Article published in The Easley Progress, "Independent Bookstores Navigate Local Rent Landscapes"

JUNE 2018 — I supplied a free version of the story below:

PENDLETON, SC — A customer walks into The Pendleton Bookshop with a to-go coffee. “Hey, Dad!” says owner Amy Albright. The historic building—once a general store from 1850 to 1859—is now a cozy, neatly organized shop. An antique safe, its designs faint but colorful, stands in the corner. Amy’s father hands her the coffee with a familiar smile.

Amy spent years dreaming of opening her own bookshop. In November 2021, during the pandemic, that dream became reality.

“Someone I had shared my dream with told me that this space, owned by the Pendleton District Commission, was becoming available,” Amy said. “They’ve owned the building since the 1960s, and they were looking for a tenant willing to work with a small research library down here.”

Now, the building includes a study area and archives associated with Lake Hartwell Country, an upstairs collaboration with Kimberly Huddleston, and wooden bookshelves reminiscent of Belle’s in Beauty and the Beast. Amy spent months working with a local lawyer to negotiate a unique rental agreement—an early challenge of small business ownership.

A few miles away and a town over in Central, SC, Samantha Wood is on her computer doing any number of tasks. Sometimes she checks email, looking at promotional materials for books. Other times, its catalogues.

“There's literally thousands of releases every week,” Samantha said. “And so we read the catalog, we read the magazine that comes out, we read the emails that we get from hundreds of different publishers to see really what's going to be something that our customers would like and that we think our customers would want. And so there's a lot of back-end work on actually choosing what goes into the bookstore and what kind of things that we think that our customers would like. And that's something I've really learned over the past three years of doing it day in and day out.”

Like Amy, Samantha selects every book in the shop but unlike Amy, hers is an independent children’s bookshop, one of the only in the state, with another outside of Charleston. Recently, Samantha’s view has changed on the lawn outside. Paying the bills had not been easy for her and her sister who opened up the book shop during the pandemic, but since the closure of a popular restaurant next door and the road infrastructure of train tracks sandwiched with a one-way street, business slowed to a trickle. Hence, the view of the lawn: a real estate sign.

Two local bookstores have had to come up with different and creative ways to make rent while investing in their prospective communities. For Samantha, this means finding a new location. For Amy it means, “an outside the box rental arrangement where there’s archives and a research library in the same location.” She also reached out to the owner of a closed down Clemson bookstore, McClure’s of Kathy McClure, for advice when she started. Kathy said, watch your rent and labor.

But rent and labor aren’t at the core of The Bee’s Knees or The Pendleton Bookshop, at least not if you ask the community. Bee’s Knees outreach includes more than a few programs like a summer reading program where kids can pick up a passport and get 10 different categories of kinds of books to read. “Because a lot of the kids, when they first start reading in like second, third, fourth grade, they go toward the graphic novels,” Samantha said.

In July, there’s a program called Where's Waldo? Samantha says that bookstores all over the country do it. There’s a hidden Waldo and participants get a passport signed off on if they find the Waldo and get a coupon for a free book. “We also support the local schools. especially when they are looking for books for certain events or they need books for certain activities,” Samantha said.

Along with this, The Bee’s Knees supports the Daniel High School with a patron of the month award and donates discounted books to the United Ways Preschool Pages program once or twice a year.

In return for her work, Samantha asks folks to shop locally. She hopes to find a building that suits the children’s bookshop so that she can continue doing what she does best—selecting hardbacks and paperbacks for her neighbors.

Amy perhaps feels more supported in Pendleton, keeping tabs on The Bee’s Knees and other bookstores like First Chapter Bookshop in Seneca and McDowell's Emporium in Anderson. While she is happy with her town’s current programs and outreach, Amy said, “I would like to see some more small businesses come to Pendleton that are different to increase the diversity of what Pendleton has to offer. This would become even more of a retail destination with foot traffic. An outfitters, yarn shop or quilt shop are some ideas. More art, independent makers studios.”

Samantha and Amy are only two of 2,433 independent booksellers in the United States, according to the American Booksellers Association. But their impact is far greater than even book sales can account. Samantha’s activism looks like buying eco-friendly children’s toys and avoiding plastics. Her proposed treatment plan for small-business rent troubles is to increase local shopping (and spending) by consumers. In the same vein, Amy’s belief is that more small businesses need to come into the area.

Both members of the American Booksellers Administration and the Southern Independent Booksellers Association work night and day to keep the doors open, the reading lamps on, and the coffee hot.

Owner of The Pendleton Bookshop on the second floor window, surrounded by pottery from local artist.

Taken by owner of The Bee's Knees children's independent bookshop.