Spencer Ruchti in Conversation with Connor Guy

Spencer Ruchti is a bookseller and the author events manager at Third Place Books, where he oversees some 300 readings and other events each year. Moss editor Connor Guy spoke with Ruchti in June about the history of bookselling, literary culture in the Northwest, and the life and work of one of the region’s most consequential but unsung literary figures, the bookseller and former general manager of Seattle’s University Bookstore, Leroy Soper.

To start out, why don’t you tell me a little bit about your job and bookselling? What is a day in the life of a bookseller? What do you like about your job?

For over four years now, I’ve been the author events manager for Third Place Books, a chain of three community bookstores in Seattle. Our flagship store in Lake Forest Park opened in 1998, and was the brainchild of Ron Sher, a real estate developer who was interested in the idea of third spaces—those places between home and work, where you can hang out and you don’t necessarily have to pay to be there. Malls and parks are common examples, as are coffee shops, barbershops, and of course, bookstores. And these spaces are increasingly missing in American society. I’m sitting right now in the Third Place Commons, which was Ron’s quintessential ideal of the third space. There are wide tables and dozens and dozens of chairs. I’ve actually counted the number of chairs in this space, which we use for author events—there are exactly 187. And people don’t just read here, we don’t just host book events. People come here for live music, crocheting clubs, Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, Bible study groups, remote work, all kinds of things. There’s a group of banjo players that jams here on Tuesday evenings.


We host about 300 author events a year across all three of our bookstore locations. And those range from local poets who invite a handful of friends to celebrate a new chapbook to 800-person events with some of the biggest names in literature today. We’ve had everyone from Jodi Picoult to Ocean Vuong here. One of the interesting things about being a bookseller is that you’re often put into rooms with famous people in their respective fields, just because they’ve written a book. One of my first bookselling jobs was at Harvard Book Store in Harvard Square. And two months in, the store had George Saunders on the calendar, one of my favorite authors at that time. And, you know, I’d read him in college, and I wanted to write like him. He was on tour for Lincoln in the Bardo that year, and as part of his book tour, he was inviting booksellers up on stage with him to read different parts, since that book is a polyphonic novel, written in part like a screenplay. So two months into the job, I was invited onto a stage alongside George Saunders. I was just 22. It was difficult not to take an interest in bookselling after that.

Can you talk a little bit about how booksellers fit into the ecosystem of writing, publishing and reading?








Bookselling is interesting because it sits in this nebulous space between art and retail. If you host events like we do, you’re also a part of the performing arts space, and technically in the same market as the local symphony, theater, or the movies for a customer’s evening leisure time. In some ways, working on “the floor,” or as a “frontline bookseller” (as opposed to an administrative role), is a lot like working in retail anywhere else. You’re helping customers, shelving products, navigating a complex inventory system, ringing customers up at the cashier.


The difference is that instead of selling clothes or home goods, you’re selling books, and books are complicated. They’re complicated to organize, they’re complicated to categorize. And a customer’s expectations are different, too. If I walked into a clothing store and said, “This brand put out a pair of shorts in 2007—do you have them in stock?” the clerk would look at me like I was crazy. But that request is totally normal in a bookstore. I’m expected to carry Lolita, a book published 70 years ago, and I’m also expected to carry, or have available within a few days, any title someone hears about on NPR or that a customer’s pastor posted about on Facebook, whether that book was published yesterday or 15 years ago. If I don’t stock it, it’s evidence of my inferiority to online retail, which is a high bar to meet.


Booksellers are some of the only people in the publishing ecosystem who interact directly with readers, which is to say the end consumer, every single day. Editors don’t do that. Publicists do so tangentially. But there is a fervor for certain authors that you can’t really quantify until you meet those readers up close.


These days, many authors have a direct connection to their reader through social media—Goodreads, Substack, Instagram. That wasn’t always the case. But booksellers are also part of that connection—especially good booksellers, who are often active members of their communities and make an effort to understand where readers are coming from and what they’re asking for. It can be very rewarding, and also frustrating, because customers can be unpredictable, or a bookseller’s ability to offer good service is disrupted by forces outside of their control. But there are booksellers, myself included, who take that service seriously.







It sounds like the relationship can ideally go both ways—you’re recommending books to people and giving them ideas, and you’re also hearing from them about what they’re interested in, what their enthusiasms are.








You see this in the trend of self-publishing, for example. Many authors now choose to self-publish, especially in genres like romance, fantasy, science fiction.  Booksellers often find out about these books from readers who will come in and say, “you should stock this, this is going to be a huge deal.” There’s only so much you can learn looking at sales data. With physical retail, if you don’t have the book on the shelf to begin with, you can’t gauge demand until a customer speaks up and asks for it. Customers are really participating in the buying process. There’s just so much out there.








What are some of the challenges facing booksellers today and bookstores in general?








I think the biggest challenge is talent retention. Bookselling is complicated. It requires specific critical thinking skills that don’t always overlap with a passion for reading. If you’re hosting events, it’s labor intensive, and you need a certain social acumen and cultural literacy for the strange case in which you, say, find yourself in a green room with the host of Jeopardy!, which requires a different set of social skills than hosting a Supreme Court Justice, or a popular romance author who’s very online, or a novelist who lives in the neighborhood. The range is exhausting. It’s also, in essence, retail work, and often underpaid. A lot of booksellers will spend maybe six months to two years in the job, but their goal is really grad school or a completely unrelated field. I’ve worked in bookstores on and off since 2017, so about eight years now. And one thing you start to see is that there aren’t a huge number of people who stick with it. Even well-known booksellers, like Paul Yamazaki of City Lights Bookstore, have no idea how to square the modern cost of rent with the minimum-wage vocation of bookselling. At this point, I’m surprised if I come across a bookseller who’s been working for any substantial period of time whose name I don’t recognize. If you look at the long-timers, it’s a small field.







Interesting. When I asked about challenges, I was expecting that you might go straight to the effects of a certain large online retailer.








Well, that’s interesting and I should speak to that as well. In a way, the rise of Amazon and online retail platforms gave bookstores a certain freedom. James Daunt recently pointed out that, because of Amazon, we no longer need to carry a lot of dense or specialized texts—like manuals for how to repair your roof, or whatever. If someone needs that, they can find it on Amazon, or the information is available online. And this gives bookstores more space to use as they see fit. We’re not just selling books. We’re selling the browsing experience as well, to paraphrase Jeff Deutsch from his book, In Praise of Good Bookstores. Survey after survey shows that people go to bookstores because they’re discovering things that they wouldn’t otherwise. They’re visiting bookstores for the enjoyable atmosphere. When e-commerce first disturbed the book market, consumers were dazzled by the convenience. But browsing is intentionally inconvenient. A growing number of readers, including myself, find that inconvenience pleasurable.


In Seattle, people are really proud of their neighborhood bookstores. In Fremont, where I live, people are proud that they live next to Book Larder, which is a wonderful community institution and Seattle’s only cookbook store. I’m proud to live a 10-minute walk from Charlie’s Queer Books, the only trans-owned bookstore in the Northwest.


The other thing that bookstores do that Amazon doesn’t is host events. We provide a place where readers can regularly come together and connect through their shared interests. Connecting with authors and readers is the most rewarding thing I do in this job.








Do you see anything distinct about bookselling in the Northwest?








Absolutely. Before coming out here, I had some experience bookselling in Boston. And one thing I’ve noticed in the Northwest is that people are loyal to their regional authors. Jess Walter, for example, is a superstar here. He’s obviously known across the country—but the crowds he draws in Spokane are crazy. A Spokane brewery just made a beer with his face on it.


It’s similar with others. Like Jonathan Evison—every time he publishes a book, he goes and visits almost every bookstore he can in the region. In our neighborhood, people are proud of the fact that Octavia Butler lived here in Lake Forest Park from 1999 until her death in 2006. We named a street after her. I’m sitting in front of our brand-new Octavia Butler mural at Third Place Books, designed by our in-house graphic designer Stephen Crowe. That’s the kind of thing that feels unique to the Pacific Northwest.


My first experience bookselling in the region was at a bookstore called Broadway Books in Portland, run by these two wonderful women, Kim Bissell and Sally McPherson. This was during the pandemic, and the front door was locked during business hours because we weren’t letting people into the store. My job was to answer the door when customers came knocking, and hand over their pre-orders from a hold shelf. I did that for a few months. It was about as exciting as it sounds. But what was interesting to me was that we were still maintaining the front tables with the latest releases, even though customers weren’t browsing. What bookstores choose to put on these tables is usually indicative of where their priorities lie—you can walk into a store and immediately understand, “this is an academic bookstore,” or “this is a commercial bookstore.” And even during the pandemic, with no one in the store, Sally and Kim had the most interesting front tables. Many authors I didn’t recognize. Eventually I figured out that it was because they were focused on authors from Oregon or Washington, some from the neighborhood, and a lot of them I didn’t know yet.  It really informed this idea that, as a bookstore, you don’t just have an obligation to promote good or popular writing. You also have an obligation to take care of your neighbors.








I know you’ve taken an interest in the life of Leroy Soper. Can you tell me a little about who he was and how you started learning about him?








I first became interested in Lee Soper because of a book I found. We sell both new and used books at Third Place, and every so often a book about the history of publishing will come across our used book counter. One day someone brought in a two-volume set called Portrait of a Publisher, 1915-1965, which is a collection of writings meant to tell the story of Alfred Knopf, the publishing house, in celebration of its 50th anniversary. It reflects a kind of old-fashioned, stately conception of what a publisher does and represents. I sent a picture of the books to our Knopf sales rep, Katie Mehan, basically saying, “I thought this was interesting, and it made me think of you.” It turned out she had a copy herself, which had been given to her by a bookseller named Leroy Soper. She explained that Lee had for many years been the face of University Bookstore here in Seattle. Katie wrote about this person in such glowing terms, and I’d never heard of him. So I found his papers in the University of Washington Libraries’ Special Collections, six boxes worth of files. The height of his career took place in the 60s and the 70s; he retired in 1993, and he passed away somewhat recently, in 2016. But over the course of his lifetime, he contributed to Northwest literary culture in so many ways. Early on, he worked for Walla Walla Bookshop, and then moved to University Bookstore in Seattle, working there for a stint of 10 years, from 1959 to 1969.


After that, he left University Bookstore and started his own book wholesaler, Raymar Northwest Book Company in Bellevue, which distributed books across the Northwest. For context, wholesalers buy books in bulk from publishers and store them in warehouses for distribution to retailers. They give bookstores another option when they need a certain title quickly, when the nearest publisher warehouse carrying the same title might be as far away as Reno. If I sell out of, say, There, There by Tommy Orange, I basically have two options. I can order directly from the publisher, where I can get a better discount—but that can take up to two weeks sometimes, depending on when you order, which is a long time to not have a copy of There, There on the shelf. Or I can order from a wholesaler like Ingram, which has a number of warehouses across the country, including one nearby in Roseburg, Oregon. The discount isn’t as favorable, but instead of waiting two weeks, I can get that same book in two days. Today there are very few book wholesalers thanks to corporate consolidation and Amazon’s role as what might be seen as a de facto direct-to-consumer wholesaler.


Lee eventually returned to University Bookstore after Raymar was acquired by Ingram, which is when he really made his name. There are many kinds of booksellers, and different degrees of commitment to this line of work, which is to be expected, but Lee Soper was something rare. There are articles about Lee’s tenure at University Bookstore, praising his management, and particularly his commitment to highlighting scholarly books alongside trade books. This is more common today at university-adjacent bookstores, but was seen as strange and remarkable at the time.


Another thing you can follow in his archives are his deep, personal relationships with authors and editors. There’s correspondence with writers like Tom Robbins, Ivan Doig, Gary Larson—all these titans of Northwest literature. And these weren’t passing or insignificant connections. Ivan Doig is inviting Lee over to dinner, they knew each other’s spouses and kids. Especially today, it’s a rare thing for booksellers to have intimate relationships with authors, almost like the kind of relationship that editors have with their writers. This interested me, the idea that a bookseller would take it upon himself not only to help put books in peoples’ hands, but also to act as a steward of good writing, to develop these relationships with writers, read their early drafts, and provide feedback on new works. Today, booksellers aren’t taken seriously as real participants in either the business or creative side of book production. Lee showed me an old model that challenged that bias.








It’s interesting to think about how his business smarts and his creative contributions might have intersected and what each, or both together, did for the literary community here.








Yeah. And in 1960 he was also at least partly responsible for the founding of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, our regional trade association, which Third Place and most other bookstores in the Northwest belong to. And then towards the end of his career and even after his retirement, he was on many book award panels. He was on the advisory board for the University of Washington Press.








You’ve been getting into this a little already, but how would you characterize the changes that have taken place in bookselling, and in literary culture more broadly, since Soper’s time? Both in the Northwest and beyond?








For one thing, publishing has become more centralized in New York. So that’s part of it. But the relationship between authors and readers has changed, too. It used to be more obvious how booksellers served as a connection between authors and their readers; authors weren’t able to really facilitate those relationships themselves. Today we almost take for granted that authors can have a direct connection with their readers at all times. It can be unhealthy for a lot of authors to sacrifice the quality of their work for the quality of their platform, but for others, especially first-time authors, it can be a way of showing people like agents and publishers that they really have a following. Obviously, bookstores are still vital for many reasons, especially discovery. They are places where people encounter new books and new ideas, and ideally over the years bookstores develop a sense of trust with certain readers. That’s as true today as it was in Lee Soper’s day, even if there are fewer readers walking into bookstores overall.








Before we wrap up, I want to talk a little bit more about the Northwest. At Moss, we’re very interested in thinking about how place and community figure in creative work. We already covered what makes bookselling in the Northwest distinct, but do you have any ideas about the region’s literary culture in general, and what sets this place apart?








I think one thing that’s distinctive is the important role that indigenous communities and writers play in the literary culture here. Vi Hilbert was the famous Lushootseed teacher and is the great grandmother of a Coast Salish author, Sasha taqʷšəblu Lapointe, who lives in Tacoma and has published several great books. Hilbert was part of a group that produced what is surely the only Lushootseed dictionary still in print, which is a huge though underrecognized part of the region’s literary legacy. There’s a great biography of Hilbert by Janet Yoder that talks about the incredible hurdles she overcame to preserve the Lushootseed language and make it an academic field of study.


The Northwest also has sometimes been seen as an escape for writers looking to flee the concentrated city culture of the East Coast. It’s a very attractive place to live in many ways. The music culture has also been a draw. And so you have a lot of people who flock to the Northwest from other places as transplants, in many cases because of culture.








This is something I think about a lot. And it’s curious to me that the region’s rise to cultural prominence has happened kind of alongside but also in spite of its economic rise, with the steady expansion of the tech companies. You have people coming here for culture and you have people coming here for tech jobs, but how much overlap is there, really, between those two groups? In the 90s as Microsoft was booming, so was the music culture. And in the early and mid 2010s, as Amazon was expanding at a kind of unthinkable speed, Seattle applied for and received the UNESCO “City of Literature” designation. But I don’t think these tech companies are really contributing to the creative energy. And they do harm, too. When you’re able to sell books online at a steep discount, for example, bookstores and publishers take a hit, especially local ones—which hurts other regional literary institutions, and most of all writers. I don’t really have a grand unifying theory about this, but it’s curious to me. How do you reckon with it?








You know, it’s rumored Jeff Bezos attended at least one Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association tradeshow in 1993 when he was about to launch Amazon, and received advice from professional booksellers who couldn’t fathom why or how anyone would want to purchase a book—or any product—from a website. When I moved here, I noticed book people in Seattle have a unique relationship to Amazon. In some bookstores, saying “Amazon” out loud is taboo, a cursed word, in a way that I now find a little naïve. But the fact of Amazon is more normalized here because Seattle booksellers have lived with the rise of the company. Amazon employees are our customers—they’re largely clueless to this historic divide between bookstores and the world’s largest online retailer. Amazon employees with writing aspirations have also gone on to publish memoirs—which we sell.


Bookstores have pivoted to other things and provide services that Amazon can’t and never will. In that way, good booksellers don’t need to think about Amazon. Some of the most dedicated members of our literary community have history with Amazon—because, for a while, in the early days, Amazon was one of the only places where a person with a lot of literary knowledge and an interest in books could go and get a decent salary outside of New York. One of the best booksellers in Seattle is Tom Nissley, who runs Phinney Books. And Tom worked at Amazon for nearly a decade. There are others who followed a similar trajectory.


In any history you read of the company—like Dana Mattioli’s or Brad Stone’s—books, as a market category, are really only of interest until the second or third chapter. After that, the book market is small cookies compared to Amazon’s aggressive expansion into web services, groceries, third-party seller services. Books are almost immediately forgotten. But independent bookstores collectively adapted and survived Amazon’s onslaught, in a way that national chains like Toys “R” Us, Borders, Waldenbooks, and Sears did not. Bookstores are nimble because of their independence. Our neighbors don’t want to live without us.

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