At Pillow-Cat Books in the East Village, animals have taken over. While there is only one real animal — that’s the shop’s owner, Cleo Le-Tan’s cat, who is always in the eight-months-old shop — the shelves are stocked with all varieties of species. There’s Elmo from Sesame Street, Snoopy from Peanuts, and of course Peter Rabbit. Le-Tan says the store’s organization makes perfect sense. “We can have any sort of photo book with animals or any novel with an animal, even just a pet,” she added. “So it’s kind of niche, but also broad.”
As the pandemic recedes, Pillow-Cat is an exemplar of a new breed of bookshop that’s hoping to stand out against the elephant in the room: Amazon.
While the number of bookstores in the U.S. had dwindled in recent years, as the e-commerce giant planted its everything-store flag in the center of America’s consciousness, the pandemic spurred on the losses. Even Amazon announced it’s closing all of its 68 bookstores around the US and UK as the business failed to grow beyond 3% of Amazon’s $137 billion in sales last quarter. As of May of last year, 84 bookstores closed their doors around the country as the COVID-19 pandemic enforced stay-at-home orders, according to the American Booksellers Association, ABA.
But bookshops are making a comeback: ABA’s membership increased to 1,701 from 1,635 since May 2020, as reported by the Associated Press. And like Pillow-Cat, they’re popping up in a more niche and unique form, whether it is just animal-related books, selling pickles along with classic titles or the classic bookstore for kids.
New niche bookstores are a response to the standardized online shopping. After the pandemic, people are not only craving the in-person shopping experience, but also the extra community feeling that can come out of it. And what better way than local bookstores to provide them that.
“It’s not an Amazon store, you can tell that it’s not part of a company. Pretty much what you see is reflective of Leigh and also of people who work here,” said Steve Tomori, employee at Sweet Pickle Books. The Lower East Side bookstore feels like a peek into someone’s home as books share the shelves with pickle jars and tchotchkes and the walls are covered with personal pictures of the owner Leigh Altshuler with friends and family. “I think in that aspect, you can tell that it’s fun, friendly, and is part of the experience and something that people resonate with.”
It may be niche but it’s working. Kristen McLean, executive director and industry analyst for NPD/BookScan Books Group, heard from independent booksellers that 2021 was the best year for them in sales. The print market of books has grown for the past two years and ended in 2021 19% above 2019 – marking the best year ever for print books in the US.
“As we reopen from the pandemic, people really want to be back in stores and I think that the bookstores independent industry have spent time during the pandemic to retool,” said McLean. The analyst predicts that book in-store sales will increase this year, as online buying slows down.
Hypatia Luna sees her bookstore for children as a refuge for parents looking to go out and entertain their kids after being in lockdown with them. Parents of a five-year-old themselves, Luna and her husband Jesse Adcock opened Littlest Bookshop in Tucson, Arizona, in January after a two-year delay due to the pandemic. Her 15 years as a teacher and his 20 years of experience in retail wasn’t enough to shake off the nerves of opening up their first business mid-pandemic. But they soon realized that people are craving to head back to bookshops.
“Books are the kind of thing that, especially children’s books, people like to flip through and know that they’re going to get something good for what you’re paying. And you can’t always tell that online,” said Luna.
Bookstore owners share a common passion for books and hope that it will translate to their stores itself. The idea to open up Pillow-Cat Books came up after Le-Tan walked all around New York City and talked with every bookstore owner which ended up with a book A Booklover’s Guide to New York. Two years later, in September of 2021, she opened her own store with a special focus on her other passion.
“I thought all my favorite characters in books are animals, like Snoopy. So, in the end, I was like, ‘oh, that works,’” said Le-Tan. With over 1,000 books, the owner recommends titles for curious customers that come in – sometimes accompanied by their pets – looking for something for their kids or themselves.
As the author Ryan Holiday wrote in a recent Inc. magazine column, independent bookstore owners can’t compete with the amount of books listed by big retailers, but they can offer curation. “If people want a specific book, they’ll buy it on Amazon. They come to a bookstore to discover new books, to experience being in a bookstore,” wrote Holiday. He opened his own bookstore The Painted Porch in Bastrop, Texas last year. The store only sells a limited number of titles and makes new orders by customer requests.
Customers have also helped curate the book collection at Sweet Pickle Books since the very first day. After losing her job in marketing during the pandemic in 2020, Altshuler decided to follow her passion and started collecting books in people’s houses as nonprofit organizations such as Salvation Army and Housing Works, weren’t operating, as she told Publishers Weekly. Her past experience in the Strand Book Store’s marketing department helped her to build a network of people equally passionate about books and willing to donate them. Now, every day at least four people come into the bookstore to give away books, adding up to an inventory of over 1,000 titles, according to the store employee Tomori.
But there is a reason behind this high influx: to every book donation, the bookstore gives back one of its special pickle jars. Altshuler developed the pickle recipe herself and each day produces three types of pickles: spicy, dill and bread & butter. The unusual combination is an ode to the LES history, once known as the pickle district in New York City in the late 19th and early 20th-centuries.
Boxes and shelves piled with books and merchandise that says “New York’s best pickle bookstore” only add to the bookstore’s uniqueness, especially popular in social media. The bookshop has gained news customers from the current trend in TikTok named #BookTok, which has over 43.1 billion views. The videos range from books to store recommendations.
BookTok helped drive book sales up last year and, according to NPD’s McLean, the trend will continue in 2022. The analyst says as the economy opens up, this channel will be important for book retailers to continue to have a connection with their customers.
“One thing we’ve learned from the pandemic is that people still love books, still want books and books are important,” said McLean.
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