Adam Robinson interviews Woodland Pattern
A little while ago, we encouraged all Harriet readers to drop by Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee, the famed bookstore and community center that has been in dire straits recently, due to "federal budget cutting, the general economic condition and now the current Wisconsin State Budget all but eliminating the Wisconsin Arts Board and cutting fiscal sources for the arts." Adam Robinson gets straight answers in his interview with shop employee and Mitzvah Chaps proprietor Robert Baumann over at HTMLGIANT. One, for instance, hits hard:
Do you have any idea about what sort of stuff is selling the best? I mean, like, do you think you sell more old stuff or new stuff?
Well, no one really buys anything. The people who work here buy stuff, and there are a few regular customers that drop some good blingy, but it’s generally slim.
But there's more to be said about how a bookstore can profit:
How many books are there? What do you carry?
In terms of the bookstore, we’ve got an inventory of ~15,000 books, and the vast majority of those–I’d say over 10,000–are small press and DIY. Many of the rest of them are University presses. For years in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, you could find new copies–first editions even–of amazing books at their original ‘70s and ‘80s prices. Unless we get a large number of copies of a book for an event or something and then don’t sell them, we don’t ever return anything, which means that we’ve created quite an archive over the years. (Lately, we’ve culled some of our rarer books and placed them in a special section, repriced them, etc. But there are still some gems to be found.) That’s the benefit of being a non-profit, an organization that’s much much bigger than just the bookstore: we don’t (and can’t) rely fully on bookstore sales–we’re nowhere close to doing that; instead, the bookstore can focus on being a resource for writers and fans of great lit.
Our primary focus is poetry and small press stuff in general. I don’t know if this is weird, but at any given time there’s a better chance that you’d find something like The Drunk Sonnets by Daniel Bailey on the shelves than something like Shakespeare’s sonnets, because you can get the latter at pretty much any bookstore, used or new, so we don’t make it a priority when stocking our shelves. Conversely, we’ve got pretty much full lines of stuff from Wave, Octopus, Flood Editions, Ugly Duckling, FC2, Gray Wolf, Fence, Dalkey Archive, etc.–even Publishing Genius (thanks for your generosity there) and Magic Helicopter. :) That’s not to say that we don’t have stuff on hand from Norton or Penguin or whatever–we stock great poetry no matter the publisher, we just identify with the little guys. As a reference point, I’d say that the bookstore is about 50% of the AWP bookfair–but it’s static, of course. Imagine having that in your backyard, on a daily basis, and that’s what we have here in Milwaukee.
And then there's that chapbook section. The photo above is only about one-third of the collection, in addition to fine press and rare materials, says Baumann:
Do you have a database of all these books? It seems like there’s a market for these chapbooks, and in some cases WP might have the last remaining copies. But only people in Milwaukee can see them. That’s kind of beautiful, I think. Or, but, do you ever sell anything online?
We have some stuff online at abebooks.com, some of our rarer stuff that we’ve repriced, but it’s not been a great investment for us–not to say anything bad about ABE. But in the store, every book we have is in a database, yes, and while it’s a bit of an outdated system, we can’t really afford to upgrade at this point. It would be a massive undertaking considering that so many of our titles don’t have ISBN’s let alone barcodes that can be scanned for easy database entry, like the Syoji book. We don’t even have a barcode scanner; when someone purchases a book we have to look up the books by title or author and then select the book. It’s comical, especially if someone pays by credit card: then the whole store is filled with the clacking of ancient machine, the thunder of the abacus clapping against the tele-epoch.
I think we have fantasies about getting everything online, because it would be a nice source of income for us, but it’s also nice to know that people in the Milwaukee area (or people who visit us when they’re in town) have access to some things that no one else does–sort of draws attention to objects-in-context. That said, if there’s something you’re looking for, people can call us or email us and ask. If you live out of state we don’t charge tax and our shipping fees are very reasonable, haha.
Has anyone ever called and asked for, like, a chapbook from Bronze Skull Press, and you were like, “Oh yeah no problem?”
Stuff like that has happened yes. People have been like, “Wow, I didn’t think there was any chance . . .” Back when I was the bookstore guy between 2003-2007, I used to look forward to Roberto Harrison bringing in those Bronze Skull chaps–they were always hot off the press.
Woodland Pattern also hosts events, film screenings, community workshops and art camps for kids. They've generally got a table at various area festivals, are invested in the Native American lit community, and host an annual poetry marathon reading. For more photos of the shop and to learn more, read the full interview here.