Stepping into Dark Carnival—which bills itself as a "bookstore of the imagination"—is like stepping into the cluttered library of an extremely eccentric individual. Your eyes don't know where to look first. Shelves of new mystery and science fiction/fantasy books dominate the front of the store, but books are stacked everywhere, on every conceivable surface including much of the floor. And then you start to notice, well, stuff: hundreds of toys and gizmos, from rubber stamps to gargoyles, from robots to plastic dinosaurs, and though kids no doubt love them they are clearly designed to satisfy an adult's inner geek.
In other words, Dark Carnival is a browser's paradise, a place you walk into knowing you'll find something interesting to buy. Located on a small block of other retailers a bit more than a mile from the University of California's flagship campus in Berkeley, the store is full of personality, much of it deriving from Jack Rems, who founded Dark Carnival (at another, much smaller location) in 1976, when he was a physics student at Berkeley.
"People like to shop," Rems told PW. "Make the store interesting, and they'll buy things." That sounds pretty straightforward, but in a world that seems more and more dominated by chain stores and their occasionally numbing uniformity, the experience of walking into a place that does not fit any obvious mold is a liberating one, and one reason the store has thrived.
At Dark Carnival, there are two elements to the idea of "interesting": depth and eclecticism. In the store's 3,400 square feet, Rems stocks about 30,000 titles, about 75% of which are science fiction and fantasy with mysteries accounting for most of the rest. But, Rems noted, "we're not as pigeon-holed as we look." Customers will also find titles from literary novelists like Martin Amis and Paul Auster, crossover writers like gothic horror novelist Patrick McGrath and "adult-friendly" kids' authors like J.K. Rowling and Darren Shan.
Draw of the Obscure
But while Dark Carnival offers plenty of novels for the general reader, the most devoted customers are ardent genre fans. It's the store's wealth of obscure titles and books from small publishers—items that would be virtually impossible to find in a chain store or a general-interest independent bookstore—that represents another draw. "When I'm looking for a book by a lesser-known but truly wonderful writer like Kage Baker or Nancy Kress," said Richard A. Lupoff, the prolific science fiction and mystery writer who lives about a quarter of a mile from the store, "I'm far more likely to find it at Dark Carnival than at any chain store. I have found many truly marvelous books at Dark Carnival, books I didn't even know existed until I stumbled across them at this store." It's a reminder of one the great pleasures of bookstore shopping: that serendipitous moment when you discover a book you hadn't been looking for but suddenly must have.
The diversity of titles reflects the eclecticism of Rems's own taste. The quiet, almost diffident man is serious about books and writing; he said that for him, the main attraction of bookselling was "being involved with good books." When asked about his favorite book in the store, he mentions Robertson Davies's The Deptford Trilogy —not exactly what one would expect in a sci-fi/mystery bookstore. And he relishes and celebrates authors who aren't mainstream (he mentioned "a mystical feminist baseball novel" by Nancy Willard, Things Invisible to See). As the store's tagline articulates, Dark Carnival's "niche" is the imagination, but that's surely the key ingredient in any successful fiction and not solely the purview of the genres. (The name of the store is taken from Ray Bradbury's first collection of short stories.)
Labor of Love
Owning and running Dark Carnival is a labor of love for Rems, but it's also very much a business: "From the beginning, I wanted to create a commercially viable store," he noted. It seems clear that the focus on "imaginative fiction" (a term he prefers to science fiction or fantasy) differentiates Dark Carnival, along with the extensive stock and non-book merchandise. Word of mouth is an important marketing tool, which Rems occasionally promotes with a "human coupon program: If a customer brings in a new customer, both of them get 10% off their purchase price." And events (mostly signings because space in the store is limited) often generate substantial crowds. Poppy Z. Brite, Darren Shan and Howard Hendrix have recently done events at the store, as well as Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize—winning novelist who lives around the corner. There's a Web site (www.darkcarnival.com), which contains information about store events and lists of signed or otherwise collectible books. But the biggest "marketing" strategy is the store itself, along with Rems and his four part-time assistants.
When asked about the issues created by the proliferation of chain stores and the rise of the Internet, Rems said flatly, "You can't compete with them." But he's not interested in excuses and doesn't waste the energy on factors beyond his control. Indeed, he showed little patience for those who bemoan the new world of bookselling. "When I read one of those guys complaining about how the chain stores or the Internet have ruined their business, I think 'your attitude is wrong and that's why you're going out of business,' " he said. "It's not because some big store drove you out."
Dark Carnival is another example of how independent booksellers can thrive, and Rems is optimistic about the future of the store. But then he has a strategy: "If you have a retail business, make it a place people want to go into." Ultimately that's the real reason Dark Carnival has survived for nearly three decades in a crowded and competitive marketplace (in addition to a Barnes & Noble, Berkeley—a city of about 100,000—is home to perhaps a dozen other bookstores): it's a store you want to go into. And when you go in, you'll probably leave with something you didn't expect to buy.
