Transcription of Josh Christie for the show Read & Relax #273
Lisa Belisle: Today it is my great pleasure to have in the studio again with me Josh Christie. Josh is the co-owner of Print: A Book Store, a new independent book store in Portland on the East End. Josh is also an author of four books, most recently of Skiing Maine. A lifelong Mainer, Josh lives in Yarmouth with his wife, Katie. Thanks for coming back in again.
Josh Christie: Thanks so much for having me.
Lisa Belisle: You’ve had some exciting things happen to you since the last time we interviewed you a couple years ago.
Josh Christie: Yeah, yeah, it’s been two books since then. When I was on before, I was with my father, and we were talking about The Maine Outdoor Adventure Guide, which has since been published, and he and I wrote a second book together, Skiing Maine, which was just published this fall. Separate from all that I left my position at Sherman’s Books here in Portland to open my own independent bookstore.
Lisa Belisle: That’s a lot. How have you managed to kind of balance all those different things?
Josh Christie: Well, you’ve mentioned in my bio my wife, and having a supportive spouse helps a lot, and having just lots of energy, a thirst for trying new things and creative things has really helped drive me.
Lisa Belisle: This is something that … You’re in the middle of this interesting trend so first we had small independent bookstores, then we had these big box bookstores that came in and kind of gobbled up a lot of small independent bookstores, but you’ve been with Sherman’s, and Sherman’s and obviously had its own really important stake and claim in the marketplace, but you’ve gone beyond that. You’re bringing the small independent bookstore new, back again.
Josh Christie: Yeah, yeah. With Print, we’re the fourth independent bookstore in Portland along with Sherman’s, Longfellow, and LetterPress. If you want to include the greater Portland area, we have Bull Moose with books now, we have None Such Books in South Portland, we have The Book Review in Falmouth. There’s so many great small independent bookstores in the area, and it’s really part of a larger trend nationally. If you look at the number of stores since 2011, I believe there is more opening than closing every year. There’s a reaction after all the things you mentioned, the big box stores, and then Amazon and online book selling after that, which seem like they might be the death blow to independent bookstores. After the recession, bookstores really bounced back.
Lisa Belisle: Why? Why is that so?
Josh Christie: So many are really good at knowing their community, I think is a big part of it. You really are integrated in your town, and you act not just as a retail space but also as a community space. There are things like author events and programming with schools, galleries, and stuff like that that can’t be accomplished by an online enterprise. You have to have a stake in your community.
Lisa Belisle: One of the things that I like the most about the independent bookstores I go to is the recommendations. I like finding a person on the staff who seems to have kind of a similar interest and be like, “Oh, that person recommends this book, and I read that book, I like it, I’m going to choose this other one that this person recommends.” Is that a big part of what you would be offering?
Josh Christie: Yeah, that’s the same kind of stake that I was talking about. You really know that you can look at a large, either brick and mortar or a large online bookseller and they have everything or they can argue that they have everything, but there’s really not a great deal of curation. It’s just everything kind of at the same level or everything based on how much publishers are paying for advertising to lift their books up within the search algorithm or where they’re surfaced on a site or in a store, whereas in an independent bookstore, we’re really just driving sales by what our staff really likes. We hired a lot of readers, everyone we hired at Print and my partner and I both have years of experience, either in publishing or in bookstores and have a really diverse array of tastes, so we don’t all read the same things. We really build our stock based on what our staff likes and our response from the community, which is why if you have, like I said, four independent bookstores in Portland, we’ll all have different stock. There’ll be some crossovers, but each will be reflective of the people behind that store and the people that work at that store.
Lisa Belisle: You’re also the only bookstore on the East End.
Josh Christie: We are, yes. The only new bookstore. Carlson & Turner are the great antiquarian and used bookstore just up the block from us. We felt like that the growth going on in the East End, and Emily and I both have family that live up there, we felt like it was a community that would really support a bookstore and needed this kind of store and needed this kind of retail as the growth happened, before it all became… you know, God love ’em, but restaurants and condominiums and stuff like that. I think a strong retail base is really important there as well.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah, it’s actually a fun neighborhood because they do have… they have Rosemont up there. They do have really wonderful restaurants, and it seems like even just down the block from where you are, there’s a number of retail establishments that are doing kind of interesting things.
Josh Christie: Yep, yep. There’s the knitting store, there’s a couple gift shops, there’s, again, Carlson & Turner. Just a lot of really cool spaces.
Lisa Belisle: If your bookstore has its own flavor based on who you have hired what would you describe that flavor to be? What’s the vibe you’re putting out?
Josh Christie: We are kind of unabashedly progressive at the store. That’s certainly reflective in our staff and in the stock we have at the store. We’re also very event driven. We want to be really supportive of local authors in all kinds of different ways by what we do for programming at the store. Those are the ways that are most reflective of the store. We’re also going to be very unpretentious. We want to be welcoming to people no matter what they read, we don’t want people to feel like there’s a certain type of book they should feel embarrassed to ask about at the store or something like that. We want people to come in and try everything, get whatever they want to get, and we’re also super supportive of small presses. We have a dedicated small press section in our store. That means small presses in Maine like Tilbury House and Islandport and places like that, but also on the national scale, Milkweed Editions and Melville House and some of the small presses from other parts of the country.
Lisa Belisle: What’s important about small presses?
Josh Christie: The same thing, I think, as independent bookstores. They’re publishing voices that aren’t necessarily as well known. They can take more chances because they’re doing smaller things. I think there’s the idea behind a lot of larger publishers, the same as in the movie business, that you need, or even the music business, you need a blockbuster, you need a sure thing, and that makes it much harder for them if they look at the P and L, look at that profit and loss sheet, for what they’re going to bring in for manuscripts. If something’s not a sure thing, it’s a much harder thing for them to take a chance on. So many small presses are driven more by what their mission statement is, whether it’s to publish poets or progressive work or people of color, whatever it is, they’re driven by that more than just the profit.
Lisa Belisle: How has it been, as somebody who has both worked with Sherman’s but also now owns his own bookstore, how has it been to see the increased number of people who are self-publishing, and how does that interact with the book store idea?
Josh Christie: It’s been interesting. There’s more books being published today than any time in history, and a big part of that is the self-publishing side of things. It’s been great as a democratizing force. Again, people that wouldn’t necessarily have their books published otherwise are able to create a book. It does put a lot of, I don’t want to say stress, but it does add a new dimension to buying for the store, because each self-published book is essentially their own publisher. If we’re working for a sales rep for say Penguin Random House, we look at their catalog of thousands of books that are coming that season, we put in one order for those, we work with them for the shipping and the billing and all of that whereas every self-published author for the most part has a book, so it’s an independent invoice, it’s independent shipping, it’s independent all of that stuff. It does add some complexity, and there is also a gatekeeping aspect that, again, adds another layer to our work because, again, pretty much anyone can self-publish a book, so there’s not necessarily an editorial process behind it. We need to look at it a little more closely to know if it will fit well with our stock.
On the other hand, there are things that are hyper local, books about Portland, books about Munjoy Hill, books about our neighborhood that there wouldn’t necessarily, with good reason, be a national market for, but it’s something that we could find we could do really well within our store.
Lisa Belisle: Because you have written and published yourself four books, you must have an interesting and unique perspective on the creation of books and the marketing and selling of books.
Josh Christie: Yeah, you get a real sense of you appreciate every author that comes in, all the work that went into the book. To me at least it’s not just an object that has arrived on our shelves. I kind of understand the process behind it and the number of years that went into it and the number of people that had their hands in it. This is especially true of traditionally published books, where you have the author but also copy editors and developmental editors and publicists and cover designers and all of that that work together to create this final product. It does make it harder to dismiss books when they come into the store or when we see them in a catalog. We kind of know what went into it.
Lisa Belisle: I love to read, so I read books of all different stripes, and one of the things I’ve noticed about self-published books is that there is not the same level of editing, which is interesting because I’m not sure that many of us think about the importance of an editorial staff. Not many of us think about the fact that it takes many hands to actually get a product from Point A to Point B.
Josh Christie: Yes. Yeah, it’s something for me, a topic that often comes up when I talk with people that are considering how they’re going ti publish their book, is they often bring up the fact that if they self-publish, they get x%, you know, 80% or something like that of the sale price of each book, whereas just to be totally frank, for most of the books I’ve had, they were all traditionally published and I get, you know, somewhere between 10 and 20%, if that, of each book sold, and having gone through the process it’s easy to understand that all that other percentage, it’s not going to some, you know, mustache twirling, cigar chomping editor that’s just collecting money, it’s going to all of these different people that had a hand in the book, and my books wouldn’t have sold as they did, they wouldn’t have looked as good as they did, they wouldn’t have been the product they were without all these hands in it. I appreciate wanting, looking at a book as a singular thing and thinking, “Well, I wrote this so I should get, you know, almost all of the profit that comes from it.” It really does come from a community that created a book.
Lisa Belisle: I have appreciated, I mean, I’ve read self-published books that were very good and that seemed okay and fine without the levels of editing that usually one has, and then I have read other self-published books that I’ve just been like, you know, there’s so much of this that was good, and I think that if they had just had a good, even a good copy editor. Maybe someone who could find those apostrophes that were misplaced, or if they had some sort of content editor who could just say, “Move those sentences around. The flow is going to improve if you do that.” I think it’s an interesting thing that artists, we like to believe that we’re all spontaneously creative and amazing in every part of this, but it’s not necessarily true.
Josh Christie: Yeah, and it’s certainly not to sound dismissive because, of course, there are traditionally published books that could use those same improvements that somehow made it through without having them made, and there are self-published books that are really excellent, and there’s all kinds of different levels of cooperative publishing and different levels of independent presses that are somewhere in between those two extremes that we’ve kind of created in this conversation here. Yeah, it’s just all kinds of different ways that a book can come to market now, and I think generally speaking that’s really good for the book market, it’s good for us because we have a greater number of books that we can pick from, and it does make our job harder because we have to be more selective in what we’re bringing in, but at Sherman’s and already at Print, some of our best-selling books were locally published books or self-published books. The list was always a nice mix of big presses, small presses, traditionally published, self-published. Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: You have a book about skiing, you have the Maine outdoor adventure guide, and you also have one about the Maine beer trail? Is that …
Josh Christie: Well, I have the two books I wrote before those, one is a large book published by Cider Mill Press in Kennebunkport and distributed internationally about stouts and porters, so just specifically those two styles, and then my first book was called Maine Beer, and it’s a history of the brewing industry in Maine, a history of brewing here in the state from the earliest European settlers up through prohibition and modern day brewing and then a profile of every brew in the state at that time in 2013, which was, I think, 42 breweries, and now we’re up to 89, so in the space of three years. So it’s amazing how fast it’s grown.
Lisa Belisle: I was going to give you a ton of credit for being so prescient.
Josh Christie: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: That you were out there writing about this stuff as it was happening, and now it’s like independent book stores, now it’s like the sweet spot.
Josh Christie: Yeah, it’s a book that came out at the right time. I was lucky that it came out when it did because it was just kind of on the cusp of this big explosion of growth in brewing in Maine because, again, it’s doubled in the space of three years from the number that had grown from when David Geary opened his brewery in the mid 80s until 2013. The same number have opened in the last three years as had opened in those 25.
Lisa Belisle: What is it that you think about yourself that has enabled you to tap into this greater something? You know, the fact that, “Oh, I’m going to write about beer. Oh my gosh, beer is like, now it’s so big,” and, “I’m going to have this independent book store,” and people are craving this. How are you, and what’s the gist of this here? What’s the magic Josh thing going on?
Josh Christie: Oh wow, I wish I knew. A lot of credit goes to my dad who worked in industries, again, doing the same kind of thing in his time when he was my age, which would have been the 60s and 70s. He was doing advertising and he owned Saddleback up in Rangeley, and he was the first person to partner with Hannaford Brothers to put coupons on the back of their receipts so that they could get a ski ticket, which now any supermarket you go to, you see coupons on the back of the receipts. It’s just this idea of looking at a need that isn’t being met or some cool creative idea that no one has had before. It’s hard to say what the nexus or where creativity comes from, but hopefully it was just being raised to question things and look at whether things are being done in the best way they could or see if this is something that I really think is cool and important and want to support, and probably more often than not you gave two examples of things that I was right about. I’m probably wrong far more often than I’m right but you get to get behind the things that you really like, and sometimes society follows you and sees the same thing.
Lisa Belisle: That’s a really important point, and you chose some things that you felt passionate about that you actually wanted to spend the time researching and learning about and writing about and getting behind to market. I think that that’s something that sometimes we’re not sure that we want to take the chance to do.
Josh Christie: Yeah, I mean it does take, you have to kind of banish fear from your mind. If you’re worried that something isn’t going to catch on, or if you’re worried that you’re wrong, it’s very easy to convince yourself not to pursue something, and people do that every day. They decide not to take the chance that they were going to take because it’s safer to keep doing what they’ve been doing, so you just have to take the leap sometimes.
Lisa Belisle: Sometimes, I think, we don’t know what we don’t know. We think, “Well, nobody’s ever put something out into the world so maybe there’s no, nobody wants it.”
Josh Christie: Right.
Lisa Belisle: If you don’t put it out there, you won’t know whether people really want it or not.
Josh Christie: Yeah, and someone else will figure out that they do, and they’ll put it out there.
Lisa Belisle: Ugh. That’s actually the worst, if you think, “Oh, I should really do this,” and then ten years later, you read, “That’s the book that I was going to write.”
Josh Christie: Exactly, yeah.
Lisa Belisle: I guess that’s sort of the lesson, is, you know, if you think that something is going to be important, you need to kind of get behind it.
Josh Christie: Absolutely. Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: You’ve been spending a lot of time writing, working in bookstores, creating this bookstore. How are you going to continue to balance? I’m assuming that as a writer, you’re going to want to keep writing.
Josh Christie: Yeah, well it’s a benefit to me. All I’ve really written in the past, and all I really have any aspiration to do, is write non-fiction, which is easier for me to wrap my head around, and having done it for ten years now, I have a decent idea of how to outline and schedule my time and structure pieces and stuff like that. I can’t imagine how much energy it takes to write fiction and come up with these stories and edit and all of that, but, again, I think mostly comes down to the fact that these things that I thankfully was right about and am passionate about are avocations, you know, I would be skiing and reading and drinking local beer, whether I was writing about them or not. It’s in my spare time that I’m often pursuing these interests and then realize, “Oh, I could write about this,” or “Oh, I want to say this thing about this beer or this thing about this hike.” It’s that blessing of it not feeling like work, I guess.
Lisa Belisle: What is it that you currently are interested in that you’re kind of noodling around and spending time doing?
Josh Christie: Right now, well since the store opened the day before Thanksgiving and we’re headed into the holidays, that’s kind of where all my mental energy is right now. I’ll be writing ski columns for the Sunday Telegram all through the winter, and there’s a couple places like Black Mountain up in Rumford that I haven’t had a chance to visit in a couple years that I’d really like to write about, a cool, community-focused mountain that has a lot of side country and glade skiing, which are types of skiing that I really enjoy. Still planning on going up there, and then once we get through the holidays at Print and get a little more, hopefully, breathing room when we hit January, I’d really like to go back and look at either a revised edition or a second edition of my Maine Beer book just because the market has doubled in Maine since it came out, and it’s a story that was so fun to tell and people are still interested in but is getting sadly out of date.
Lisa Belisle: I guess that’s good. It seems like it would be kind of a fun thing to be able to look into the beer scene.
Josh Christie: Yeah, again, that’s the great thing is that it doesn’t feel like work. I want to do it because I want to do it, because I want to talk with these new brewers that have opened breweries or places that have expanded or places that have changed in the last three years and see what their stories are.
Lisa Belisle: I remember interviewing you and your father, and what a big personality he had. I know he passed away in May, and I actually kind of felt like, when I learned of this, it felt like a loss, even though I had only met him for this interview. How have you been doing with that?
Josh Christie: It’s been hard. It was unexpected. Although he was getting older, he didn’t have any serious or at least imminent feeling health problems. He ended up passing away from a rather large heart attack. It was totally unexpected. He was healthy and hiking and kayaking and all the stuff that he had done for years, for decades. It was a big shock, and luckily, not luckily, but by just coincidence, I had just about decided that we were going to open Print a couple days before he passed away, and I had gone up to visit my parents because it was Mother’s Day weekend, and I had told him about my plans for the store and stuff like that, and then he passed away the next day. I felt like I got to communicate this major change in my life to him, which has given me a kind of a sense of, you know, a sense of zen, a sense of calm around his passing. Of course, I wish he was still here, but in a lot of ways I feel like I got everything from him that he needed to give me or that he wanted to give me to live my life.
It’s cyclical, we’re in our first series of big, major family holidays now since he passed away with Thanksgiving and Christmas and the end of the year, so that will be tough. You know, he kind of lives on through my brother and I and our work and our mom, and yeah, there is something very cool about the fact that he built his career and built his name in the ski industry, and I’ve been lucky enough to do some work in skiing, but it’s almost always in the shadow of his name and his reputation here in the state of Maine, but I’ve built a reputation, at least in New England and the world of independent bookselling, that kind of mirrors what he was doing at the same time when he was my age in skiing, so that’s really a cool thing.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah, that is interesting that you started, and you did a lot of collaboration kind of in his field, but, you’ve benefited from that, but then you also get to have your own thing, and he got to see a lot of this evolve.
Josh Christie: Right. Yeah. It is what it is, and as someone told me right after it happened, we all, everyone loses their parents eventually, it’s just, sometimes it’s sooner than others. It was always going to happen, and where we were in our lives and our relationship, it was… It’s never good, but better now than it could have been, I guess.
Lisa Belisle: Your wife Katie, you mentioned, is very supportive of all of the work that you do. What is her big passion in her life?
Josh Christie: She does a lot of dance. She’s a scientist for a company called EnviroLogix. That’s her day job, but she does a lot of dance and fitness instruction, she teaches Zumba and Buddhi yoga in Portland at a couple different places, and she’s deeply involved with Vivid Motion, which is the non-profit dance troupe here in Portland that does the Nutcracker Burlesque every year at the St. Lawrence Arts Center, which is kind of a tradition in the East End of Portland. Those are her big things right now.
Lisa Belisle: It sounds like both of you have this very kind of interesting creative side and this very interesting linear side. Both of you have that. It must be …
Josh Christie: Yeah, that might explain something about why we got together.
Lisa Belisle: Well, then, it probably explains something about why you’ve been able to support one another in your lives.
Josh Christie: Yeah, yeah. She and I have both been very understanding of each other’s very long hours. For her, it’s often early in the morning, either going into work or teaching early morning fitness classes, and when I’m working on stuff for the store, it tends to be very late in the evening that it’s keeping me there, but it’s a relationship that really works well. We both love to cook and are, don’t love to, but are fairly obsessed with keeping the house clean, so if one of us is home, we know we can do it and rely on the other one to do it when we aren’t there. It works really well.
Lisa Belisle: I know this is a very busy time for you, so I feel like I’m quite blessed that you were able to run down here and do this interview with us, and at the last minute.
Josh Christie: Of course, yeah.
Lisa Belisle: That’s even better. I love what you’re doing. Since you just opened, I haven’t had a chance to go up there, but I will very soon because I love bookstores, and I’ll be there. I’ll probably be haunting you guys. I’ve been speaking with Josh …
Josh Christie: Go out there.
Lisa Belisle: Yes, absolutely. I’ve been speaking with Josh Christie, who is the co-owner of Print: A Bookstore and also an author in his own right. He lives in Yarmouth with his wife, Katie. Thanks so much for coming in, and I encourage people to spend a little time in your bookstore.
Josh Christie: Thank you so much.