Book Browsing in Dupont Circle

(Kramerbooks and Afterwords Café façade at right. Image from http://www.kramers.com/about.cfm)

It's a rare thing to see three* independent bookstores operate within a short walking distance of one another. Even before the internet threw the publishing industry into an uncertain abyss, corporate behemoths like Borders and Barnes & Noble endangered smaller establishments, and the meeker storefronts generally remained few and far between.
But the neighborhood where Sinclair Lewis wrote Main Street boasts a handful of local bookshops all surviving even in the presence of a Books-A-Million (the area’s one chain, stocking the lousiest selection). Here is the lowdown on my favorite literary emporiums in Dupont Circle:

*I know that Lambda Rising counts as a Dupont bookstore, but since it comes from a GLBT angle, I plan to profile it in a future post on District GLBT places of interest.

Kramerbooks & Afterwords Café – 1517 Connecticut Ave. NW – Open until 1 a.m. every day and 24 hours on Fridays and Saturdays, this bookshop/eatery transcends the lowly standing usually reserved for businesses focused on literature and assumes a loftier, glossier position – that of a nightlife staple. Though most of its profit presumably comes from food and drink, its retail space, outfitted with one of the widest fiction selections in the District, usually bustles well into the night.
New releases, encompassing literature, essays and memoirs, lie to the left upon entering. In front of the distant wall dedicated entirely to fiction, several shelves carry major titles in philosophy and theology, many of which would appeal to the city’s liberal population, but enough that would challenge its groupthink propensities as well.
Closer to the café entrance are the larger history, specialty and self-help sections. Through another corridor one finds the bar (in a bookstore? No reason to ever leave…) and, understandably separate, a decent children/teens section.
Poetry is lacking in Kramerbooks, however, occupying only one part of a slim shelf back near the literature and philosophy. This weak point is common to many booksellers, but after such a strong showing in fiction it comes off a tad disappointing. It makes the place seem incomplete, though only barely.
Prices are average – as a broke college student I wouldn’t make more than two purchases at a time. Service is helpful, but because the place attracts throngs, not as intimate as other independent shops.
The crowd does allow the shopper to flip through pages as long as he or she likes without arousing impatience, but don’t expect to get any appreciable reading done in the store itself – nowhere to sit outside the dining area, and a din of voices and music fills the space constantly. But it’s not an unbearable din, by any means, and the playlists are usually decent and diverse – I’ve heard Fleet Foxes switched to Van Halen in one sitting.

Books for America – 1417 22nd St. NW – Farther away from the traffic circle, tucked in an unusually schizophrenic spot between Soho Café and Club Apex, lies this gem of used bookseller. Books for America relies on donations and volunteers to achieve its endearingly basic mission – encouraging reading and literacy in the District – by offering the cheapest deals on books anywhere beyond a yard sale.
For instance, on my first visit I arrived with $3.50 in my wallet, intending only to browse. I came away with Waiting for Godot, A View from the Bridge and Inherit the Wind. Not an everyday occurrence, especially for frequenting an establishment that looks like part of a shopping center.
The problem with a donations-only bookstore, however, is that the selection can range from extravagant on one day to paltry the next. It depends on how many gracious philanthropists are donating, and gracious philanthropists are scarce these days (I don’t blame them, though). When I bought three of the most eminent titles in drama that day, I essentially cleared out all the relevant titles in Books for America’s drama section. I’m sure it has been replenished since then, but there’s no real way of knowing what you will or won’t find while shopping.
That said, this store stocks plenty. (The bookmark they give away with purchases encourages the buyer to donate their books back upon finishing. I fully endorse this policy, even if I don’t flawlessly live up to it.) With a plain, hectic arrangement, the lo-fi aura within lets the shopper feel as if he or she were sifting through a literary dumping ground, searching for glistening titles both renowned and obscure.
They may be hard to find quickly – if they are there at all – but when time permits the digging can be as rewarding as the discoveries.

Second Story Books – 2000 P St. NW – This is a collector’s bookstore, which means no cheap purchases here. But that doesn’t mean it’s unworthy of a browse, either. Both Second Story’s Dupont and Rockville, Md. locations specialize in rare items, mostly hardcover, that ordinarily only an internet search could produce.
The store’s interior looks more like a library than a local shop, with tall wooden shelves eliciting an administrative vibe. But their contents are far from mundane – in the literary criticism section I came across books so old that their jackets had World War II propaganda written on the inside cover. Though fiction is sparse, I found an edition of Tropic of Capricorn from the first year it legally printed in the United States.
Of course, jewels like these are expensive. Only the tables outside offer any cheap deals, and I found much of their contents sub-par. But taking down an original Mencken, sitting down on the partially obscured chair in the far left corner, and reading a few pages while Billie Holiday played on the loudspeakers made the visit worthwhile. Even though I could never in my dreams afford the book I held, I felt distinguished just having the opportunity to flip through it.
And collectors – this is your local diamond mine. Come prepared to strike it rich.

The Record, the Biz and the District

(Som Records' interior. Image from somrecordsdc.com)

Before you bemoan the oft-heralded demise of music retailers in the internet age, take a walk along the 2300 block of 18th Street NW in Adam’s Morgan until you hear gritty rock and roll playing outside a storefront.
Turn and look up. Manikin legs clad in brightly-colored stockings dangle over a ledge beside a neon sign belonging to Smash, a music and lifestyle store that’s also a wildly successful District staple.
Look down. Crooked Beat Records, specializing in vinyl, sits in a lower adjacent space and fares just as well. Down 18th street, before the incline, Red Onion Records and Books, yet another steady music distribution business, stands tucked next to a drycleaner. Further south, DJ Hut and Melody Record Shop serve Dupont Circle. Over on 14th Street, Som Records stocks only vinyl LPs and faces no serious financial trouble to speak of.
So is this city some sort of anomaly, housing a formidable number of successful music enterprises at a time when others around the country are closing in droves?
It might have something to do with what products the District stores choose to emphasize.
“It’s an accepted theory that the CD industry will not survive,” says Red Onion owner Josh Harkavy, explaining that what sets thriving independent businesses like his apart from failing chains like Virgin and Tower is the small places’ focus on vinyl. He argues that the business model embraced by mega-stores, being CD-based, precipitated their own doom. In the meantime, he adds, vinyl “isn’t going anywhere.”
Matt Goyner, a Crooked Beat cashier with noticeably highlighted hair that seems to explode in a mushroom cloud above his head, agrees. CDs, he says, are more disposable and not as “aesthetically pleasing.” While he admits that LPs will never again achieve the popularity they enjoyed in their heyday, he has noticed an increased interest in the medium that Crooked Beat relies on – though its stock includes all sorts of music products, revenue comes primarily from vinyl. (A seemingly antiquated sign in the window reads, “We sell turntables!”)
“They [LPs] are probably hipper these days,” Goyner says.
National statistics appear to back up these assertions. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, the organization behind the manufacture and distribution of 85 percent of the country’s recorded music, LPs are the only physical sources of music that saw a spike in sales last year. It was a considerable jump – 147.7 percent. Digital sales, by comparison, were up only 16.5 percent. CD sales fell 26.6 percent, and revenue from music videos and DVDs was cut down by more than half from 2007 to 2008.
Total sales for all physical music are down about as much as those of CDs, accounting for the horror stories usually associated with running a modern music business. But for longtime District establishments that never embraced the shiny round phenomena of the 90s, times aren’t so harrowing.
“We’re up and down, but we’re alright,” says Alec Budd, a part-time cashier working sometimes at Smash, sometimes at Som Records, with mutton chops that extend at least and inch and a half from his cheeks. Som deals exclusively with vinyl – large dark LPs decorate its interior like wallpaper – and Budd says that the store puts new products on the stands every week. Like Goyner, he finds the vinyl aesthetic of a higher quality than their smaller, silvery counterparts, citing the superior sound and packaging.
“CDs,” he says, “didn’t even last a generation.”
Over at Red Onion, Harkavy says that in addition to being a better product, vinyl enjoys popularity because it represents a “backlash against the digitalization of music…a return to something real” – something a music fan can hold in his or her hands, a visible piece of culture to add to a collection.
In fact, collectors are the reason independent record stores continue to survive into the twenty-first century. Goyner explains that all the stores in the area “are targeting niche markets” – vinyl collectors, almost without exception – to establish themselves as “destination shops” for the subculture.
Budd expands on this idea, saying that the availability of multiple record stores within walking distance from one another has secured the city’s Northwest quadrant as a place where collectors want to be – music enthusiasts from the suburbs can drive in and make an event out of expanding their collections.
Budd concedes that sometimes changing media can bring about a low period – claiming to have worked in District record shops since the mid-90s, he can recollect a handful popular local stores no longer in existence – Phantasmagoria, Orpheus and Vinyl, Inc. are among the many. Although they tanked, the community they served – the same one now frequenting Som, Red Onion, et al. – stuck around.
“I sure spent a lot of money there,” says Budd.
A report by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which represents the recording industry in 72 countries, shows that digital music now makes up 20 percent of the music market worldwide. The U.S. is responsible for half that market, but the most pernicious menace to retailers seems to be music downloaded illegally – 40 billion files around the world were obtained without payment in 2008 alone. For every five albums purchased, 95 are pirated.
But these startling numbers don’t phase local record shops. They are fully aware of the juggernaut that online downloading and person-to-person (P2P) file sharing has become. It bears little consequences on their intended clientele.
“No one will buy a CD for $10-$15 when they can download it [the album] for free,” says Harvaky, but “vinyl never went anywhere.” The collectors he caters to don’t want intangible albums. They want real products for their stashes at home.
The District’s music community also does what it can to keep its record stores – and in some cases, its lifeblood – open and bustling. Local bands play occasional in-store performances at Crooked Beat and Som, and the publicity they offer is rewarding in turn – all the stores mentioned here stock albums from local acts, opening the bands up to a market they need. The retailers do what they can to embrace the community, hoping to maintain their images as hallmarks.
“We’re going to keep going with what we are doing,” says Goyner as another two young, bearded customers descend the steps to enter Crooked Beat. “People aren’t going to stop listening to music, and they probably won’t stop buying it.”