In terms of timing, I left at the beginning of the discount boom, but there was another factor that was crucial to my decision to exit the book business. I think it is pertinent to the decline in feminist stores. The issue is book prices.
When I started my store in 1973, I actually sold a few paperbacks for 95 cents! Most were under $3.00. New hardbacks were priced at $5.95, $6.95, $7.95 (unless they were art books or deluxe cookbooks). I would say that at that time, one could buy a new hardcover book for the price of a meal in a restaurant, and for less than the cost of a movie ticket. What did long-playing record albums cost in those days? I'm not sure, but I think they were probably about the same as a book.
Today, a hardcover book costs twice the price of a comparable restaurant meal, three times the cost of a movie ticket. How can this situation not have a terrible effect on the feminist book business? It's no wonder that feminist bookselling and bookstores are barely hanging on. Even if the dollars spent to buy such books remain constant, only half as many volumes could be purchased by a dedicated reader today.
Whereas gay men demographically have more disposable income than straights, gay women are at the bottom of the economic ladder; women as a group have less disposable income than men, and household income hasn't increased in twenty years -- it now takes two working adults to sustain a family that one breadwinner could provide for in the past.
The background on this price lurch includes a change in the tax code that occurred, I believe, in the late 1970s. Until then, according to the sales reps who called on my bookstore, publishers were not taxed on their inventory of warehoused books. Random House had Modern Library books from the 1930's still priced at $3.95 sitting in warehouses on Long Island. There was no penalty to owning them, except the warehouse overhead. The backlists of previously published books were phenomenal!
But when those marvelous repositories of books became a tax liability -- I mean in the sense that publishers paid tax on their retail value annually -- there went the backlist. Within about two years the available titles had dwindled greatly. And the price of a new book doubled
overnight. There may have been other external factors in that price increase, but it certainly happened in the contxt of the new tax situation. I believed the price increase was a way to increase current cash flow to offset the cost of holding older books that remained, amazingly, priced at their original levels for the most part.
One year when I took inventory on January 1, I had twice as many dollars on the shelves as a year before, but not more books. I began to cut out sections that sold more slowly and were fairly pricy. The worst moment for me was the year I decided I had to eliminate the biography section. It was so important in a feminist store.
Competition from discounters hurt because I depended on the Christmas best-seller to underwrite the slower sellers that it mattered to have. But I enjoyed loyal customers and do not think that discounting would have caused me to leave the business. By the way, according to Dun & Bradstreet business reports that I purchased, my store was unusually productive in sales revenues per employee, and was typical of successful bookstores in Houston in terms of numbers of customers and sales revenues.
I cannot understand why books shot up to such a high multiple of their 1970 prices when other "entertainments" did not. There was a good article in the New York Times in December, 2001 about the fact that publishers in general, the big trade publishers, are now facing a slowdown in sales caused by....high prices. The more vulnerable feminist sector simply hurt sooner, I think.
I was buddies with June Arnold and Parke (Patty) Bowman, who ran Daughters Inc. press, and remember a few comments they made about obstacles they faced. They were able to afford big ads in the New York Times Book Review in their early days; later that became too expensive. An unexpected problem they faced had to do with their inability to build up working capital to support publishing more titles or doing more promotion, despite receiving a fair amount of critical success and book sales.
As soon as someone they published had the opportunity to go to a "Madison Avenue" publisher they would do so, which meant that Daughters never could develop the financial base that a mix of new and well-known authors might have yielded. In effect they were always starting over, compared to the mainstream publishers who were able to count on best-sellers from their most popular authors to help finance untried authors, as well as advertising for all. June and Parke understood why their authors longed to publish at major houses, but it was frustrating because it effectively shut off the flow of capital that could have strengthened Daughters as a resource for feminist writers. I would say that's a chronic problem for stigmatized communities: the most successful representatives are eager to escape from the location of the people for whom they speak.
MaryRoss Taylor (www.artwomen.org)
Abstract of the New York Times article about book prices
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