog business in Sharon,
Open a Bookstore?” by Arvyn Cerézo online which states that it New Hampshire.
Rwould cost about $120K to start a second-hand bookshop. Not bad for two guys who didn’t know what they were doing!
To excerpt this article, Eric Johnson of Recycle Bookstore in Jim
California said that an average bookshop would need about 3,500 sq.
feet of space. Expenses would be $50K for bookcases, counters, and Hello Jim;
cash registers. Miscellaneous startup costs about $10K. Stock would be That certainly would have discouraged me. I think that you are right
$600 K for a new bookshop and $60K for a secondhand bookshop. about a few hundred dollars using homemade bookshelves to get us started.
You should also have about $30K in the bank to pay employees before I would have guessed $125 for rent, but you are probably right with $175.
the sales start rolling in. Rent would range between $9K and $13K a So, we started off with an initial estimate of probably less than $500, a
month; payroll would be $15 an hour plus health insurance, so maybe lot of work and scrounging.
$10K a month per employee; and expenses would be $22K a month. Thank God we were too stupid to know
Assuming a 50% markup on books, that what we were trying to do was impos-
you would have to sell $44K a month sible. Back then people were going out to
to break even, and more to pay for the Colorado to bookseller school. We didn’t, and
$450K invested so far, and you had we didn’t have the vaguest idea of how to
better hope that you choose the right run a bookshop, or anything else. Ignorance,
location for your shop, as location, low expectations, and persistence seem to
location, location is crucial, or all will have paid off. And the persistence was really
come to naught. Also, make sure you like mindlessly plodding along because
hire only perfect employees! nothing else occurred to either of us.
I’m glad we didn’t know this when You really should write a book on how
Ken Callahan and I started the Unicorn to be a secondhand bookseller and charge
Bookshop in 1975. Since we mostly used lots of money for consulting fees. I would do
free barn wood for shelves, I’d estimate it, but I still haven’t the vaguest idea of
that what with nails and screws, and gas how it should be done. I do know that
for my father’s old pickup to move the none of the many people over the years
books, I’d say probably under a hundred who told me how I should properly run
dollars in hardware costs and a few my business are still in the book business.
hundred dollars for old books and I My wife Diane told the story when we
forgot what our first month’s rent was – were visiting her brothers about how a
$175 maybe?? group of students at Harvard Business
Of course, Ken had a second job, and I School offered to take our sporting book
was living at home, so that helped. Also, we mail order business on as a class project
sent away for dealers’ catalogs and went about 20 years ago, analyze what we
to book auctions, so we were eager to did, and show us how to grow and grow
learn, and fortunately didn’t do anything and grow and dominate the book world and make billions … and make
really stupid. them famous as well. After the first interview, they told us that we were
I remember that Ken read an article in Life Style magazine about hopeless, which was accurate. They were smart people. I think that they
how to start a secondhand bookshop and showed it to me. After I read then went out and found a guy named Jeff Bezos, and after that, the world
it, he said to me, “Let’s start a secondhand bookshop!” and I answered, went all to hell.
“Okay.” We ran an ad in the local paper that we bought books and Ken
went to auctions and stored the books in my mother’s barn.
When we thought we had enough books, we found a cheap second- Dear Ken,
floor location to rent (which conveniently was just across the street Thank goodness we didn’t know that we didn’t know what we were
from the county library), built bookshelves from barn wood, and doing and that we didn’t have any experts telling us that what we were
opened on June 2, 1975. And the rest is history. Later on, we split the doing was impossible.
business in 1980 and Ken moved to New Hampshire, and incredibly, Jim
48 years later we are both still in business, me as the Unicorn Bookshop
in a first-floor location in Trappe, Maryland and Ken as Callahan and Warning: do not try this yourself!

James Dawson has owned and operated the Unicorn Bookshop in Trappe, MD since 1975, when he decided that it would be more fun to buy and sell old books
and maps than to get a “real” job. For a born collector like Jim, having a shop just might be another excuse to buy more books. He has about 30,000 second hand
and rare books on the shelves, and just about all subjects are represented. He can be contacted at P.O. Box 154; Trappe, MD 21673; 410-476-3838;
unicornbookshopMD@gmail.com; www.unicornbookshop.com

34 Journal of Antiques and Collectibles