Nooks for Books: Rare and relevant findings for new & used book lovers

I’ve loved books my whole life. As a kid, if I wanted a present, I wanted a present of a book. (Fairytales, specifically.) My corporate career was in IT for 30 years. Even while I was doing that, I was online. I was one of the earliest booksellers on AbeBooks back 20 years ago or so. I was only doing rare books. Over time, what became apparent is that when you go online you find exactly what you’re looking for, but you miss the aesthetics of being in a bookstore. After IT, I apprenticed at a bookstore in San Francisco [where I was living at the time].

What did you learn in your time apprenticing?

It helped me formulate what I wanted a bookstore to be. I knew I wanted to sell new and used books. As a book nut and collector, I love things that are out of print. Why would I want to sell only new books or bestsellers? I love old books — the bindings, quality. You can look at it and see, wow, someone hand-sewed this, or there’s a piece of old newspaper someone used for the binding. You can tell how much care went into it.

How’d you get to New Mexico?

Well, I wanted to open a physical bookstore in San Francisco, but it was outrageous. They wanted seven years rent, your first child’s DNA. Then I came out here because I still had my house here [doing work with the state] and I walked into a place and said, “I’m thinking about opening a bookstore,” and it was done on a handshake. We started off very small on Baca Street in Santa Fe.

What makes a book interesting?

It could be beauty, though we try not to buy a book just because it looks good. There are some people that want to buy books by the foot to use for decoration. At least the books aren’t going to the dump, because we want no homeless books. We’ll never throw away a book unless it’s moldy and unhealthy.

We get books that have exciting content and create an exchange of ideas. Right now, there’s a lot of stuff going on about Russia and Putin. We did a dictator window in Santa Fe that provoked a lot of conversation, like — is a dictator a dictator if they only do bad things? One thing about a bookstore is, it gets people talking and in an exchange of ideas.

What books do you make sure to keep around the store?

We always look for beautiful books about Taos and art and the southwest — very apropos for the location. We try to keep things regional. We just got the new Mirabai Starr in. Some of our absolute bestsellers are “Blood and Thunder” by Hampton Sides (which is about Kit Carson and the Natives; good nonfiction about the area); the “Taos Hiking Guide,” of course — we sell a million of those; and we just got in the anniversary edition reissue of “Bless Me, Ultima.” We listen to our customers and see what they’re asking for — whether classics or a new translation of “The Iliad.” We have a very engaged customer base.

We want to make sure that we have something for everyone. We don’t want to be an elitist bookstore. We should have a book for $1 and maybe there’s one for $500. We don’t mind if you just want to look at the book, to appreciate it in that way. You should feel like you can look at cards or puzzles, or sit in a comfortable seat and look out the window. This is a welcoming place.