Booksellers Extraordinaire
Elaine and Bill Petrocelli of Book Passage oversee an everwidening circle of community activities— in addition to being purveyors of books.

BY JILL KRAMER

To say that Book Passage is a bookstore is like calling Cirque du Soleil a circus act. It is so much more. In the last 30 years owners Elaine and Bill Petrocelli have created a resource that enriches not only the local community but the literary world at large. They nurture and launch new writing careers through their classes and conferences, where aspiring professionals connect with agents and publishers. They facilitate the formation of book clubs and writers’ groups and provide the meeting space at no charge. They bring in luminaries like Gloria Steinem, T.C. Boyle, Nick Hornby and Molly Ivins to read to and interact with audiences—again, for free. Their events draw visitors from far outside the county, who bring in revenue for our hotels, restaurants and shops. They run ongoing charitable programs for organizations like Hospice of Marin and the Marin Literacy Project. They host fund-raisers like the recent all-star benefit for victims of Hurricane Katrina, which raised $44,000. And, yes, they sell books. Book sales keep the doors of Book Passage open.

Book Passage started out as Elaine’s pet project, a little hole-in-the-wall in downtown Larkspur that she opened after leaving her career as an elementary school administrator. It was three years after she and Bill married, both for the second time. An attorney, he’s written two books: Sexual Harassment on the Job and Low Profile: How to Avoid the Privacy Invaders.

Bill gave up his law practice 20 years ago to join Elaine at the store, after she’d moved it to the present location. As Book Passage steadily expanded in size as well as reach, it became clear that his legal expertise was needed to counter repeated incursions by the chains.

Today, the store occupies two sprawling buildings in a small shopping plaza just west of the freeway in Corte Madera. The first building houses the cafe, fiction and self-help books, children’s department and a room for author events. In the building behind it are the mystery and travel sections, the classroom, the used books (proceeds go to Hospice of Marin) and Elaine’s office, where the Petrocellis sit with me to chat.

Let’s start by talking about Barnes & Noble moving to a new location down the road. Does this threaten the survival of Book Passage?
BILL: We’ve had a Barnes & Noble across the freeway from us for the last 15 years that’s the same size as our store and we did not raise the same kind of questions that we’re raising now. But when they signed a lease for a space three times larger down the road, that raised the alarm. That signaled to me that they were going into the mode that they’ve followed many times around the country of trying to put their local competitors out of business. We’re not afraid of competition as long as everybody’s playing by the same rules. Barnes & Noble really doesn’t play by the same rules.

ELAINE: I think this is a warning about what can happen to Marin County. The malls are able to choose who goes into their space and at what size, with no input from the citizens. Yet if I want to change the entrance to the bathroom here, I have to go through a planning process. Citizens who want to make changes to their homes have to go through a planning process. But somewhere along the line malls have become countries unto themselves. They are able to use all the city services, but when the citizens say, “We don’t like this,” they can say, “None of your business.” Other communities have made rules that require community input for businesses over a certain size.

Tell me about that.
BILL: It’s been done in Santa Cruz, for one. There’s a whole lot of information about that at www.newrules.org. They’re saying that size does make a difference. When a chain attempts to come in at a certain size, it’s going to disrupt the competitive balance of an area, and a community should have rules to evaluate what that impact is going to be.

I suppose from the vantage point of the mall owner, it’s just simpler for them to lease to one big store than to, say, three small stores.
ELAINE: It is simpler but actually they get more rent from smaller stores. They charge smaller stores more per square foot. They also charge more for common area maintenance.

Well, it sounds like that should be illegal.
BILL: It probably should be, but it isn’t. And this is a situation where a New York management firm, Madison Marquette, sat down with a New York book chain and decided to threaten radically the competitive balance of bookselling in Marin and the people in Marin have absolutely no input on this decision whatsoever. I think Marin County ought to have a say in any kind of a land use decision of that magnitude. We think Corte Madera ought to have legislation about this, and the county should have rules about this. It’s time to take control of our own destiny and not let a lot of land developers and absentee chains decide what Marin County is going to look like. Otherwise it’s going to look like the San Fernando Valley.

What happened when Borders opened in San Rafael?
BILL: It immediately drove another bookstore out of business—Cottage Books in San Rafael.

ELAINE: And A Clean Well-Lighted Place in Larkspur. And I’m sure it has a competitive impact on us. It’s not as close as Barnes & Noble will be, so there’s less of an impact.

BILL: Another example is Novato, which had a good downtown bookstore. The Novato City Council at that time just gave away the city to the mall to come in and bring in any tenant they wanted to and they brought in a great big Crown Books. And it wasn’t long before that put the local bookstore out of business. Then Crown Books itself went out of business, so now Novato has no bookstore.

ELAINE: Basically, almost all of the local stores in Novato went out of business.

BILL: Wal-Mart is classic in doing this—coming in, opening a huge warehouse-type store, putting all the local stores out of business, then deciding maybe it’s not such a great location after all, moving on and the town has destroyed their local base. And I just don’t want to see that happen in Marin.

I’d like you to talk about the ways that locally owned business—and bookstores in particular—benefit the community.
BILL: I would put it in three categories. One is the amount of money that they help circulate back into the community. All independent retailers circulate more income into the community than do chain stores. There have been a couple of studies on it now—one out of Chicago showed that the independent stores recycle about 70 percent more money into the community than did the chains because they spend everything here. They deposit money in a local bank, hire management people here, contribute to local charities, buy from local suppliers. Your attorney, your accountant—they’re all local people.

ELAINE: We use local stationers, our insurance man is local, our plumber is local, our shelves are made by someone in San Rafael rather than everything going out of the county.

BILL: And with independent bookstores I think that the local advantage is even greater and that’s because a lot of them have started doing the kinds of things we’ve been doing—putting on the types of events you never would have seen a store do 20 years ago. Things like writing conferences—we have four or five every year.

We have a friend who owns a bookstore in Oxford, Mississippi, that sponsors the Conference for the Book, which brings hundreds of people in every year. Another friend in Miami has a book fair that brings in thousands of people. These things go on in the community simply because there’s a good independent bookseller there to do this kind of stuff.

ELAINE: A lot of people come to our events from out of town. And they eat in the local restaurants and some spend the night in hotels. We have one couple that comes from Eureka and they always stay in the hotel next door. And of course when we have our conferences, people come from all over the world and stay in hotels here.

Tell me about your charitable work.
ELAINE: One of the things I’m most proud of is our work with Hospice of Marin. A lot of bookstores carry used books, but we decided to do it in partnership with Hospice. The books are donated and Hospice gets the money from the sales. Last year they got over $60,000. It’s just another way that people can give to the community. And it’s a way for families that otherwise don’t have the means to buy books. We frequently get books that have been out just a matter of days and they’re on sale at less than half price in the Hospice room. Also, we have a partnership with the Bank of Marin where we pick high-profile events that we’re having here at the store and the bank helps publicize it and when we have the event, 20 percent of the book sales are donated to the Marin Literacy Project. The Marin Literacy Project uses that money to publish a book of the writings of their clients who were illiterate before they came to the project and now are writing their own stories. It’s a very satisfying thing, but it isn’t the sort of thing that somebody who didn’t live right here in the county would be interested in, or know to do.

BILL: Right after Hurricane Katrina, we got a call from Amy Tan wanting to know if we’d put on a benefit for hurricane victims. We said, When do you want it? She said, At the end of the week!

ELAINE: We had six days.

BILL: We got 35 authors and we packed the place and raised $44,000. It was an absolutely wonderful evening.

ELAINE: We had major authors—people like Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, Isabel Allende of course, Armistead Maupin, Martin Cruz Smith—the most stellar writers in the Bay Area all came out and donated their time and spoke for three minutes about New Orleans. And we gave people choices of places to donate money and they were very generous. There were at least 500 people here. And we can do this on a dime because we live here. This is our community. We don’t have to go to a corporate office in New York and have a group of people in suits figure out if it will be good or bad for the image of the company. If we want to do it, we do it.

BILL: Plus, I think author events have made a big difference in bookstores. Twenty years ago, an author event was a very rare thing. It used to consist of an author coming in and sitting down and signing books and not saying a word.

ELAINE: And that’s how the chains like to do it.

BILL: But in the late ’80s, Elaine and maybe half a dozen other store owners started pushing the publishers, saying, you know, when the author comes and actually talks to people, it sells more books and it generates more excitement. And now author events have become a standard part of the way we and a lot of other independent stores do business.

I’ve noticed from your newsletters that you’ve been doing two and three author events alone every day.
ELAINE: We try to do a mix of famous authors and authors who are getting started or authors that we just love and want to encourage. We used to have half of the middle building, and we weren’t here very long when we took over the rest of it and determined, against all advice from all retail experts, that we would devote that room to events. Because you pay by the square foot and how could you just devote it to events when you could have shelves and books in it? But we were determined to do it. And then we took over this building [behind the main building with the cafe] and put a classroom space in here.

And apparently it’s paid off.
ELAINE: It has paid off. Because the community has supported these events. Today, for example, we had an event this afternoon at 1 o’clock. This evening, I’ll be giving a book talk to a group of 36 people that bid $700 for it at a charity auction. There will be a men’s book club in the classroom, with 16 people attending that. In the mystery department there will be two authors speaking to another group. And down at our Ferry Building store in San Francisco tonight, the Left Coast Writers—that’s now about 150 people—will have a meeting. That’s what’s going on in one day at Book Passage!

BILL: The stuff that comes from the author events is amazing. And I think the most amazing thing was the time Gloria Steinem was here—it must have been 10 years ago. She came on a Saturday morning, the place was packed, and she got up there and immediately started talking to all the young girls that were there. She’d ask them questions and point them out to each other saying, “You ought to meet her.” And as the morning went on, she kept telling them they really ought to meet on a regular basis. My mouth was hanging open, I was so impressed. She organized the girls. She actually formed a community group in the course of her speech that proceeded to meet here every Saturday morning.

ELAINE: And it started because a little girl from Tam High raised her hand and said the boys made fun of the girls on the bus when they were going to track meets.

BILL: And we just made the room available to them.

ELAINE: They talked about what was going on in their high schools and how they were handling things and what they cared about and college applications and whatever they wanted to talk about. And they kept meeting here for years. And when Gloria Steinem came back a few years later and the girls were in college, they all came back. And those girls have gone on to become top aides to senators, involved in women’s studies programs at universities—they’re real leaders.

That is so wonderful!
BILL: We really felt good about the fact that we were able to let them use the room and not have to put a price tag on it.

ELAINE: Every once in a while one of the girls comes back and tells me what she’s doing and they’re always doing amazing things.

BILL: Things like that happen here all the time. People that meet in a writing class here will have follow-up groups.

ELAINE: They’ll pull up to one of our tables and critique each other’s work. And we have almost 200 book clubs. Often they need to start here. We have a tea twice a year where we invite everyone who would like to be in a book club. Because the clubs that are already formed usually don’t take new members. So we introduce people who are interested in reading the same kinds of books and we invite them to meet here as long as they want to and eventually they go on and start meeting at home or in restaurants and another new group comes along.

Tell me more about your writers’ conferences.
ELAINE: We’ve had people come through these conferences and get published. And that’s very exciting when that happens. The chair of our Mystery conference is a Marin resident, Sheldon Siegel. He became a mystery writer after first taking a class and then attending a conference here and he credits Book Passage for his career as a mystery writer. And there are lots of people like that.

BILL: You know, this raises another issue I feel very strongly about and I’ve been battling for years—the impact of independent bookstores on what’s published. People always think that, if the independent bookstores went out of business, they could still buy the books they want somewhere else. But I would contend that the books they want may not ever get published if there are no independent stores. You’ve only got one or two buyers in a particular category at Barnes & Noble and at Borders making these decisions. I look at it as a funnel. Imagine 100,000 authors out there [spreading his arms wide over his head], all trying to get published, all trying to get the attention of 100 or 200 publishers [lowering his arms a little, with a narrower space between them]. But they have to go through maybe four or five chain buyers [bringing his hands even lower and closer together]. And if they can’t get past those five buyers, they never get through the funnel to reach the millions of readers who buy books. I get mad every time I think about this! I hear a story every week from authors who say their publisher took their book to the chains and said, “If we publish this, will you buy it?” And a lot of times the chains say no. Or they say, “We’ll only buy it if you modify it.”

You mean they’ll actually have someone read the book and try to censor it?
Maybe. But the worst thing is the publisher then makes a decision based on that. Sometimes they’ll kill the book. Sometimes they’ll go back to the author and say, You’ve got to change it.

That’s incredible!
BILL: It’s absolutely unbelievable. But that’s the kind of power they have and of course they’re going to abuse it. In this whole scenario, everybody’s actions seem perfectly logical but despicable. It happens.

ELAINE: Authors who write mysteries have told me, for example, that sometimes they’ll have a character who’s very successful in a series and the author wants to write a book that doesn’t have that character in it and the publisher will say, “I’m sorry, but our major buyers say they want that character.” So then the author has to decide whether to change publishers or whether to write what the major buyers want.

BILL: “Major buyer” is code for chains. Because I can assure you, nobody ever asks an independent store, “Which character do you like?” I’d be offended if they did!

ELAINE: A few years ago, when the fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie, the chains fell all over themselves to get those books off the shelves while the independents continued to stock them.

BILL: On the positive side, there are a lot of new books that only really break through and get noticed because of the impact of independent stores. Amy Tan is an author who started that way.

How?
BILL: Basically, her books were picked up by the independent stores because they thought, this is a really good book and the publishers decided, yeah, maybe it is. And then they went back to the chains saying, we’re getting a lot of feedback from the market that this is a good book, so the chains picked up the book and started selling it themselves. So it’s not that the chains won’t sell these books, they just may not take a chance on them in the beginning. And the author’s career is finished before it ever gets started. It’s only when the independent stores pick them up that certain books get the kind of groundswell of public reaction that convinces the publishers to convince the chains that they ought to take it. We have people coming to our classes on how to write a book, they meet agents and the next thing we know they’re getting a book published. It’s going backwards up the chain from us! And it’s very gratifying.

This weekend’s author events include Taylor Branch on February 25 at 7pm and Robert Crais on February 26 at 2pm. Jane Fonda will be here in April and Madeleine Albright in May. For more information about Book Passage, call 415/927-0960 or log on to www.bookpassage.com.

PHOTO OF ELAINE AND BILL PETROCELLI BY RORY MCNAMARA.

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