Small Bookstores

Chapter 5: Downsizing the Bookstore (1)

If you are going to start a bookstore from now on, it is better to keep it as small as possible.

As mentioned earlier, until a certain era, the general perception was that "the bigger the bookstore, the better." If you go there, you will definitely find the book you are looking for. Vast floor space and an astronomical number of volumes were the standard clichés for advertising. Even now, when visiting rural areas that lack such large bookstores, there are quite a few residents who crave them.

For example, if you find such a need in your hometown, you might consider opening one yourself. However, unfortunately, that is quite a gamble. The larger it is, the higher the rent and labor costs, and the inventory costs become enormous. It is better to assume that the reason major chains have not opened stores there is because it is not a viable business. That is how mature the industry has become.

It has been said that the Japanese are good at miniaturization. In 1982, a book on Japanese culture titled "The 'Shrinking' Japanese" (Gakuseisha, later Kodansha Academic Library) became a bestseller. However, at that time, the publishing industry was still on an upward trend, and bookstores were becoming increasingly large. Now, 35 years later, is it too late to say again that small bookstores are good and that we should downsize bookstores? No, I think it is something we should consider now more than ever.

It is a happy thing to have a large bookstore nearby where you can quickly find the book you are looking for. However, those areas are being solved more and more by technology. But the individual experience of unexpectedly encountering a book you didn't know, a book you had been curious about, or a book that for some reason catches your eye in a bookstore you wandered into, will not disappear as long as bookstores exist. That bookstore is not necessarily a large one. Even if it is small, or perhaps precisely because it is small, that is possible.

When Atsushi Horibe, who was the manager of Keibunsha Ichijoji in Kyoto, went independent and started a bookstore called "Seikosha," I had the opportunity to have a dialogue with him in several media outlets. "Downsizing" is the word Mr. Horibe used at the time to explain his own store.

The size of Keibunsha Ichijoji was 120 tsubo (approx. 400 square meters). It is not small, but it is by no means a large bookstore. As a "select shop for all things related to books," it is loved by locals and visited by many people from afar. An attached gallery, "Enfance," was created, a "Life Hall" dealing in miscellaneous goods was created, and shortly before Mr. Horibe retired, an event space called "Cottage" was also created. There is also a well-stocked online shop. Even now that Mr. Horibe has left, it is a wonderful bookstore.

However, if you develop a store in a multifaceted way, the number of people you employ, the space you have to look after, and the number and variety of products increase, and with that, the things you have to do also increase. Mr. Horibe, having become independent, decided to first downsize everything so that he could handle it all by himself.

Looking at Japan, and indeed the world, it feels like many of the vibrant bookstores are small ones. How are these small bookstores managed? In this chapter, I would like to clarify why they are so vibrant.

Mr. Horibe says, "The best thing about the current store is that I designed it to be small from the beginning" and "It was good that I thought in terms of the minimum" (see page 259). Incidentally, the English title of the Japanese culture book that became a bestseller in 1982 is "Smaller is better."

Reprinted from "A Reader for Future Bookstores" (NHK Publishing), pp. 186-188