War of the words

Step into Outwrite Bookstore and it’s hard not to bounce.
This colorful, cruisey Midtown meeting spot (and the Southeast’s preeminent gay and lesbian bookstore) almost always bobs with activity, usually set to a boom-chicka-boom disco beat. The clientele, mostly men, drift among the shelves, bumping along to the music, or sit in groups sipping coffee and sizing up each new arrival. Gaggles of girly boys gather on the store’s small corner patio outdoors, while curious onlookers stare at the often quirky and creative window displays.

In less than a decade, Outwrite owner Philip Rafshoon has written what can only be called an Atlanta success story — a small business that has survived despite daunting odds and has come to be heralded as a community builder, a cornerstone of Midtown’s revitalization.

Sitting here in this slightly intoxicating, motion-filled den of eye-fucking, it’s hard to believe the independent bookstore is an industry under siege. The ’90s were a brutal time for small bookstores in America. Big-box giants like Borders and Barnes & Noble systematically squashed the little guys, while Amazon.com slowly leeched away business to the Internet. With those new competitors to deal with, independent general interest bookstores across the country began to vanish, leaving behind only a handful of survivors, mostly stores serving niche markets like Outwrite. Add to that post-9-11 jitters and the Bush recession, and you arrive at a bleak battlefield for some stores.

In Atlanta, never a stronghold for the book trade, not many independent booksellers remain, and the ones that are still around are reaching deep into a mixed-bag of strategies, trying to find a viable tactic to fend off the enemy. With a blend of resilience and resignation, some storeowners concede they can’t win against the big Bs and are worried that their Waterloo might be around the corner.

But Outwrite, a business that has grown nearly every year since its inception, may provide a blueprint for what it takes for small booksellers — and perhaps small businesses in general — to survive and even flourish in the era of the superstore.

The casualties

In any discussion of Atlanta’s bookstores, all roads invariably lead back to Oxford Books. The much beloved retail landmark has almost achieved canon status as a parable for the city’s loss of identity. Opened in 1970 and later expanded, Oxford became a destination for authors on tour and a gathering place for the city’s literary lights. The Peachtree Battle location managed to be both cavernous and cozy at once, and also was one of the first bookstores in the nation to experiment with adding an on-site coffee shop. During its heyday, the store hosted as many as 20 book signings a month.
But by the mid-’90s, Oxford hit an iceberg of bad business decisions, and its eventual demise in 1997 sent shivers down the spines of small bookstores all over the city.

“It’s scary for us, especially when you see something like an Oxford close, because you have to ask, ‘How could that happen?’” says Linda Bryant, co-owner and founder of Charis Books and More, a feminist bookstore in Little Five Points.

How it could happen comes from a complicated equation of a changing industry and bad timing. Oxford owner Rupert LeCraw had zealously expanded into additional locations, and its Pharr Road superstore was perilously wedged between nearby Barnes & Noble and Borders stores, two chains that then and now were spreading like syphilis. Ironically, both chains effectively outfoxed Oxford by using its own formula: huge inventories of titles coupled with trendy coffee bars. The number of independent bookstores in America fell from about 5,000 to 2,000 in less than 10 years and, even worse, led to the dreadful Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan vehicle You’ve Got Mail in 1998.

It’s a disturbing trend for a variety of reasons, especially in Atlanta, where suburban-style big boxes are popping up like fungi. With the passing of a city’s independent bookstores, so goes no small indicator of its sense of place.

br>?The walking wounded
Driving south on Moreland Avenue into the amusement-park atmosphere of Little Five Points, it’s hard to imagine the neighborhood Linda Bryant saw in the early ’70s. Instead of restaurants, coffeehouses and boutiques, insert pawnshops, liquor stores and urban squalor. The area was considered inner city, she says, and not entirely safe. But Bryant chose the neighborhood for its diversity and for its potential. In 1974, she and Barbra Borgman opened Charis (pronounced care-is,), a Greek word meaning “grace” and “gift.”

“We definitely chose this neighborhood because of our sense of mission, of wanting to be in a neighborhood where we might be needed, where we could bring books of encouragement,” Bryant says.

The store’s growth led them to move into a larger space in 1994. Bryant tells the story of how on moving day, all the store’s books were transferred not by paid movers but by a team of volunteers. Charis has been in its current location, a cheerful yellow house on Euclid Avenue, ever since. But just two years later, the store found itself in a quandary. Though its series of extra-curricular events, like lectures and writing and discussion groups, drew large crowds, the bookstore was barely scraping by. The problem? Bryant almost whispers the word: “Amazon.”

“We were at a crisis point,” Bryant says, “which we’re at again today, really, saying, ‘How are we going to make it financially?’”

Charis responded to the crisis with a novel solution, forming a separate, nonprofit programming entity. Today, Charis Circle operates out of a back office in the bookstore and oversees a broad spectrum of educational, cultural and community outreach programs, as well as all of the store’s literary events. Bryant and store co-owners Cherie Lyon and Sara Look split their time between the nonprofit and the bookstore, and most events are held in Charis’ main retail space.

But while the nonprofit arm has flourished, the for-profit bookstore has stalled. The wolf may not be at the door, but he’s circling the block looking for parking. Last year, Borders opened a new store on Ponce de Leon Avenue, and speculation in the neighborhood is at a fevered pitch that another big-box bookseller may be part of a new development south of Little Five Points on Moreland Avenue.

Regardless, Bryant says she’s not quite ready to sound the alarm for help just yet.

“We know that we’re an endangered species,” she says. “We know that it’s a miracle we’re still here. It is a miracle of support from the community, and of loyalty.”

Mark Stevens, though, is ringing the alarm bell, and then some. Though his Science Fiction & Mystery Book Shop on Cheshire Bridge Road has been in business for 19 years, Stevens says he’s constantly on the verge of closing. Two years ago, he sent a letter to the customers on his mailing list warning, “If you want to see us here next month, you need to come in.” The customers responded — but sales eventually fell off again. Then came Sept. 11.

“It was like turning a light switch,” he says.

Stevens worries not only about his own store’s future, but also about the greater danger industry changes may spell for book publishing. With their huge buying powers, the megastore chains are able to give customers deep discounts and effectively undercut the small booksellers. Already Stevens says he can’t carry some titles at his store because he can’t compete with the prices at the chain stores. But that buying power also has an ultimately dampening power on good writing in general, he says. He believes the rise of the megastores will eventually squeeze out smaller publishing houses whose unconventional voices might not fit into a more mainstream Wal-Mart-type mentality.

“What you have is a landscape that’s blasted,” he says. “People are going to say, ‘Whatever happened to the good old days, when I could walk into a bookstore and the clerk knew my name?’ And the selection people do find just isn’t going to be the same.”

?The survivors
When Philip Rafshoon was growing up in Dunwoody, his father used to bring him and the family into town to visit Oxford Books on a monthly basis. Those early experiences shaped what Rafshoon came to believe a bookstore should be — not that he ever intended to go into the bookselling business.

Rafshoon doesn’t look or sound like what you’d expect to find in a virtual Atlanta native who transplanted here from New York at an early age. The slender 41-year-old speaks with no discernible Southern accent, but he betrays his sales background with his coercive command of language and gentle ability to win you over to his way of thinking.

A Georgia Tech graduate and former salesman in the computer industry, Rafshoon opened Outwrite in 1993 after inheriting the business plan from a group of prospective entrepreneurs who abandoned the endeavor. He admits that he got into bookselling not because of his love of literature but out of a desire to impact the community.

When someone complains to him about the things Atlanta lacks, Rafshoon answers: “Create it yourself.” And that’s what he’s done with Outwrite. He decided to create something he thought the city sorely lacked: a big-city gay bookstore in a pedestrian-friendly area.

The store was originally located in the Midtown Promenade shopping center, but in 1996, Rafshoon’s real estate agent called him up and insisted he come see a space recently vacated by a gay disco. Far from the hub of activity it attracts today, the intersection of 10th Street and Piedmont Avenue was then home to a rundown auto rental station, a decrepit old school building and a suburban-style Subway. Rafshoon immediately saw the shop’s potential.

“People thought we were crazy,” he says. “They said, ‘Look at all the businesses that have failed in this location before.’ I just kind of laughed at them.”

Seemingly overnight, the newly relocated bookstore and its neighbors found themselves on the corner of See and Be Seen. The seedier aspects of the intersection soon gave way to shiny new restaurants and offices, not to mention the monumental facelift when Post Parkside moved in. Rafshoon admits that he got lucky with the timing of the store’s relocation, but he maintains that Outwrite’s influence played a big role in the area’s revitalization.

“I think that success is built on two things. First is being in the right place at the right time, which means being aware of what’s going on around you. But the other thing is knowing what to do when you’re there. We saw this place and I said, ‘We’re going to build the best bookstore in the city. We’re going to build the best gay and lesbian bookstore in the country. And maybe, in essence, build the best bookstore in the country, because it really shows community.’”

Though Rafshoon didn’t consciously have the term “New Urbanism” in mind, the ideology’s approach to development certainly has informed the new face of the intersection. Rafshoon tapped his life partner (and part-time New York resident) Robert Gaul to design the store’s interior, drawing heavily from influences like A Different Light in San Francisco and Lambda Rising in Washington D.C.

“It’s pedestrian-oriented,” says Rafshoon. “It’s made to make you feel like you’d want to walk down the street. It’s made to feel not cookie cutter, like it’s not part of a chain.”

Not to launch a Small is Beautiful soliloquy on human-scaled development, but Outwrite’s urban context and lucky proximity to the restaurants, a coffeehouse and the Post development across the street may help explain why the store has thrived, even in the midst of an economic downturn and with the arrival of a shiny new Borders in Midtown.

Though Outwrite has proven its ability to serve its core audience, the bookstore has recently expanded beyond its niche, partnering with the Woodruff Arts Center to produce a literary speakers series. Drew Marchman, producer of the Page to Stage series and director of public relations for the Woodruff, says he chose Outwrite to collaborate with because he liked the idea of working with an independent bookstore. Usually held at the 14th Street Playhouse, Page to Stage events bring in authors ranging from David Sedaris to Tina McElroy Ansa, giving both gay and straight writers a chance to speak in a theater setting.

“Almost every author says, ‘I’m really glad you’re using an independent bookstore,’” says Marchman. Many writers get their first big breaks from independent bookstores, he notes, and they remain loyal to those stores long after they’ve made it.

br>?Loyalty in the trenches
It’s exactly that kind of devotion that the independents are now depending on to keep them afloat — a dedicated following from regular customers.

Marlene Zeiler, owner of Tall Tales Book Shop in Toco Hills Shopping Center, still sees some of the same customers who came in the year the store opened — in 1979. When the store relocated to a different part of the shopping center two years ago, the loyal customers came right along. The attraction? A more personal touch in their book-buying experience.

“We have really good people working for us,” Zeiler says. “We have an intelligent group that really cares about the books. I’m not saying the people at Barnes & Noble don’t care. But I know that my people will go that extra mile for our customers.”

The Phoenix & Dragon Bookstore in Sandy Springs also sees a lot of repeat customers, says employee Connie Macleod, which may explain how the New Age shop has lasted 15 years.

“People came here to heal. They go to Barnes & Noble to get a latte,” Macleod says. “People who shop here are looking for something more.”

And that sense of “something more” may be exactly the weapon small booksellers must use to keep the big stores at bay. After 9-11, the element of human connection has become important again, Macleod says, noting that Phoenix and Dragon set up a special prayer room where people could come to meditate in the days following the attacks.

After Sept. 11, Rafshoon says Outwrite’s business actually increased. “People wanted a place where they feel comfortable. They wanted a place where they feel supported, no matter what happens. People talk about people going for comfort food. And this is a comfort place for them,” he says.

The owners of Charis speak of comfort in similar terms. But despite that loyalty, Charis’ owners are now looking at ways to better market the store and rethink its image. Expect that severe ’70s-styled logo to be updated soon and a new sign placed out front. The store’s challenge, Bryant says, is to communicate to the public just what a shop like Charis can mean to its community.

Cherie Lyon, a longtime Charis employee who became a co-owner this year, compares the store to an old house that needs a little renovation. It may require some work, she says, but the house will still be sturdier than any new construction out there. And in the long-term battle against the big box stores, that resilience will matter.

“Honestly, I don’t think they can kill us,” she says. “What do we have that’s different from everybody else? It’s us. That’s it. It’s our spirit.”

Rafshoon agrees, noting that even if small bookstores can’t win the war against megastore chains, “it is a war in which we can win a lot of the battles.”

“We’re not going away anytime soon,” Rafshoon says. “And if that day ever came we’d just throw a big ol’ party and say, ‘Thank you very much, now we’re moving on to something else.’”

tray.butler@creativeloafing.com