John Michael Currie discusses plans for his store, Books New & Used.
“It’s a mission.”
That’s the way John Michael Currie explains how he came to own Books New and Used. It was not that he wanted to buy a store, he says, but that he couldn't stand the idea of Trenton’s one bookstore shutting down.
“This community is culturally a desert. This is the one pearl, the one place of oasis, of cultural exchange, that exists here,” said Currie when The Planet stopped by to chat last week. “I’ve always been a reader and so has Becky [Currie’s wife], and this is just too precious a jewel to let it close.”
So it’s not so much a matter of John Michael Currie running a small business as of John Michael Currie trying to save civilization. Faithful bookstore patrons (as well as faithful Planet readers--saving civilization is seriously important to The Planet, too), will know Currie is not the first to ride into this battle. The Planet has interviewed both the bookstore’s previous operators as they pursued the same quest.
Original owner Danielle Hargis opened Books New and Used about 20 years ago in the strip shopping center behind CVS on Highway 136 West as an overflow location for her Fort Oglethorpe store, Books Never Ending. (“Books Never Ending” was an apt name for store no. 1, she explained, because it described not just her inventory but her cross in life to bear: When your business model is the two-for-one book trade, you always wind up with more books than you know what to do with.)
Ms. Hargis, who lives on Lookout Mountain, eventually closed the Fort O location and had operated the Trenton store solo for years when she decided to retire in the summer of 2017. She was turning 78 and seriously needed R & R—but could not face closing without finding a buyer. She didn’t want to leave Trenton without a bookstore. (And besides, what was she supposed to do with all those books?)
Fortunately, in the nick of time, along came Brittany Doyle, a young mother whose husband owned the warehouse next door (this, BTW, came in handy later on for the book overflow problem), who also loved to read, and who also couldn’t stand to see her one local bookstore close its doors.
So Ms. Doyle and her husband, Dave, bought Books New and Used, and she ran the store while nursing her newborn daughter and ferrying her little boy back and forth to elementary school and sports functions. Ms. Doyle fought the good fight for a year, but it wasn’t easy with the children so small, and her hectic mama schedule made keeping regular hours a nightmare.
John Michael Currie had had a problem catching the store open. One day this summer when he did, and had swooped in to buy a last-minute birthday present for one of his grandchildren, he found owner no. 1 and owner no. 2 both there and both looking grave. “They were talking about closing it down,” said Currie.
No, no, no! thought Currie, and started down the road to becoming owner no. 3.
The road wasn’t precisely short or precisely straight, either. Currie, a registered nurse, was not retired yet, but he did consulting work job by job so he was free to do with his time as he pleased. At first, that meant working alongside Ms. Doyle in the bookstore, learning the ropes.
“I looked at five years of Danielle’s sales charts,” said Currie. “You’re not going to get rich off it but it can keep itself open.”
He began to form definite ideas of where he thought the business should go, and on Aug. 31, the Doyles’ deadline, he came into the store with cash in hand and what he thought was his final offer: He’d invest his money in the store, he’d continue working with Ms. Doyle, they’d improve the business to his specifications, then he’d buy it. The Doyles said no thanks, turned off the air conditioning, and prepared to shut the business for good.
“I couldn’t sleep all night long,” said Currie. “I was just thinking about this store closing down. So I came back the next morning and bought it.”
That was Sept. 1. Since then, his attitude toward the store has been a combination of bewilderment as to his motives—“I’ve neglected every other area of my life,” said Currie. “If I could find someone to buy it, I’d sell it in a heartbeat”—and wild, boundless exhilaration: “I immediately had a vision for this place that included this whole building,” he said. “I want boutiques and restaurants and bookstores, things that make my town palatable.”
The whole shopping center, said Currie, would make a great cultural center. “In the middle, you could set up a stage where you could have music, poetry readings, maybe some short plays.” Another storefront could host classes—classes in whatever the community would support, said Currie.
All that’s long-range, and requires the shops to be ceded by their current tenants. Meanwhile, Currie is thinking how he can transform at least the space he already has. He wants to clear out the front of the store to create a seating area, he said, “to have a place where people can recline, rest, read a book, have a cup of coffee.”
Right now, though, as a practical matter, what Currie’s trying to do is reassure the existing customer base by keeping the doors open consistently 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. And he’s organizing the shelves to suit himself, filling any empty spaces he might find there by cherry-picking through about 20,000 books still in boxes that the previous owners never got to.
Currie says the place is doing a fair business so far, with about 25 percent of its customers coming from the interstate a few hundred yards from the store. “They’re on the way back to Michigan or Colorado or Connecticut, and they stop by to buy a book for their way home,” he said.
With that, and regular customers, said Currie: “It pays its own bills, and as long as it keeps doing that, I’m OK.”
As for the future? Currie says either he’ll find a buyer to take over the quest or he'll just continue marching toward glory one slow, book- box-strewed step at a time. “I have a vision that’s very big, that’s huge, but I can’t get there all at one time,” he said.
Nobody ever said saving civilization was easy.
Books New and Used is at 5375 Highway 136 in Trenton, and its telephone number is (706) 657-3144. It is open Tuesday-Sunday 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
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