Despite its size, it has a ramshackle coziness, with air redolent of old furniture and older paper. Shorey's space on the second floor of the old office building - its main sales level - is a warren of 34 rooms crammed floor-to-ceiling with books.
Said a longtime observer of Seattle's antiquarian-book scene: ``One thing you could say about Shorey's is that it's a very good specimen of a 19th-century bookstore still in operation.''Īnyone who has visited its rambling quarters at 110 Union St., between First and Second avenues, is apt to agree. Todd says it will allow them to handle more than twice the 300 to 400 laborious books searches they now conduct each month.Ĭomputerization also will allow them to enter the 20th-century book business, in some opinions. Shorey's book-search service and its ``wants'' list are being computerized. In the near future, they also may get it sooner rather than later. If people want it bad enough and don't mind waiting, we'll eventually get the book.'' ``There's virtually no book that we have to say: `I can't help you,' '' adds Todd, ``because we always have ways of checking further. ``We sell at least 100 books a month that are on our `wants' list. ``We don't throw out these `wants' until we either find the book or the customer tells us they no longer want it,'' says Jim Todd, 36, who in 1975 joined his father, J.W.
But I'll accept it for my granddaughter.' ''įor years, her order had been part of Shorey's ``customer wants'' list, a vast file of 3-by-5 cards where all requests go whenever a standard book search - phone calls and advertising in antiquarian-book journals - proves fruitless after three or four months. Homer Henderson, who has worked at Shorey's since 1974, recalls the response of one customer who was told that her long-sought book had finally arrived: `` `Well,' she said, `I ordered it for my daughter. Such stories are legion, for Shorey's has been pulling off similar feats for a full century: The family-run institution is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, easily making it the oldest bookstore in Seattle and one of the oldest in the nation. She is not alone in her astonishment and delight. ``I just looked at this notice, showed it to my husband and we each broke out laughing,'' wrote Turner. On June 12, 1990, Shorey's informed her they finally had located the book. Roberts, ``The Grandeur and Misery of Man,'' which was published in 1955 by Oxford University Press. Shorey's apparently never gives up.''Īt Shorey's Bookstore on May 21, 1971, Turner ordered an out-of-print book by David E. ``I was not just pleased to have the book found, but stunned by the fact that it took nineteen years to find it. ``How is this for doggedness?'' an amazed North Seattle woman, Alma Turner, recently wrote The Times.
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