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Saving Broadway Books

A story about blogs, books, burritos--and a son who wouldn't let his mother's business fail

Robbie McClaran

INDEPENDENT STREAK Roberta Dyer with her son, Aaron Durand, in the store she has owned since he was 12.

By early last January, the dry-heave-inducing economic crisis of the fall of '08 had settled into a grinding, merciless condition. One midweek afternoon, I stopped in my neighborhood bookshop in Portland, Oregon, to pick up a few titles that my wife needed for a community college class she was teaching. I was the only customer. The quiet felt ominous.

"Are you hanging in?" I asked Roberta Dyer, the owner, as she rang up my sale. I had been a steady customer at Broadway Books for more than a decade, although I hadn't visited the store for months. Dyer paused before replying, and I feared the worst.

"Our year had been awful," she acknowledged. "But then, in December, we had our miracle."

Dyer had operated the store for 17 years, fighting off challenges from franchise and online booksellers, weathering fads and slumps, building her business into a neighborhood anchor and a mainstay of Portland's community of readers. She was not a woman prone to moonbeam notions. Still, I assumed that her emotions had gotten the better of her in this instance, and that whatever stroke of good fortune had visited -- a family inheritance? a wealthy customer dying and leaving a windfall? -- had clouded her usually clear head and careful use of language.

Yet the remarkable story that she proceeded to tell me showed how two pillars of the old culture -- books and the traditional brick-and-board, owner-operated retail store -- had been upheld by the new technologies that are generally regarded as the old way's destroyer. It was a story about a parent and child connecting, despite and because of their generational differences; about blogs, burritos, and a tremendous record-setting snowstorm; and about the almost mystical staying power of the small local business. During this year, in this season, only the most hardened Scrooge wouldn't call that a miracle.

It all began a month earlier, on the morning of December 8, 2008, in the heart of the crucial holiday shopping season, when Broadway Books normally logged up to 25 percent of its annual sales. As she sat behind the counter of her empty shop, surrounded by piles of unsold books, Dyer realized that this season's yield would fall dismally, perhaps disastrously, short.

She had started the business in 1992, after a two-decade career as a book buyer for a local department-store chain. By the time I moved to the neighborhood the following year, Broadway Books was already established in the classic line of America's small, independently owned bookstores. In northeast Portland, you go downtown to Powell's for a used or hard-to-find book. If you're seeking a popular title, you might go to the Barnes & Noble at a nearby mall. When you're struck with the hunger for a necessary, sustaining book, however, you shop at Broadway Books.

Among the small stash of books I keep near my desk for instruction and inspiration, for instance, is a novel about prize-fighting titled The Professional, by the late, great sportswriter W.C. Heinz. First published in 1958 and reissued as a trade paperback in 2001, it's hardly the sort of book you would expect to be featured at a store run by a female baby boomer of progressive sensibilities. And yet I had discovered The Professional at Broadway Books, prominently displayed on the table on which Dyer showcases overlooked gems.

"I don't care whether it's a political biography or a daughter's memoir or a novel about baseball," she says. "I just like good writing, and the readers who share that taste have always found their way here." Always, that is, until last September.

"Starting last fall, I saw a hunted look in people's eyes," Dyer recalls. "There was a fear that went beyond being cautious or thrifty. It was as if people had lost faith in the most basic things. They were frozen. Nobody was buying at any of the neighborhood retail stores."

September bled into an equally grim October and November. Thanksgiving came and went, and the slump deepened. Now, with December performing worse than the average February, Dyer doubted she could keep her doors open through January. In the midst of this figurative storm, meanwhile, a real one now bore down on Portland: a once-every-20-years pelting of maximum winter that threatened to shut down the city, drive shoppers deeper into their devalued homes, and pound a final nail in what appeared to be Broadway Books's coffin.

"It was time," Dyer says, "to think about an exit strategy."

But first, she decided to phone Aaron Durand, her 28-year-old son, who was working for the shoe company Birkenstock USA in Novato, California. She needed to talk to Aaron about a book on music that he had asked her to find. But mostly, on that bleak winter morning, Dyer needed to hear her only child's voice.

"I can't get that title for you," she told him.

"That's OK," he said. "I'm in no rush."

"You're not listening. I can't help you. My distributors don't deal with that publisher. You're just going to have to go online, do some digging, and order the book yourself."

"Mom?" he said. "Are you OK?"

"I'm sorry, Aaron, but I can't help you with this."

The next day, he shot his father an e-mail. "What's the matter with Mom?" David Durand broke the news to his son: Broadway Books was on the ropes.

Aaron was stunned. He had been 12 when his mother went into business. She was so devoted to the store that the family jokingly referred to it as her other baby. How could she stand losing it? Aaron wondered. He opened his laptop, logged on to his Twitter page, and, barely thinking, began to type.

Read more:

Rewriting the Ending

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