In March, it will be Jeff Hull and “Streams of Consciousness.” In April, Neil McMahon and “Lone Creek.”
For 21 years, Barbara Theroux's bookstore has welcomed an eclectic - and esteemed - array of authors, from James Lee Burke and William Kittredge to Nicholas Evans and George McGovern, to rub shoulders with Missoula readers.
The store is listed for sale at $195,000, plus inventory. Buyers can step into the long-term lease. The business is listed as a turn-key operation, meaning everything - including the name, the fixtures and the author events scheduled through May - is included. In fact, the deal includes an offer from Theroux to stay on for a few weeks and teach the new buyers how to run the place.
“I don't even know what the other options are,” she said Thursday morning, seated at a little table toward the back of the bookstore. “Closing? No, that would not be an option.”
It's rare to see a well-established bookstore in the heart of a vibrant downtown community up for sale, said Realtor Katie Ward, who is marketing the business. She has been fielding a lot of interest from potential buyers both in Missoula and out.
“What we've found is that a business like Barbara's is very attractive to creative-minded entrepreneurs wanting to relocate to Missoula, and buying a business is one of the best ways to buy yourself a job and get to live in Missoula without having to work for someone else,” Ward said. “It seems like owning a bookstore is a lifelong dream for all kinds of people.”
It's a good time to own an independent bookstore, said Russ Lawrence, president of the American Booksellers Association and co-owner of Chapter One Book Store in Hamilton.
The booksellers association's membership is just below 2,000, “which is down considerably from 15 years ago,” Lawrence noted. “But the very good news is that in just the last two years we've seen a dramatic upturn in the number of new stores opening.”
That probably has to do with the fact that the big chain bookstores aren't opening new locations at the same pace they were even a few years ago, he said. Some have closed locations in markets that weren't doing particularly well.
That has given book-loving entrepreneurs an opening to find their niche, he said.
Missoula is home to a particularly diverse bookstore scene, he added. Each one of its bookstores offers something different, and they receive a lot of encouragement from local readers.
“Missoula is a reading community,” Lawrence said.
Theroux, he added, has built her shop into “something Missoula wouldn't be the same without.”
She opened Fact & Fiction in 1986, the same year Lawrence and his wife bought Chapter One. While they had no experience running a bookstore, Theroux had been in the business for years.
“We leaned on her fairly heavily for advice and she was very generous with it,” he said. “She has spent a lifetime in bookselling,”
Theroux was a book lover from the start. She grew up in Pennsylvania and was trained as a school librarian, and shortly after earning a degree in education she accepted a librarian position with a school in Oregon.
“That's how I got to the West,” she said.
She met her future ex-husband in Oregon and moved with him to Idaho, where she worked at a public library. Before long she was asked to interview at the Washington State University bookstore in Pullman, Wash. The bookstore was looking to hire a trade-book buyer - as opposed to a textbook buyer - and Theroux remembers admitting to the store's manager that she had no business experience.
Don't worry, he told her. The business side can be taught. It's the background with books that's harder to find.
Theroux accepted the job and began working the week before Thanksgiving, only to discover no one had ordered anything for the busy holiday season.
“So I had a very interesting first month, if not year, on the job,” she said. “Had I known then what I know now I would have been just tearing my hair out. But in essence, there was nowhere to go but up.”
She worked at the Washington State University bookstore for seven years before her ex-husband, who worked for the U.S. Forest Service, was transferred to Missoula and Theroux accepted a job with the University Center Bookstore.
While working there, she became more involved in the local book scene and noticed that, while Missoula had some general bookstores, none were serving the needs of local authors the way she would like. Years earlier, she had become active in the American Booksellers Association and, through that organization, had absorbed a lot of information about running a bookstore.
Feeling the time was ripe to make a change, she became an independent bookstore owner in March 1986, when she opened Fact & Fiction at 216 W. Main St. She remained at that location until 1998, when the building changed ownership and her rent increased, and she found her current location at 220 N. Higgins Ave.
Over the years, she has built a loyal following of customers and become more and more enmeshed in Missoula's book world.
“It's a way of life,” she explains, simply. Missoula is growing and its book scene is vibrant, and if ever there were a time to hand over the business, it's now, she said. She's prepared to wait if it doesn't sell overnight - but on the other hand, she wants to be ready if it sells right away.
“I've taken it this far so I don't want to see that it fails,” Theroux said. “I want to see it continue to grow and change with new blood.”
She wants most of all to make sure that her employees are taken care of. Many of them have been with the bookstore for years, and she gives them much of the credit for building Fact & Fiction's reputation as the kind of place where customers can stop by to talk shop any time, whether or not they buy a book.
Theroux may not remain the driving force behind Fact & Fiction, but she plans to remain an active part of Missoula's larger book scene. She expects to stay involved with Friends of the Missoula Library, the organization she currently oversees as president, and she hopes to attend more Montana Festival of the Book events.
“Books will always be a part of my life,” she said.
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