At Eastridge, books are back in the mall and soon authors will be too.
Not since Barnes & Noble abandoned its Eastridge location has another bookstore appeared in the immediate vicinity. Now everything has changed. Brad Jones and Cinda Meister of BookSmart in Morgan Hill have opened a satellite location in Eastridge. Anyone in the neighborhood can head over and support a local mom ‘n’ pop business. Even better, if VTA ever finishes building the light rail extension they should have built 40 years ago, then thousands of additional customers can peruse the small confines of the latest BookSmart enterprise.
I recently caught up with Jones and Meister to get the skinny. They spoke via Zoom directly from their desk at the Morgan Hill store, where they were helping customers as we talked. The Morgan Hill location started in 1994, but Eastridge will be a different beast, they said. Everyone remains hopeful.
“The east side of San Jose has been a book desert for a long time, and we believe that every community needs an independent bookstore because of the value it brings to the community,” Jones said, adding that he tried a second location years ago, which didn’t work out, so he was somewhat skeptical when the Eastridge gambit first materialized. But they’re off to a good start.
“We’ve had a super ton of feedback from people coming into the mall,” Jones said. “And what we hear is, all the time, ‘Oh, we’re so excited. It’s been years since there was a Barnes & Noble here and we love having a bookstore in our community.’”
As we talked, decades of Eastridge bookstore memories came into the conversation. B. Dalton. Barnes & Noble. Was there a Waldenbooks?
In Morgan Hill, Jones and Meister originally ran a restaurant and then discovered a bookstore that was going out of business. They decided to take it on, naively, Meister says. They started with an idea and a credit card. They just kept listening to the customers. The inventory evolved based on what the customers wanted.
The most joyous reward one can imagine in running a bookstore? At the original Morgan Hill BookSmart, it was exactly as anyone would expect.
“I think it’s connecting a reader with a book that just touches them in some way, especially a reluctant reader,” Meister said. “Grandparents come back in, or call me and say, ‘The book you picked for my grandchild was fabulous and now he’s a reader.’ That’s what’s really rewarding.”
Jones concurred: “We have people that were in the womb when we had our restaurant that are now coming here with their kids, and in some cases their grandkids.”
Eastridge remains a challenge, just because staging author events and promotional operations like Independent Bookstore Day is a little more complicated due to the bureaucracy of the mall, but nevertheless, every gratifying aspect of running a bookstore still applies. The inventory, said Jones, will be necessarily different due to the demographics of the neighborhood.
“One case in point is that we are carrying a lot more manga there than we do [in Morgan Hill] because there’s more interest in it, and there’s more interest in some of the role-playing games and those kinds of things than there are in Morgan Hill. I would say Morgan Hill leans a little more towards contemporary literature and also to things like cookbooks, stuff like that.”
With clientele as far away as Germany, if Jones and Meister can replicate the type of successful customer base they have in Morgan Hill, then Eastridge should be more for the better.
These days, with many dark forces designed to ruin real human connection, real books and real community, one would expect an eventual backlash. People will again desire real human interaction. Parents will raise kids to think critically and read books, talk to each other, and discuss the books they like, or don’t like, in person, and gather, and have real lives apart from the disinformation and conspiracies that dominate the online world.
“We keep thinking the same thing, and we’ve always been, business-wise, a counterpuncher,” Jones said. “If something happens in the market business, then we try to fight back in some other way.”
It’s a battle worth fighting.
