A few weeks before Thanksgiving, in the mountain resort town of Estes Park, Colo., Paula Steige formally celebrated the 75th year of her family-owned bookstore. The town's mayor even stopped by Macdonald Bookshop to surprise her with a proclamation honoring her for the 75 years her family has served the community: four generations of Macdonald women have run the store, in the same location.

The family business wasn't originally a bookstore. After newly arrived J. Edward Macdonald purchased his small log cabin in Estes Park in 1908, he opened a hardware and general store next door in which there was a small corner of books for sale. When he retired from the general store, his wife, Jessica—Steige's grandmother—opened a bookstore in the parlor of their home. In addition to books, she sold magazines, stationery, school supplies, office supplies, cigars, candy and candles. After her husband's death in 1932, Jessica Macdonald continued to run the store, by then a town fixture, until her death in 1957. Ownership then passed to her daughter Louise; upon her death in 1971, her daughter, Paula, took over full-time management of the shop.

Steige attributes the store's longevity to several rather basic factors. "There's no big huge competition; our town is 45 miles from the nearest big chains," she told PW. "Also, we make money in the summer, because that's the big tourist season. Sometimes we've had competition, but they always come and go because they don't understand how tough the winter is." She added that her parents had the foresight to own their buildings and property, so there is no rent to be paid. Another important factor is that the community is a close-knit one. "We survive because we are all loyal to each other."

Not that things haven't changed over the years. In the early years, Steige said, the store was open year-round until her grandmother became elderly; from 1940 to 1976, it was open only in the summer. It didn't operate full-time until after Steige retired from teaching in 1976. "When my mother was running the store, I remember she would order a book and it would take three weeks to arrive from Denver," she said. "And sometimes we'd go to the warehouse and pick out the books ourselves."

In the summertime, she said, the town fills with 50,000 to 60,000 visitors; the winter population is about 9,000—plus a handful of weekend visitors.

Macdonald Bookshop has always been a general bookstore, with an emphasis on Western history, Native-American history and nature—"Hiking, bird identification, all the things people come to Rocky Mountain National Park for," explained Steige, who said she stocks between 15,000 and 18,000 titles, with the wider selection in the summer. She knows what customers want. "We haven't had to change our focus; we don't need to get the latest computer titles, and we don't need to keep up in the same way a metropolitan store does."

Community Ties

A catastrophe in 1982 drew the community closer. On July 15, at the height of the store's busy season, a nearby dam at Lawn Lake collapsed; the resulting flood devastated the book shop, which sits on the bank of the river downstream of the dam. Four feet of water destroyed two-thirds of the inventory. With the community's help, the store reopened 18 days later.

"We had a totally empty store," Steige explained. "We had to rebuild part of the foundation and tear out all the floor joists and replace the floor. We had 118 volunteers who helped with the painting, hauling, cleaning, and then unpacked the new merchandise and shelved it. I only had to hire a contractor and his small crew—he engineered the help of the volunteers. Our community always comes together."

But Steige even considered the flood "a blessing in disguise—we needed the renovations anyway, as it was an old house, built in 1907. We never thought about anything but getting back up and moving on."

No Events

One of the things that Steige does not do in her bookstore is author events. Because the store is actually an old house with storage upstairs, the selling area is only 1,100 square feet. Plus, the audience tends to be elusive. Steige explained, "It's hard to have events here; there's only a small number of locally based customers here, and the visitors are usually here only for three days at a time, so it's hard to capture them." Instead, the store focuses on community visibility and cooperation, such as sponsorship and making donations to the library and the hospitals. On the rare occasions when the store does have an event, she said, "We send a mailing to invite people, rent a room and have a slide show."

And yes, there is a fourth generation of Macdonald bookselling women: Steige's daughter, Stacia, previously Steige's buyer for stationery, now runs the store next door, Macdonald Papeterie, which opened in 1991. "When it got too crowded here," Steige said, "we built a building next door, and my daughter now has 3,000 square feet of space where she sells journals, pens, art books and art supplies." Jessica Macdonald would no doubt be proud.