Maggie Galehouse visits
Becker’s Books
Tucked away at a small table between SEX
and AMERICANA, Ann Becker and I are munching on chicken sandwiches and
talking shop.
The shop we're talking is Becker's Books.
The bookstore, which sells used books, opened in 1993 and went online two years
later. SEX and AMERICANA are just two of the 60 categories in this maze of a
place with as many nooks and narrow, twisty alleys as a street in Morocco. Becker and her husband, Dan, own the Spring Branch store, and the blood and
sweat they've poured into it is apparent. It's in the terrazzo floors, the
hand-wrought wooden bookshelves, the brick patio that
wraps around the side and back of the house-turned-bookstore.
And it's in the books. An
explosion of books. Stacked on shelves, resting in
boxes, piled on chairs.
The store holds 90,000 volumes, but the Beckers own about 400,000 titles in all, plus two
warehouses to store them. Plenty for the couple and a handful
of staffers to manage.
Poking around before lunch, I got waylaid
in the magazine section and leafed through an issue of Movie Stars from
December 1964. It introduced TV's hottest new men: David McCallum of The
Man From U.N.C.L.E. and a baby-faced Ryan O'Neal from Peyton Place
Dear God.
I also found a clock radio on a low shelf
playing '80s music and blinking the wrong time. This is why I love
used bookstores.
At lunch, I screw up the courage to ask my
gracious hostess: "How do you make any money?" With visions of
e-readers dancing in my head, I look down at my pickle and pick up another
potato chip.
"We ship about 1,500 books out of here
each month," Becker says, matter-of-factly. "About 70 percent of our
sales are online."
Still, postage can be a killer - it
consumes one-third of the store's operating costs each year, she says.
Becker would love to increase in-store
traffic. "If you come in on your birthday, we'll give you a free
book," she says. "We're like Baskin & Robbins."
When a nearby bookstore chain ran out of
some Shakespeare plays, a slew of Memorial High students came to Becker's Books
to buy them. Stratford High students came looking for Of Mice and Men for
the same reason.
And while Becker and I were eating lunch,
she excused herself to help a local math professor who scours used bookstores
for old math books. He pulls problems and equations from these old books, in
part because students cannot Google the answers.
Becker believes that no one in her lifetime
should worry about the death of the bound book. Not going to happen.
She still marvels at the thought and care
that went into each book she sells.
"Everything in here," she says,
gesturing to the floor-to-ceiling stacks, "was inside someone's mind at
some point in time."
Both Ann and her husband have written
books. She compiled and edited Houston: 1860-1900, a collection of
vintage images of the city. Dan Becker co-authored, with Ann Malone, Around LaPorte,
which includes images from 1892 to 1950.
Online, readers can find Becker's Books at houstonbooks.com
and texasbooks.net, domain names Ann Becker bought year ago. ("My husband
is the curator," she explains. "My job has been to be up to speed on
Internet business.") Of course, the couple also sell
books through Amazon.com, Alibris.com, AbeBooks.com, and other sites.
Like any used bookstore, Becker's Books is
an intimate, personal space.
When the Beckers were
building out the shop in the 1990s, they often worked late. Their two children
would fall asleep in a corner chair or on the long ramp that leads to the back
of the shop.
"We'd go back to work at night and
bring their pillows and blankets," Becker explains.
There's a big back room where the Beckers hold the annual staff Christmas party. Reading groups
have met at the store. And two couples got married in the back garden.
Near the register up front, three black and
white photos of women are on display: Ann Becker's grandmother,
great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother.
"Next time you come, I'll show you a
photo of my daughter," she tells me. "She has her great-grandmother's face."