Neal Coonerty and Bookshop Santa Cruz Neal Coonerty and Bookshop Santa Cruz: Forty-Six Years of Independent Bookselling Current location of Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue An Oral History by Irene Reti University of California, Santa Cruz University Library Neal Coonerty and Bookshop Santa Cruz: Forty-Six Years of Independent Bookselling. Copyright © 2012 by the Regents of the University of California. All uses of this oral history are covered by copyright agreement between Neal Coonerty and the Regents of the University of California. Under “fair use” standards, excerpts of up to six hundred words (per interview) may be quoted without the Regional History Project’s permission as long as the materials are credited. Quotations of more than six hundred words require the written per- mission of the University Librarian and may also require a fee. Under certain circumstances, not-for-profit users may be granted a waiver of the fee. To contact the Regional History Project: [email protected] or Regional History Project McHenry Library, UC Santa Cruz 1156 High Street Santa Cruz, CA 95064 Phone: 831-459-2847 Printed in the United States of America. A big thank you to Neal Coonerty for generously and wholeheartedly participating in this oral history project; to Esther Ehrlich, consulting editor, for her skillful editing; to Bettianne Shoney Sien for her excel- lent transcribing and personal interest in this project; to Lucie Rossi Coonerty for carefully reviewing the semi-final version; to Kathleen Roberts Design for graciously providing the photos; to Mark Ong and Donna Mekis for permission to reprint the Morton Marcus poem; to Christine Bunting, Head of Special Collections and Archives at the UCSC Library for helping bring this project to fruition; and to Virginia Steel, University Librarian at UC Santa Cruz, for supporting the Regional History Project’s efforts to document the history of the Central Coast region of California. Contents Introduction 1 Early Life 7 UC Berkeley 11 Meeting Candy Coonerty 16 The Pre-History of Bookshop Santa Cruz 21 Bookshop Santa Cruz in the 1970s 29 The Paperback Revolution 35 Northern California Booksellers Association 38 Nixon’s Memoirs for the Price of Bologna 43 Bookshop Santa Cruz in the 1980s 45 The Loma Prieta Earthquake 50 Competition from Crown Books 77 Competition from Borders Books 85 The Impact of Amazon.com on Independent Bookstores 96 Building Community 99 Key Staff Members at Bookshop Santa Cruz 102 Casey Coonerty Protti 105 The Future of Bookstores 109 Neal and Candy Coonerty celebrating their twenty-five years at Bookshop Santa Cruz, November 1998 Introduction The Descent (excerpt) by Morton Marcus Feeling more like a diver going down into a sunken ship than an anonymous volunteer entering a half-demolished store, I donned the yellow hard hat and descended to the basement of a building that had toppled in the recent earthquake. A bitter, smoky dust stung my throat and nostrils, and overhead, electrical wires dangled like tentacles in the mildewed mist pierced by my flashlight beam The treasure was everywhere, strewn on the wet linoleum or still on shelves—books of every size and shape, books on every subject, for the building had been a bookshop until the week before, and contained a cargo more valuable than bullion or any jewels or ingots that might have sunk in wooden ships beneath the Spanish Main… 2 • Neal Coonerty On October 17, 1989, Santa Cruz almost lost a beloved indepen- dent bookstore. A 7.1 earthquake centered only fifteen miles away hit this coastal California university town, damaging many of its historic buildings. One wall of the 1895 unreinforced masonry building that housed Bookshop Santa Cruz peeled off and collapsed into the Coffee Roasting Company next door, killing two employees. The city red- tagged the building with all the inventory trapped inside and scheduled the building demolition. The story Marcus tells in the poem above, of how four hundred brave volunteers showed up to pull books out of the crumbling building and saved Santa Cruz’s independent bookstore, is only one chapter in Bookshop Santa Cruz’s extraordinary forty-six years of history.1 In this series of oral history interviews, Neal Coonerty, Bookshop Santa Cruz’s owner, tells a story of creativity, resilience, humor, and persistence. It’s the tale of how one independent bookstore survived competition from two different superstores, the rise of Amazon.com and other online booksellers, e-books, a devastating natural disaster, and personal tragedy, to remain a vibrant community business and institution. But Neal Coonerty is more than a local independent bookstore owner. An activist, Coonerty is well known for his political work through both the Northern California Booksellers Association and the American Booksellers Association on behalf of the independent book- selling business. In “The Revolt of the Retailers,” a chapter of Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption, Laura Miller argues that competition from the major chains fostered a “collective identity among independent booksellers.”2 While booksellers in the past cultivated an image of conservative gentility, a rapidly changing economy called for a new, savvy political bookstore owner, one who “sought to be a savior of community life by standing up to those powerful organizations that appeared to threaten local autonomy.” According to Miller, political activism by independent bookstore owners took three related forms: 1 This poem is reprinted with permission from the estate of Morton Marcus and originally appeared in the Bookshop Santa Cruz Readers Newsletter in summer of 2006. 2 Laura J. Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption, (University of Chicago Press, 2007) pp. 162-63. Introduction • 3 First, independents agitated to make their trade organizations a base from which to organize. Second, they tried to use antitrust laws to equalize the terms publishers and wholesalers grant to chains and independents. Finally, booksellers engaged in educational campaigns aimed at convincing the public to patronize independents. These campaigns mixed the kind of public relations common to any consumer industry with an effort at consciousness-raising and an attempt to politicize the chain-independent issue. Neal Coonerty has engaged in all three of these forms of activism. A member of the Northern California Booksellers Association (NCBA) beginning in the 1970s, Coonerty forged links among his bookseller colleagues and helped NCBA bring an antitrust lawsuit against the chains for unfair discount policies. During his two terms as president of the American Booksellers Association, he participated in a federal anti- trust lawsuit against Borders and Barnes and Noble for alleged illegal monopolistic practices. The ABA settled the case in 2001 for $4.7 mil- lion. Finally, through his strong community base and his media savvy, Coonerty has continued to inspire customer loyalty. Bookshop Santa Cruz can now celebrate outlasting the Borders store in downtown Santa Cruz, which closed in 2011. Despite this recent victory, the future of Bookshop Santa Cruz is still fragile, as burgeoning online book sales and ebook readers signifi- cantly cut into sales and the future of print books and brick and mortar bookstores is uncertain. Neal has now moved into full-time work as a Santa Cruz County Supervisor, and his daughter, Casey Coonerty Protti, became the primary operator of Bookshop in 2006, although Neal still retains an interest and involvement in the family business. Protti is implementing many innovative ideas to help Bookshop navi- gate this turbulent time in the book business. This oral history captures a prominent independent bookseller’s reflections on the rapidly changing state of the book business. It is a valuable contribution to the literature on independent bookstores and is therefore of both local and national interest. Neal Coonerty was born in Santa Maria, California in 1946 and grew up in Van Nuys, California. He graduated from UC Berkeley in English in 1969. In 1973 he and his wife, Candy, bought Bookshop 4 • Neal Coonerty Santa Cruz from its former owner, Ron Lau. Candy spent many years building Bookshop’s excellence, until her tragic death from a stroke in 1999, at age 49. Besides running Bookshop Santa Cruz, Coonerty served on the Santa Cruz City Council from 1990 to 1994, including a term as mayor of Santa Cruz in 1993. In June 2006, Coonerty was elected to the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors and was re-elected for another four-year term in June 2010. This oral history focuses almost entirely on Coonerty’s career as owner and operator of Bookshop Santa Cruz from 1973, until 2006, when his daughter took over the reins. Neal’s son, Ryan, has also had a successful political career. He has been elected to two four-year terms on the Santa Cruz City Council, begin- ning in 2004, and served as mayor of Santa Cruz from November 2007 to November 2008. Ryan has also worked part-time at Bookshop Santa Cruz. In 2002, Neal married Lucie Rossi. She is a retired elementary school teacher. Neal is also very close to his grandchildren and proudly pointed out their pictures to me in his office overlooking Santa Cruz. I conducted these interviews on November 17, December 2, and December 22, 2011 in Coonerty’s office at the Santa Cruz County Building. For the past three decades I have been the publisher of HerBooks/Juniper Lake Press, a feminist and literary press in Santa Cruz. I have weathered many of the same storms that have affected Bookshop Santa Cruz, albeit from a publisher’s rather than a book- store’s vantage point. Bookshop’s steadfast support of mine and other small local presses has been a key factor in nurturing a strong literary culture on the Central Coast of California.