Wessex Books owner selling shop after 30 years Wessex Books owner selling shop after 30 years (January 12, 2005)

** Tom Haydon seeks new owner for literary institution.

By Rebecca Wallace

Almanac Staff Writer

Eyeing one volume at Wessex Books, a friend teased owner Tom Haydon: "That'll never sell."

The book was about salt. All about salt. But somebody bought it.

Telling the story, Mr. Haydon shakes his head and chuckles. In fact, he adds, "We've sold two or three books about salt."

Romantics avow that everyone has a soul mate. Book sellers might well believe there's a reader for every tome. Now, after running his Menlo Park literary stalwart since 1975, Mr. Haydon might be taking on the trickiest matchmaking task of all: finding a buyer for his shop.

The decision to sell was a long time coming, but it had a lot of factors, including the desire for a change, the imminent graduation of his youngest child from high school, and the demands of a retail schedule -- which can include seven-day work weeks, he says.

While waxing poetic about the book, a concept he says "cannot be improved upon" despite the looming threat of electronic reading material, Mr. Haydon adds that he'd like to see "not what there is outside of books but outside of running a bookstore."

And, of course, have more time to read.
Make me a match

If Wessex Books could write its own personal ad, it might read something like this:

"Community institution with many faithful customers seeking new owner. Nice location on Santa Cruz Avenue near the train station. Comes with about 75,000 books, 6,000 records, and a Web site with 20,000 cataloged titles. Landlord raises rent only about 2 percent each year. Comfy chairs."

Mr. Haydon allows that one thing might be missing: "There was a time when there was room for a couch, but the couch was driven out by books."

Not surprising in a place with more than a mile of shelves, as Mr. Haydon estimates. The owner of a used bookstore has a lovely luxury not shared by owners of new bookstores, he adds: the freedom of shaping the inventory to reflect your tastes.

Under his direction, Wessex has specialized in university press titles, poetry and fiction, as well as history and other non-fiction topics. The fiction, he says, is "quality modern fiction," not romances or best-sellers.

A stroll through the shop yields everything from a Faulkner biography to a coffee-table photo book on dreadlocks to a signed, slightly tattered first edition of "John Dough and the Cherub" by Oz creator L. Frank Baum. Through the quiet stacks comes the muffled clanging of the train bell down the street.

To keep his collection complete, Mr. Haydon has rooted through warehouses and dug for treasure at London book fairs. Then there's serendipity. You never know what will come through the door when someone wants to sell some books. That's part of the joy, he says.

"It'd be like working in a candy store where the stock changes every day," he says. "There's an endless exposure to books, and it's always unpredictable."
'Selling it to Malta'

At this point, Mr. Haydon says he's had a few inquiries about the shop, but no serious buyers have come forward. Still, he's hardly discouraged; he just made the for-sale announcement on January 4 in an email to his customers.

While Mr. Haydon won't say how much he's selling his shop for, he will say that the business is profitable. It has also moved with the times. The Wessex Web site has become an active part of the shop, with online sales making up one-third of the business, he says.

For many people, nothing can replace the tactile experience of browsing in a shop, fingering age-softened pages and eyeing colorful bindings. But Mr. Haydon says the Internet is a boon for finding the book you want, wherever you are.

"Even someone in the smallest town in Alaska has access to the same books as someone in New York," he says. "It puts them in one giant virtual bookstore."

It's also a way to broaden your own store's global reach, he says: "There's something gratifying about a book that's been here a long time and then suddenly you're selling it to Malta."

For Wessex customer and Menlo Park resident Lauren John, though, nothing replaces good old-fashioned customer service. She praises the staff for helping her when she was on quests, once for a rare book on collecting silver, and another time for an issue of Town & Country magazine from the 1950s.

"It was clear they weren't going to make any money doing it, but they helped me," she says. "They're part of what makes Menlo Park a great community."
INFORMATION

Wessex Books is located at 558 Santa Cruz Ave. and can be reached at 321-1333. Its Web site is www.wessexbooks.com.

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