New Mexico may seem like one of those states lost in time,” said Kay Marcotte, sales rep for the University of New Mexico Press and former director of marketing for Barnes & Noble in New York, “but there are a lot of freethinkers here, a lot of smart people, and consequently, a lot of booksellers per capita.”
Indeed, New Mexico, with 1.9 million people and 45 bookstores and 50 big-box retailers, is in the top third of all states in per capita bookstores. Most of those bookstores are concentrated in urban areas—including Albuquerque, which contains nearly a third of the population.
Take Santa Fe, for example. Once a pokey desert town and now a high-end tourist destination, its population of 70,000 sustains two Borders superstores, a Hastings, one general trade bookstore—Collected Works (established 1978)—and another indie, Garcia Street Books, which specializes in art and collectible books.
“That's a lot of bookstores for a small city,” said Patricia Nelson, a sales rep for Harvard, MIT and Yale University presses. Her favorite is the bookstore at St. John's College. “It's one of the increasingly rare independent college bookstores,” she said. “Courses [at St. John's] are based on a great books program, so the bookstore is kind of Platonically perfect: there are no mass market police procedurals to be found, but there are books in Greek.”
Among the chain stores, Hastings is most dominant, with 15 locations. It is also the most geographically dispersed, with stores in smaller cities such as Roswell and Alamogordo, as well as five locations in Albuquerque—the largest city in the state (at just over half a million). Barnes & Noble has just three locations—two in Albuquerque and one in Las Cruces—while Borders has a total of seven.
Susan Bachrach, owner of Moby Dickens Bookshop in Taos, said that while her town is too small (around 5,000) for a chain bookstore or any of the big box stores, “When the Borders opened up in Santa Fe, we found our customers were willing to drive the 75 miles to get the discounts. It nearly sunk us.”
Derek Buschman, who manages one of the three Borders locations in Albuquerque, agreed that it is common for customers to drive hours just to shop in a big city. “Our weekend business is bolstered by people from rural parts of the state who stop here as well as at the malls and Costco,” he said.
When book buyers get to Albuquerque, they aren't limited to just the chains. Albuquerque is home to Page One—the largest indie in the state—and Bookworks. Opened in 1984, Bookworks has expanded four times and grown to become perhaps the premier independent in the state. The store, owned by Nancy Rutland, wins praise from veteran Book Travelers West sales rep John Majeska. “Bookworks ranks as one of the two best stores in the Southwest, along with Changing Hands in Tempe” (PW's 2007 Bookseller of the Year) in neighboring Arizona.
Majeska, who has been selling books in the Southwest for more than four decades, was less than sanguine about the state of bookselling in New Mexico, asserting that the number of total bookstores in the region has shrunk dramatically. “It used to take me five weeks to cover both New Mexico and Arizona, but now I do them both in two,” he said.
Lisa Knudsen, executive director of the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association, disagreed with Majeska's pessimism. “We've gotten an impressive number of new members from New Mexico in recent years,” she said. These include Cookin' Books in Chama (opened 2005, pop. 1,100), the Corner Bookstore in Angel Fire (opened 2005, pop. 1,100), Southwest Book Roundup in Capitan (opened 2004, pop. 1,500), Desert Blossom Books and Office Supplies in Silver City (opened 2005, pop. 10,000) and Insight Books (opened 2006) and Books Etc. (opened 2007), both in Ruidoso (pop. 10,000).
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