A winter Sunday in the Pittsburgh Public Market, Smallman Street, Strip District. The money to adapt and re-use this chunk of the old Pennsylvania Railroad Produce Terminal apparently didn’t go into heat: People are bundled in scarves and overcoats, wandering, sampling, buying.

A man in blue jeans, leather jacket and Penguins cap walks into the East End Book Exchange, a 6-by-10-foot space tucked into a corner of the market. Browsing through the new and pre-owned volumes, he hefts a well-thumbed Brothers Karamazov. “I’m a big fan,” he says to proprietress Lesley Rains. The slight, smiling 30-something handwrites a receipt, makes change from a metal cashbox, and thanks him.

OK, so the store’s name is a misnomer, created when the store was a pop-up, which it isn’t any longer. It’s also no longer in the East End, and no longer an exchange. Business models are malleable. What matters is that Rains is selling books — old books, new books, books by local authors given on consignment. Real hold-in-your-hands books.

Located hard by Third Day Luxury Soaps and Soup Nancys, Jenn’s Jems and the Beaver Creek Candle Company, the Exchange is a book emporium arisen from the ashes. Because for one reason or another, independent and chain bookstores within city limits have been crashing and burning.

At one time, Pittsburgh could boast such outlets as Atlantic, Borders, Dalton, Joseph-Beth, and Walden, plus such indies as Jay’s, Stonewall and Squirrel Hill, among others. Now, save for university stores, and a few specialty shops, the city is a virtual Gobi Desert for general interest browsing, burrowing, buying.

“People are clamoring for a place to buy books,” Rains laments. “I wanted to do something about it.”

She seems right for the job. As a child, the Mount Lebanon native haunted the neighborhood library. By the time she was a teen, Rains was working in the South Hills Village B. Dalton. Leaving home, she earned a degree from Loyola and studied modern European history in Belgium and Germany, as well as New Hampshire and Penn State. She loved Rome and Paris, skied the French Alps, and, with friends, once ate $2,000 worth of Beluga caviar in a Dublin pub … washing it down with buckets of Guinness, of course.

But those were her 20s, and with her wild oats sown, Rains swapped her one-time Ph.D. aspirations for administrative work in Squirrel Hill’s nonprofit Carriage House. Once she’d settled in Lawrenceville, she turned to weekend bookselling, in part because she found it hard — nay, impossible — to purchase a copy of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. 

Beginning by raiding her parents’ home for unwanted books, Rains increased her stock from thrift shops, estate sales, library discards and donations. “I started as small I could get,” she recalls. “These days, book sellers have to be a little more creative about where and when they sell.”

Early on, her store popped up in Wilkinsburg, Garfield, and Squirrel Hill, as she cobbled together a business model she hopes will counter deep-discount big-box stores and internet sales. Seeking a (somewhat) more established location, she has since settled into the Public Market.

Or has she? In this age of emails and iPhones, Nooks and Kindles, tweets and texts, aren’t books — and bookstores — passé?

“I don’t think so,” Rains answers. “Books will always be with us. People want that book — and they want it in their hands. I just have to be entrepreneurial about it.”

Sometimes that simply means being clever. One time a man walked into her stall, saw a particular book, and asked Rains where she got it. Someone gave it to me, Rains said. Visibly deflated, the man said, I wrote it. 

Well, she smiled, can you sign it? Sure, he shrugged.

Doubling the price, Rains sold it to a collector happy to have another autographed Pittsburgh original.

Her all-time favorite sale was a copy of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a merciless exposé of the meatpacking industry … bought by the Crested Duck Charcuterie, just up the row from her stall.

“Be patient,” she tells herself. “Stick with it. I’ll be in a brick-and-mortar store. It’ll just take a little time.”

A burly man in a green cap and white beard strolls in and seizes a thick brown volume: American Indian Myths and Legends. Handing Rains a $10 bill, he thrusts the hefty volume under his left arm and smiles. Then he disappears, far into the madding crowd.

This article appears in Feb 29 – Mar 6, 2012.

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18 replies on “At East End Book Exchange, Lesley Rains tries to find new bookselling niche”

  2. The writer should visit Awesome Books downtown and garfield, Copacetic Comics, City Books, Eljay’s, etc etc etc. Gobi Desert I think not.

  3. The Gobi Desert metaphor is so far from the truth that I want to poke my eyes out. The bookstore scene in Pittsburgh is a vibrant one. Just because we don’t have any boxstores within city limits doesn’t mean there’s nowhere to shop. In fact, the success and recent opening of numerous independents speaks a lot about the character of Pittsburgh. I should know, I’m opening a store in the Mexican War Streets this June.

  4. In fairness to Abby, and as his editor, I think some of these comments are focusing on a couple words in isolation … and in the process missing both the larger point of the story (which is all about celebrating a local, independent bookseller) AND the point being made within the paragraph in question.

    I’m a BIG fan of places like Caliban, Awesome, Eljay’s, Townsend, etc. But as much as I love them, they focus on used books and/or collectibles, and their collections are necessarily idiosyncratic. What’s largely been lost, as Abby’s story suggests, is a more general-interest store where it’s possible to pick up, like, the latest Oprah Book Club recommendation, or the hot non-fiction title you just read about in the Sunday NY Times.

    Yeah, that part of the market IS largely catered to by chains. And not all of it is to my taste. But hell, even a college-educated snob like me (thanks, Rick Santorum!) just wants to pick up the latest collection of Paul Krugman screeds sometimes. And five or 10 years ago, there were more places inside the city limits where I could go and be reasonably assured of finding it. Off the top of my head, there was a B&N in Squirrel Hill, another Downtown, the aforementioned Joseph-Beth on the South Side. That’s why I think the line about Rains searching in vain for a copy of Jane Austen is interesting … there are times you just want to dash into a place and feel confident you’ll be able to grab up a Penguin Classics edition of the book you want.

  6. Poetic justice is chain bookstores pushing out the indies, then Amazon destroying the chains, the indies come back!

    Funny as it may seem but Amazon is actually a collection of a million independent bookstores. Even some of our own local bookstores sell on Amazon to keep afloat. Eljay’s (which is now in Dormant) comes to mind.

  8. I don’t think Pgh is unique with regard to the resurgence of independents. Chains fail in urban areas because people are often there for other reasons. Going to the movies, eating out, etc in Squirrel Hill comes to mind. Therefore, this Barnes and Noble failed because people browsed rather than bought books. A suburban location on the other hand is more of a destination. People drive to these stores because they want to buy a particular book.

    The Amazon effect is interesting. One may have to wait to get a particular book in their hands, yet the price is often better. There’s a psychological factor as well – you are many times supporting a smaller business or individual rather than an evil corporation, even though Amazon gets a cut.

  9. I’m a librarian and what I find funny is how hard my library is trying to seem like a bookstore (displaying books by subject, comfortable seating areas, reference people in the stacks wearing headsets, we even gave away coffee for a while) while more and more bookstores are going out of business. Makes me even more worried for the future of libraries.

  10. The thing about libraries that is truly disturbing is how they are getting rid of books to make room for computers. My hometown library in Meadville, PA has a bi-annual book sale. At one of these I found a poetry book written by a local author who escaped Nazi Germany during WW2. I asked one of the librarians if they were sure they wanted to sell it. She said they didn’t have the room. I bought it.

    I went to the library the next week to see if they had another copy of this book available to check out. They didn’t. I explained the situation to a different librarian and offered the book as a donation. She also said there wasn’t room for it. Totally sickening.

  11. @sara I agree that the Gobi Desert metaphor is not a good one. I believe the author didn’t intend to cause a firestorm though and only used this metaphor to emphasize that another bookstore would be a good thing. One thing’s for sure, we are sure lucky to have so many indies in the city.

  12. I’m glad the libraries are swapping books for compoopers. My book collection has increased considerably! Even got some first edition Twains from a small town’s library sale.

  15. Many indies and used bookstores stock new titles. There is also a Barnes&Noble at Duquesne U and Bradley’s Books in the strip. Both carry new titles as well as books on the NY Times bestseller list.

  16. Lots of interesting comments. I try to shop at independents but I’m bothered by the pretentiousness of some of their workers. The Big Idea has a great and varied selection but the people there are simply not very nice.

  18. OK, there’s some serious sock puppetry going on here — multiple aliases posting from the same IP address. While I welcome the comments made here, I try to keep things on a “one online identity per customer” basis, in order to prevent confusion.

    I will delete future comments from that IP address unless the commenter in question picks an identity and sticks with it.

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