For the second installment of our ongoing series of interviews, Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travelled to Portland, Oregon, to speak with Michael Powell, owner of Powell's Books.
The "City of Books," as the four-story flagship store in Portland, Oregon, is known, occupies an entire city block, and carries more than one million books.
The sixty-eight-thousand-square-foot space is divided into nine color-coded rooms, which together house more than 3,500 sections. "From the moment you walk in," writes Chamberlin, "it feels as if you could find anything there."
"People want a calm background for the books," Michael Powell says. "Our shelves are about twelve feet high. You live in these little alleys, and there’s a kind of cozy feel in that that makes it comfortable for customers. And you can sit on the floor, you know, you can spill something on the floor. It’s not a big disaster."
When the newer sections of the store were built more than a decade ago, the concrete floors were left bare because the industrial feel not only complemented the plain, pine bookcases but also added to the laid-back atmosphere.
Among the 3,500 sections within the main store, one is devoted to literary journals and books published by small presses.
"We started as a used books company. My dad introduced new books in the late seventies, and his mantra was two of everything and three of nothing," Michael Powell says. "It's a substantial part of our business. In dollars, roughly 50 percent of our total business is new books, about 40 percent is used books, and then 10 percent is magazines, cards, and sidelines."
Michael Powell is "endlessly curious about the world, about his employees’ ideas, about what his customers want to read, and about innovative ways to do business," Chamberlin writes.
The main warehouse, "which feels like an airplaine hangar but with the sound of jazz floating in the air," Chamberlin writes, processes as many as three thousand online orders daily. And 70 percent of those are single-title orders.
"I think we’re an anchor for the city," Michael Powell says. "That may sound immodest, but somebody’s got to say it. If you have a relative come into town, or a friend come into town, and they say “What is there to do in Portland?” If you name three things, one of them is going to be Powell’s. Because the city’s proud of it. You don’t even have to be a reader—you just want to show it off. Biggest bookstore in America, maybe the biggest in the world... It says something positive about the community—that it supports a store that large—and people like that message."