Longtime family-friendly business moving to new Harvest Plaza location
Published in the June 8 – 21, 2016 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Nicholas Preciado
A young girl relaxes in the children’s section at BookSmart days before the landmark downtown business is set to relocate.
Photo by Marty Cheek
The downtown will say goodbye in mid-June to BookSmart, the independent bookstore which has been a community gathering place for Morgan Hill since 1999. But don’t worry if you’re a fan of the store — and there are many of them. BookSmart will have a new home across town.
“Every day, I mourn having to leave downtown,” said co-owner Brad Jones. “It’s been a big part of our lives.”
“It hurts my heart to leave downtown,” Jones’ wife and co-owner Cinda Meister added. “I’m excited about the opportunities our new location will bring us, but I’m still mourning. Mourning the old, getting excited about the new.”
The downtown property on Second and Depot streets is owned by a developer that is planning to build town homes on the location in the near future. The new iteration of the store is set to open soon in a new location Jones calls “BookSmart 3.0,” in the Harvest Plaza shopping center on the east side of U.S. 101 at East Dunne Avenue and Murphy Avenue in the former Concept Cyclery site. For the past two months, the store has been liquidating its inventory at its current location to minimize the cost of the relocation.
Meister said she’s looking forward to being next to some of the music teachers from the Music Tree, who are also relocating from downtown into the same building as BookSmart. The couple could not give a date when the new location will open but hope there won’t be a large gap between when the current location closes and the new location opens.
Owners Brad Jones and Cinda Meister show the stages of their store’s growth.
“We’re at the mercy of construction,” Jones said. “But we know our last day downtown is June 15.”
Financing the move is also a challenge for BookSmart. “We just don’t have the collateral to go out and get a loan,” Jones said. “We’re basically financing this move through the reduction of our inventory.”
BookSmart is currently holding a 70-percent off clearance sale on most of its books and toys. Jones and Meister plan to liquidate as much of their inventory as possible. That way there’s less to move when the new location opens. This works in the long run, as space requirements have forced the new iteration of BookSmart to reduce inventory by one-third. Even with the down time for the store, it will be able to help customers with online sales.
“You can still purchase books through our website at any point in time,” Meister said. “Even if we’re not 100 percent up and running when the new location opens, we’ll at least be able to sell books.”
Jones has deep roots in Morgan Hill. His great-great-grandfather was the first town marshal. Jones and Meister both went into the restaurant business at a young age, with Meister getting her first restaurant job when she was 13. Years later, a childhood friend partnered with the couple and started a downtown restaurant called Mushrooms Grille & Bar. After three years, all parties decided to pursue other interests.
Photo by Marty Cheek
A customer makes a purchase at BookSmart before it closes and reopens in its new location.
“We decided that we wanted to do something different from the restaurant business because we’d been in it all our lives,” Jones said. “But we’d fallen in love with downtown. We knew we wanted to continue to work here and make downtown a better place.”
Along the bookstore’s west-facing wall is a small cafe that serves coffee, ice cream, gourmet hot dogs, soups and sandwiches. Run by friendly staff who know customers by names, the cafe has been around since the early days of BookSmart. All items are locally sourced.
“When we opened BookSmart initially, it had a small ice cream parlor,” Meister said. “We thought, ‘We could do that easily.’”
The couple learned early on that it was a special sight to see a child’s face brighten when they got a book and ice cream at the same time, she said. Thousands of kids have come to BookSmart for the ice cream and stayed to wander the store with their parents, looking at the toys and books.
Depending on permit requirements, the cafe might not be ready to go full service when BookSmart opens at the new location. But Jones said they will still serve great coffee, great ice cream, and great hot dogs.
Photo by Marty Cheek
Brittany Shores delivers up a freshly made chili dog with cheese at the BookSmart Cafe in downtown Morgan Hill.
“Our space is limited at the new location,” Meister said. “We’d rather do what we know and do it well than see if we can add other things.”
BookSmart has always been a retail business. With the change in location, the bookstore will become a hybrid business, part retail and part nonprofit. And it will still continue to serve the educational needs of local families. Jones said that BookSmart paid for community-building programs like Gift of Reading, the local Where’s Waldo program, and the Snowflake Scavenger Hunt through the retail side in the past, despite those programs being unprofitable.
The nonprofit side of BookSmart will be handled through a foundation called BookSmart Community Advantage which was created by Jones and Meister and will focus on those programs the bookstore paid for in the past.
Jones and Meister admit they’re entering new territory. They formed the “Tiger Team,” a group of professional people residing in the community who have created a group to aid in the transition.
“We’ve been working to raise money and awareness,” said Tiger Team member Emily Shem-Tov. “We help out with events and promotions to get people into the store. We do whatever we can to help them get over this rocky period and start off healthy in their new space.”
The mother of two young girls, she joined the Tiger Team after Jones issued a call to action in BookSmart’s newsletter. The call to action asked for volunteers interested in helping the bookstore survive and adapt.
Jones is hesitant to jump to conclusions about the impact of BookSmart leaving downtown.
A customer shops at BookSmart, which is moving into a new location after a developer purchased the property.
Photo by Marty Cheek
“Anything we say is conjecture, but we do know that communities all over the country are trying to recruit independent bookstores to their downtowns,” Jones said.
Meister said there’s been an increase in the number of independent bookstores over the past three years, according to the American Booksellers Association which documents the nationwide trend of growth for independent booksellers. She thinks that the re-emergence of independent bookstores across the country is due in part to people craving more personal experiences in a high-tech world.
“It’s true that you can get anything online, but you don’t have the value of someone else’s expertise,” Meister said. “People want a shopping experience. You can buy anything online, but it’s not satisfying.”
BookSmart and stores like it provide economic and societal benefits from as “third places” besides home and work where the people can gather and interact with each other, Jones said.
“You have work, home, and some place else to socialize, to be known, to be able to share,” he said. “That’s always been our goal: to be a third place for people.”
Photo by Marty Cheek
Brad Jones and Cinda Meister in the toy section at BookSmart.
As an anchor store for the downtown, BookSmart has witnessed trends come and go over the course of its 17-year lifespan. The biggest thing to come out is arguably the novels featuring the young wizard, Harry Potter, Jones said.
“Harry Potter was the springboard for all other kinds of great literature,” Jones said. “It introduced reading to kids who had never read something outside of school.”
“Oprah did that, too,” Meister added. “She made reading important again for adults with her book club.”
BookSmart is proud of being a family-friendly bookstore that has something for everyone. A healthy selection of fiction is complemented by deeper genres such as fantasy, science fiction and mystery. There’s also a wealth of children and young adult books. The bookstore has hosted book publishing parties and poetry readings in the past and intends to continue to do so as well as continue it’s monthly book club.
“Our book club’s been going strong for many years now,” Jones said. “We read a different book every month, except for December.”
The Explorers group met at BookSmart where parents interacted with their toddlers 2 to 4 years of age.
Photo by Marty Cheek
During the holidays, the book club hosts a party where members bring their lists of what they’d like the group to read in the new year. Everyone eats, drinks and haggles over what books will be read.
“It’s a good mix of men and women with wide viewpoints,” Meister said.
BookSmart also teams with various schools and districts around the Bay Area, including Morgan Hill Unified School District, giving local schools a venue for off-site programs and field trips.
“One year we won a grant and gave half that money in gift certificates to the school district so they could put more books in their classrooms,” said Jones.
With the growth of independent bookstores trending upward and a new location, Jones and Meister are optimistic about BookSmart’s future.
“The new location has more visibility,” Jones said. “One-third of the community drives by the new location two times a day.”
Community members loyal to the store have volunteered to help pack and move any remaining inventory. The couple plans to spread the word through BookSmart’s newsletter.
One look at BookSmart and it becomes clear that it’s a beacon of the book industry. It’s stayed lit among the turbulent trade, undamaged by the emergence of e-books, shining bright through the decline and resurgence of print.
“As much as it hurts to leave downtown, this could end up being a better move for us,” Meister said.
