Anne Marie Keohane, co-owner of Symposium Books on Westminster Street in Providence, walks among the stacks, restocking shelves at the downtown bookstore, which carries about 10,000 titles.
Bookstore writes latest chapter in Downcity upturn with scholarly texts
Symposium Books
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By Emilio DiSpirito IV License Partner | Private Office Advisor Engel & Völkers Oceanside www.DiSpiritoteam.com…
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Owners: Scott McCullough and Anne Marie Keohane (husband and wife)
Type of business: Retail, online and wholesale bookseller
Location: 240 Westminster St., Providence, in the Alice Building
Employees: 6 (plus owners)
Year founded: 2003
Annual sales: WND
The window display is packed with art and architecture books, interspersed with leftie political books, the latest Milan Kundera novel, a coffee-table book on alt-rocker Nick Cave, Molly Ivins’ “Bushwhacked,” and dense tomes like The Columbia Companion to British History.
The first impression is urban-upscale, not unlike Tazza, the café and wine bar next door. But the price tags are bargain-shop: Kundera in hardcover for $6.98; Hans Richter for $19.98. Inside, the vast majority of books are 40 to 90 percent below list price.
Even in New York City, a bookshop like this would stand out – so focused on high-end books, but so inexpensive, a cash-strapped intellectual’s dream store. But on Westminster Street, Symposium Books is even more prominent – it’s one of the pioneers of the new Downcity.
Owned by husband-and-wife team Scott McCullough and Anne Marie Keohane, Symposium operates on three levels: It’s a retail store, open since last summer; a Web-based bookseller; and a wholesaler with clients throughout the Northeast.
McCullough said they decided to start their own business after working for years in the book industry: him at a store near Columbia University, her at various publishing houses. They came to Providence after looking in New York, New Haven, Philadelphia, Boston and Keohane’s native Ireland.
“We thought this had the best opportunities,” McCullough said. Some places were too expensive, or had too much competition; New Haven, on the other hand, was desolate. Providence was attractive, affordable and had “the right demographics,” he said.
They arrived just over two years ago, and McCullough set up a wholesale business, using connections they’d made in New York. That gave them a chance to scope out the retail market, find a location, and “see what everyone else was ordering.” Late last spring, they opened the store, in the newly renovated Alice Building.
They knew this was uncharted territory, but it was also “sort of a logical spot” for them, McCullough said, because it was close to College Hill but also in the middle of the city.
It took them awhile to build up their inventory, because McCullough had a very specific – and unique – business model: along with some new releases and must-haves, they sell mostly publishers’ overstock and returns, but from university presses and other high-end imprints.
The arrangement allows them to sell $65 books for $40, even $17, and still turn a profit. But while mass-market remainders are easy to find, the kinds of books McCullough buys are tougher to find, and may require weeks of patient waiting. And if he sells out of a great philosophy title, he may have to wait weeks to restock it.
“That’s the problem with our sale books,” he said. “We haven’t been able to keep up.”
At this point, Symposium is carrying about 10,000 titles, still short of the 14,000 McCullough said he could fit. Literature is the top-selling section, he said, followed by art and art history, architecture and philosophy.
Both McCullough and Keohane work at the store. She’s there on weekdays, a cheerful host and expert adviser to anyone browsing the literature shelves. He spends much of his time at their warehouse on Route 10, but comes in on Saturdays, “by far our busiest day.”
Eight months into their Downcity endeavor, they’re still losing money on retail, McCullough said, but making money on wholesale and the Web site. “Time goes fast,” he said, “but we’re still trying to put things together, getting a sense of what people want to buy.”
They have made inroads. Architecture faculty and students at Roger Williams University, a few blocks away are regular customers, and they get plenty of traffic from the Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Rhode Island, and Brown University.
They’re preparing to carry textbooks for the fall semester, at several college professors’ request. And they’re updating the Web site, to make it more closely reflect what’s going on at the store and to include special features, such as video of authors’ readings.
McCullough said it will probably take another year before Symposium, the brick-and-mortar store, turns a profit, but he’s confident that a business like his can succeed here. He’s also a true believer in books.
“I think a lot of bookstores lose focus and start getting into sidelines,” he said. “My main focus really is books. That’s what we are.”
The Symposium Books Web site is at www.symposiumbooks.com.
