In addition to complimentary coffee and treats, Legends Bookstore in Cody, Wyoming,  

In 1974, Gayle Shanks was a 23-year-old idealist raised on the activism of the previous decade and anxious to make a difference herself.

So she opened a bookstore.

 

says Shanks, whose Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona, is now among the country's leading independent sellers. "I really imagined this as a place where people would come and talk about ideas and books, and I still see it that way."

Bookstores have a long history as allies and nurturers of social movements, and a generation of owners came of age when works ranging from Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" to Eldridge Cleaver's "Soul on Ice" were an integral part of the uprisings of the '60s and '70s.

Shanks, Mitchell Kaplan of Books & Books in Coral Gables, Florida, and Kris Kleindienst of Left Bank Books in St. Louis are among many baby boomers who founded stores with little sense of how to run a business, but a profound sense of purpose. They are now pillars of a smaller but still vital independent-bookstore community, and models for the wave of younger owners who have opened stores in recent years.

 

says Oren Teicher, CEO of the independents' trade group the American Booksellers Association. "The key to it was they always understood the store wasn't only about buying and selling books, but a way to engage with the community."

 

With real estate far cheaper and superstores, e-books and Amazon.com well into the future, starting a bookstore in the '70s and '80s was often no more complicated or expensive than buying a car. Shanks opened Changing Hands with an $800 bank loan and around $1,000 from personal loans. The original space was 500 square feet, rented at $125 a month. Books were arranged on shelves that Shanks and others assembled out of recycled wood.

"We ran it on a shoestring,"
Shanks say of Changing Hands, which now has some 13,000 square feet and a second store in Phoenix.

The arc of many baby boomers' lives is one of rebellion giving way to acceptance and conformity.
Watching thousands of stores close down, first from superstore competition and then from the Internet, drove them to think more like business people. But favorite works and current events remind them of why they became book sellers.

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