Here is a very interest article about the closing of Detroit's oldest bookstore. Let me know if you enjoyed the article, I love finding different articles to post.
Reading The Last Chapter At Detroit's Oldest Bookstore
by John Carlisle, Detroit Free Press
William Foulkes looked out the window of his store and watched the world passing by.
It was September, a new school year had begun, and college students outside walked past in twos and threes, looking down at their cell phones as they moved.
Foulkes was alone inside, standing behind the counter of the Big Bookstore, which sits on the northern edge of what’s now called Midtown, right by Wayne State University. It’s the oldest continually operating bookstore in the city. It’s one of the last independent bookstores left in the region. And after 80 years or so, it’s about to close for good.
“I go through stages, between sad and resigned,” Foulkes said. “I’ve gotten so used to over the years not having any control over the fate of things. It’s just another thing. But I saw it coming.”
A girl going past stopped for a second, looked up at the faded sign on the building, peered into the dark doorway and kept moving.
Foulkes hustled to the front window, standing next to the 1980s landline desk phone, by the open front door with the “No Smoking” sign still on it, looking hopefully to see whether she might come back. “I don’t know what that was just now, but she was looking like, ‘Maybe I should go in?’” he said.
Students don’t usually shop here, though. If they need books for school, they can get them online or at the Barnes & Noble just down the street, where they can also buy accessories for their phones, cords for their computers, backpacks and clothes, a few dozen kinds of coffee or tea, even a breakfast quiche.
“I’m more of a neighborhood bookstore, and it’s different than what you’re supposed to be these days, which is a Barnes and Noble corporate,” Foulkes said. “Even if you’re not corporate you’re supposed to look and feel like it.”
He certainly doesn’t. Foulkes is eccentric and bookish, a 60-year-old with a long, white beard who has never driven a car, doesn’t own a credit card and only recently got a cell phone at the insistence of a family member.
Everyone thinks he owns the place because he’s the only one who works here, and because the store’s become so much like him in all those years in its reluctance to modernize.
There’s no coffee served here, no Wi-Fi, no computers, no website like the chain bookstores have. The stock is catalogued only in his head. All sales are cash only, and are recorded by hand on a ruled paper ledger.
There are those who still find charm in places like this. But many people simply do the bulk of their reading nowadays on their computers or mobile devices. Although the Big Bookstore has survived the changes in people’s reading habits and the transformation of its neighborhood, these kinds of places have long been a dying breed. And this one’s near the end.
“You get to a point when you’re in hospice and you know you’re not getting out,” said John King, the store’s owner. “The bookstore is basically in hospice.”
The final chapter
King has operated bookstores in Detroit since 1971. “I liked reading,” said King, 66. “I like the way the books held knowledge for everyone. The more you read, the smarter you became, so it was a nicer way of going through life.”
He’s best known in the area for his world-famous, four-story, used and rare bookstore just west of downtown, which has more than a million books and has defied the downturn in bookstores by striving to be the biggest and best at simply selling books.
“We started out as a used book store, and as we grew we didn’t add a coffee shop, we didn’t add calendars or greeting cards. Our mission was to sell used and rare books from day one,” King said. “And we’re successful 'cause we focus on just that and don’t go on tangents like doughnuts and sandwiches and all this other crap.”
While that main store is iconic, and a smaller John King used bookstore in Ferndale still does fairly well, the Big Bookstore has always been a scruffy, underperforming little brother to the other two.
“Our best years there we made about two grand,” King said. “And that included the rent income from a couple of tenants, too.”
The Big Bookstore has been around since the 1930s, in different locations near Wayne State but always with the same name. King bought the store in the late '70s and relocated it to an old Firestone station at the edge of the Cass Corridor, but kept the name to honor its longevity.
Not long after, Foulkes walked in, learned there was a job opening and left another bookstore to come work in this one, where he’d been hanging out a lot anyway. He has been in charge of it most of the time since.
Back then there were still some vestiges of the old Cass Corridor, the city’s longtime home to artists, writers and musicians who shared neighborhood space with the skid-row population of transients, drunks, prostitutes and pimps.
But the area was rechristened as Midtown, the university began expanding its footprint and incorporating more of the neighborhood, the landlords raised the rents of the area’s Victorian apartments in response, and a new wave of younger people began moving in, edging out the older residents.
Gone were the hippies and poets who liked having a place where you could buy a Kerouac novel or a collection of Rimbaud poems for a buck. Now came young professionals and students who downloaded books to their tablets and grew up knowing bookstores as places that served pumpkin spice lattes and muffins. “It’s totally changed,” Foulkes said of the area.
Meanwhile, the bookstore didn’t change at all. Nor did Foulkes.
“Bill is like from the ‘60s, so he never updated,” King said. “He just never transitioned to the modern age as we know it now. He’s a throwback, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But he recently just got a cell phone and he was bragging how he just sent his first text, and this was a couple weeks ago. Time has passed him and passed the store by.”
“I think I’m more ‘70s,” Foulkes said. “I’m too cynical to be ‘60s.”
Foulkes grew up in Detroit, moved with his parents to Sterling Heights and for much of his life took the bus downtown most days to work at one bookstore or another. He has always loved books. “It’s words,” he said. “Mom told me when I was a little kid I’d have her read Shakespeare to me, ‘cause I loved the sound of the words.”
Nowadays the store draws mostly collectors, connoisseurs and those who still prefer the feel of a book in their hands to one on an illuminated screen.
Here they can find the Iliad of Homer, the short stories of Mark Twain, the complete works of the Bronte sisters, all arrayed on wood shelves that sag under years of weight and smell of musty pages. There are outdated history books here presenting the past through the eyes of different eras, old magazines featuring yesterday’s news, and a collection of vintage science fiction paperbacks that aren’t so fictional anymore. And most cost just a buck or two.
As the neighborhood gentrified over the last decade or so, the offers King was getting for the property kept escalating, and finally became impossible to ignore. A deal hasn’t yet been signed, but it’s coming soon. His announcement of the impending closing was fairly blunt in its explanation.
“The store, sadly, became an anachronism and deteriorated to an almost embarrassing state,” King said earlier this summer. He didn’t take out a newspaper ad or distribute flyers to announce it. Fittingly or ironically, he thought the best way to get the word out these days about the demise of an old-fashioned bookstore was to post the news on Instagram.
But even though the store has become out of place in its own neighborhood, which lately has seen new development skyrocket, King still had doubts about closing it.
“I wake up sometimes in the middle of the night thinking, ‘Why am I doing this? Why am I killing off what used to be a landmark store in Detroit?’" he said. “But at this point now reality has set in. It’s time for it to be put out to pasture.”
Keeping the faith
Foulkes isn’t used to change.
Four times a week, he heads to the bus stop near the home he shared with his parents for years, hops on a bus that takes him to another bus, which takes him near the front of his store where he has worked for decades. He usually brings a magazine to read on the long ride. His fellow passengers have their faces buried in their phones, he notes.
An hour later, he gets to the store, unlocks its weather-cracked wood door and sits behind the counter surrounded by thousands of books just waiting to be read again.
He has gotten more visitors lately, regular customers who've heard that the store is closing and wanted to check on Foulkes, an old neighborhood mainstay. “He’s the last lone wolf of the Cass Corridor,” King said.
Foulkes isn’t used to the attention.
“Everybody’s been like, ‘What’s going to happen to Bill?’ and I’m the kid who was like, ‘Please don’t hit me again’ all through high school,” he said, laughing. “The idea of being this popular hits me really odd.”
In came Joey, a thin scarecrow of a man, drenched in sweat, browned by the sun, walking with a cane. He stood in the doorway, said hi to Foulkes, lingered a minute, bought nothing and left. “He’s got a bad leg or something, so he always comes in to say hi,” Foulkes explained. “It’s a way to stop and rest for a minute.”
In came Mike, a customer since ‘89, who sometimes gives Bill a ride home. “It’s pretty amazing it’s lasted this long, when other places like giants fell,” said Mike Manzoni, 52. “It’s really his personality that’s kept the store going. But what can you do? You can’t really halt these changes.”
Same goes for the neighborhood. The store really belonged to the old Cass Corridor, where vagrants would stagger into the shop asking for matches. Where the drunk who once got thrown out of the store came back to smash the front window with a rock no less than seven times a month in revenge. Where the old neighborhood’s cast of unpublished writers and struggling artists made a point to support a little used bookstore.
“In the old days, when it was working class, there were a lot of people who were single people who would wander the neighborhood and they would read. That was their main thing after work,” King said. “So the bookstore was successful ‘cause the neighborhood could support it. But now it’s all different over there. The customers who used to buy 90-cent pulp mags are now all gone.”
In came a young man and woman, bringing with them their retro bicycles. They wore new backpacks. Fashionable clothes. They’d come from Manhattan because they’d heard how cool Detroit was, and this rough-edged place looked more like the gritty, mythical Detroit they’d heard about. “Are you guys new?” Foulkes actually asked them when they walked in. He’s still not used to newcomers.
“I’ve been getting a lot of that since people have discovered Detroit as a destination,” Foulkes said. “I ask them, ‘Why the hell did you come here?’”
But above all, Foulkes isn’t used to the idea that books could become obsolete, the way other mainstays such as records did.
“It’ll probably be like vinyl is now,” he said. “There’s going to be a niche. But it’s never going to be what it was,” he said. “Bookstores are going to be gone, but you’ll probably go on eBay or Amazon or whatever and get a book that way.”
He doesn’t know when the store’s last day will be, or how he'll spend his days after it closes. There aren’t any openings at the other King stores right now, he’s been told.
But most of his life has been spent around books. Sometimes he even takes the long bus ride down here on Sundays, when the store’s closed, just to be here. Books are what he’s always done.
He’s thought of moving to Spokane to be with his sister, he said. Once the store's gone, there’s not as much tying him here anymore. Maybe it’s a chance for some real change. Maybe not.
“We put Mom in a home, my father died and I’ve missed Sunday dinner,” he said. “And there’s a really good bookstore there.”
The Big Bookstore is at 5911 Cass Ave. in Detroit. Hours are 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday. For more information, call 313-831-8511.
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