A deal consummated 25 years ago is still yielding benefits for Henry Zook, longtime owner of Brooklyn's Bookcourt. In 1984, when Bookcourt's first lease expired, Zook took a chance and bought the store, a move that laid the foundation for the future. “We paid market of $160,000 in '84,” Zook says. Then, in 1996, Bookcourt bought the building next door when the owner of the flower shop there retired. “He wanted to sell to me because he knew me, and we paid quite a bit more for that one,” says Zook. Owning his building enabled Zook to expand—and Zook believes ownership is what has allowed the store to survive. If he hadn't owned it, he says, “at this point, I doubt very much we'd be here.” But Bookcourt is more than surviving, it's growing.
Zook's most recent expansion, completed in October 2008, was a long time in the making. “Since 1996, we knew we wanted to go out, it was just a matter of getting the money to do it. That finally became available in '07. It took us a little over a year to get it done,” Zook says. With the new space, what was already a successful shop has become a model for how an indie can prosper during tough times.
“This expansion basically doubled the store, and we had to take on really little debt to do it, thanks to my relatives. Finally the store is the size it should be, given the debt we're carrying,” Zook says. “Honestly, we didn't have a lot of extra stock. We just brought stuff upstairs and spread it out.” The new space has had a noticeable impact on sales. According to Zook, “Our business is up—we're up over the same months a year ago, but we have twice as much space. Had we not had that space, we'd certainly be down.”
The success of Bookcourt is also due to following the top three rules of New York real estate: location, location, location. Brooklyn's Cobble Hill is a great place for a bookstore, and Zook knows it. “We're in a very literary neighborhood, a very affluent, well-educated neighborhood, where people read voraciously. We've got a lot of writers here, and most people are readers, so we have it good in a number of ways,” Zook says.
In undertaking the expansion, Zook capitalized on another of Cobble Hill's major resources: kids. A recent census showed that Bookcourt's zip code has one of the highest per capita populations of children under three, and Zook used his extra space to put the children's books out front. “People had trouble getting strollers in. We moved the kids books from the back to the front, and that's given us a lot more room for the kids books,” Zook says.
Opening Bookcourt in 1981 was Zook's second turn as a bookseller. He began his career in Boston, where he worked at Wordsworth Books in Harvard Square. Zook came to New York in 1979 , working in the advertising department of St. Martin's. By 1981, he wanted to get back into bookselling, and opened Bookcourt. The original store was 600 square feet. Now, after the expansion, Bookcourt is 3,300 square feet.
Having a firm niche as the community bookstore has allowed Zook to blunt the worst impact from Amazon and other online retailers. He isn't anticipating the printed book to die anytime soon and even believes e-books might help his business. “One of the big advantages of a download is, it's a lot less expensive than a hardcover, which gives publishers motive to skip hardcovers and just do paperbacks to level the playing field with e-books,” he theorizes. That would be fine with Zook, since he has to discount hardcovers to keep up with competition, and makes more money on paperbacks, selling a lot more of them.
Bookcourt is still a family business. Zook runs it with his wife, Mary (they're now separated, but, said Zook, still “work as family”), and his son, Zack. He's confident about the future. “I don't see books disappearing anytime soon,” he says.
|
