The Reminiscences of a Seattle Bookseller

“That was the day that I really understood I could buy books and sell them for more money. That was the day I got hooked by books.”

Taylor Bowie has been selling books in Seattle for over 40 years. My first job in the book trade back in the early 1990’s was working for Taylor at Bowie & Company. At the time I was working as a residential therapist at an in-patient facility for troubled kids and was beginning to show signs of social service burn. Taylor’s friend happened to be the cook at this place and Taylor and I would often chat when he would come by to pick him up after his shift. When he mentioned that one of his employees was leaving I mentioned that I was ready to leave the madhouse I was working in and he offered me the job. The rest they say is history. Interestingly enough the employee who was leaving Bowie & Company was Mark Wessel who would become my partner in Wessel & Lieberman early the following year.

These reminiscences are destined to become a vital resource for the history of Seattle bookselling while also providing an intimate glimpse into the lives of the type of universal characters that populate the book trade.

Memories of forty years in the Seattle book trade: part 1

As a little kid, I was both inquisitive and acquisitive. By age four, I had already decided to be either an archaeologist or what we then called a “garbage man.” I loved the idea of digging around and poking around for artifacts of one sort or another, and I was always interested in what other people threw away. My first collections were of empty tin cans, shiny pebbles and match covers. Being raised in a family that was fairly literate and (in the case of my dad) very musical, by age ten I had already formed a little collection of old books, as well as started what would become a huge collection of 78rpm records.

So that is how I came to apply for my first job in a book shop here in Seattle. I had been a record customer of the Fillipi Book & Record shop for about a year, and was frankly looking for more money to spend on my new hobbies. Mr. and Mrs. F were pleased to oblige me with an every-Saturday gig, the duties of which included sweeping, wiping down the wooden steps which led to the second floor, and repairing torn sheet music and dust jackets with Scotch Tape.

Ted Fillipi was a very shy and gentle man. He had first entered the book trade in San Francisco around 1932, but in a few years had relocated to Seattle, where he opened his first shop, on

, in 1935. He was assisted by his amazingly vibrant, hard-working, dedicated, often-abrasive and opinionated wife, Katherine…who was known to one and all as “Kits.” By the time I came to work for them in 1966, the record department (run with a velvet glove AND an iron fist by Kits) had become the more important half of the business, although plenty of great books came and went through the doors even then.

Even as an adult, I was always a little scared of Kits, but Ted was much more easy-going and began to show me a few things about books and their values. My shop duties were still of the mundane type I’ve mentioned, but I began to get a picture of what made one book desirable and made another just a hunk of paper and glue.

Fillip’s was at the same address from 1953 until the time it closed just a few years ago. The building at

(corner of

) is a sort of odd pie-shaped brick structure which originally was three separate businesses, including an auto mechanic at the far east end. When I first went to work for Kits and Ted, they had just expanded into the second unit, and in a few years had bought the building and taken over the entire space. I recall seeing the old “garage” space for the first time after they had cleaned it up and moved in bookshelves and painting…no one would ever have imagined that this had once been home to broken-down Hudsons and Model A Fords.

The charm of Fillipi’s was due in part to this interesting layout…lots of odd nooks, crannies, cubbyholes, back stairs, front stairs…you name it. And the odd layout complimented the fascinating inventory they stocked…not just books, but a huge array of 78- and LP phonograph records, old photographs, paintings and prints, small antiques, the occasional LARGE antique, even fine costume jewelry, for which Kits had a very astute eye. There were boxes of inexpensive vintage post cards, a huge collection of very inexpensive piano sheet music of the last hundred years, and hundreds if not thousands of vintage photos of film, music, theater and vaudeville performers. Many of those show biz photographs had once belonged to J. Willis Sayre, the long-time arts critic for the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Mr. Sayre had donated the photos to a local institution which either could not or would not house them properly, and they ended up in boxes in the “balcony” at Fillipi’s. The early theater and opera photos were the most mysterious…who WERE these people, many of who never made films or records? The Sayre Collection was an amazing archive of American show business history, ca. 1910 -1955. I would pay a pretty penny now if I could somehow put it all back together.

When I worked at Fillipi’s, it was not unusual to see someone come in with a specific want, but who would end up spending hours, if not the whole day, poking around at all the amazing things to be found there (did I mention vintage toys?) And the better part of them always ended up buying something, even if it wasn’t what they had been seeking in the first place. That was one of many things I learned from Ted and Kits Fillipi…make your inventory general and you’ll please more people…plus you’ll always be finding new things to add to that inventory.

While working at Fillipi’s, I met one of the most important people in my years in the book trade…someone who may have had more influence on my deciding to go into the business than any other single person.

Russell Vellias was a long-time Seattle resident, born in 1928, who as an adult had floated around from one activity to another. He sold ferry boat tickets. He played chess, sometimes for money. He played the horses, ALWAYS for money. And somewhere along the line, he learned that you could make money by buying old books in one place (thrift store, estate sale, bookshop) and selling them at another place (bookshop, collector, etc.). In the late 60s, Russ was a very frequent visitor to Fillipi’s, always with a box or two of interesting books to sell to Ted. I always poked my nose into what was going on between Ted and Russ, and soon decided that here was something else I could do to supplement my then-generous salary of $1.50 an hour.

In later years when I had my own shop, Russell Vellias became a valued friend, a source of supply of amazing material, a frequent source of capital when I was short, and a great customer as well. But back in the 60s he was more of a friendly competitor, and seemed more amused than anything else by my first baby-steps as a book scout. Remember, too, that at age 13 or 14 I was restricted to taking the bus from one sale or shop to another. I envied Russ, not just for his car, but for his terrific ability to scope out a huge shelf of books, and find the one or two worth bothering with.

I was able to scoop Russ at least once. I had gotten wind that there was to be a book sale at the St. Nicholas School on

(building now owned by Cornish). For some reason, the good ladies of the school Mother’s Club had not done much advance promotion for it, but I had learned of it from the St. Nick Alumni Newsletter that was sent to my sister.

So I got to the sale about an hour before it opened, thinking I should get a “good place in line” as I assumed there would be many others waiting to see the book treasures inside. Imagine my shock when I got there and there WAS no line…there was nobody else but me, the not-quite 16-year old would-be “book scout.”

Even better…the nice ladies inside saw me standing at the door and asked me if I wanted to come in early. Uh…yes, I did…and they gave me full run of the place, especially when I mentioned that my sister had graduated from there just a few years before.

By the time that Russ and others arrived, I had scooped up every good book I could find, including some valuable signed limited editions and fine illustrated books from the teens and twenties, each priced at either ten, twenty-five or seventy-five cents! I put a lot of extra money in my piggy bank from my $17 investment that day. Would it surprise you that the best and most valuable books were the ones I bought for ten cents?

That was the day that I really understood I could buy books and sell them for more money. That was the day I got hooked by books.

As a budding book scout and part-time employee of Fillipi’s, I always offered Ted first crack at anything I found…but that sometimes meant that I would have left-overs, either out-and-out junk which I shouldn’t have bought at all, or perhaps items which he already had in stock, or which were not in the nice condition which he demanded.

So I learned to make my way to other shops in Seattle, hauling a box of Ted’s rejects with me on the bus. The first thing I learned was that booksellers are not too keen about looking at stuff which has been rejected by another bookseller, especially one as erudite and accomplished as Ted Fillipi. But I did have the occasional transaction with other shops.

A woman named “Rose” who ran the old Raymer’s store on

would never even look at what I had to offer…she rightly assumed that I’d offered my little box of wares elsewhere, which was understandable, as she was a very cheap buyer. Raymer’s was a dusty and dreary shop, of picked-over dross. I didn’t have much better luck at Janson’s Book Shop on

. Bryce Janson and his mother ran it. I recall that she would give me the most sour look when I walked in, as if I didn’t smell good (maybe I didn’t?) Bryce was genial enough, but one of those pedantic types who would tell you how much he knew about something or another, and do so at a snail’s pace. Didn’t matter what you said, he would find some reason to disagree with you, and do so in this ponderous and pedantic way which made me want to run away and hop back on the nearest bus to anywhere…the Hell with my box of books! John Knaide’s shop (originally at Broadway and Pine, later on Second Avenue) was really an antique shop and makes the list of old bookshops only by the virtue of John Knaide’s purchase of the legendary H. Scofield library when it was finally sold in the early 1950s. That is a tale better left to another time, including the incident where Knaide sold the very last of the Scofield books to a local book scout…several hundred good books for twenty dollars!

There were others downtown, of course…Shorey’s was still going strong at its long-time location at

, between Marion and Columbia. It had every manner of odd room, office, and a dark and mysterious basement which held who-knew-what. A huge, rambling barn of a place, and so many employees: Mr. Mikelson; Dewey Knowles; Fred Kronenberg (a WW2 refugee who had been a lawyer in Poland or some place); my late friend Robert Mattila, who left a few years later to open his own shop; and what I would later think of as the Shorey version of “The Odd Couple”, proprietor Bill Todd and his brother-in-law Don Lindsley.

Those of you who remember Bill Todd will recall that he had a great deal to say about many things, and that it was often difficult to disengage yourself from a conversation with him…and back then that could be a real issue for me as I was depending on public transit to get around. That said, I always preferred to sell books to Mr. Todd than try to sell them to Don. Don was a very shrewd buyer, and instinctively knew what to buy and what to avoid. I also liked that he treated me like an adult, pretty much as an equal. He knew I was trying to make a few books as a book scout and he would take time to explain to me why some I offered were OK and why others were no good.

The meanest thing I ever did to Shorey’s was with a box of hideous vanity press poetry (self-published, usually by no-talents). They had each been inscribed by the various “poets” to their former creative writing teacher, who clearly was an inspiration to each and every one of them. But the inspiration did not compensate for complete lack of talent. This was a box of the worst garbage I’ve ever read.

I was about to walk into Shorey’s with the box, hoping for mercy and maybe five bucks of pity money, but I saw through the door that Don Lindsley was behind the counter. I lurked about the corner of 3rd and Cherry and kept peeking in to see who was running the front. When I saw Mr. Todd take Don’s place I barged in with this box of unsaleable rubbish and showed it to him. He knew the creative writing professor by name and was very impressed with the sincerity of the various presentation inscriptions…who was I to argue? And I walked away with fifty bucks…a teen-age book scout fortune in those days.

The next time I saw Don he looked at me sort of ruefully and then had to laugh at what I’d managed to put over. Eventually Don and his wife left Seattle and returned to Idaho. I look back on Don Lindsley as one of the real gents of my early book years.

A few of you may recall Robert Mattila’s first open shop, at 115 South Jackson in

. I recall going to the opening which was ca. 1975, and telling Bob what a beautiful shop he had. It was really nice, in an elegant space with an Art Moderne facade. It showed off Bob’s better antiquarian stock to fine advantage, along with his decorated cloth bindings and leather sets. I was sorry that Bob chose to close the place after only about a year. When I “designed” my own little space for my second location (1981-82), I tried to bring in some of the flavor of Bob’s shop.

To be continued….

First published Summer 2007 issue of The Journal, a publication of The Book Club of Washington