Jason Hafer's Mission Statement - Impressions, Editions and Primacies

My bookstore, Wolfgang Books, is on the second floor of an old Odd Fellows building in downtown Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. Wolfgang Books sells new, used and collectible books of distinction, with a strong literary focus. The collection is general, but generally literary, which means that I may have a sports section, but you are more likely to find George Plimpton in it than a ubiquitous Bo Jackson memoir or the latest chronicle of steroids in baseball. I happily carry classics (established and emerging), even if I only sell one a year, and I feel genuine embarrassment if I don’t have a good book in stock when somebody comes looking for it.

I tend to hold bookstores up to a different standard than other businesses. A bookstore should be a place of inspiration and illumination, and on its best nights (nights, always) a bookstore should be a place of magic. At the front of Wolfgang Books, overlooking the street, is a sun porch that is generally referred to as the Reading Room, and I want novels to be written, great problems tackled and poets to fall in love in the Reading Room.

Inspiration, Illumination, Magic, Romance. These are the concepts at the top of my business plan. Stock turn, merchandising, pre-release promotion, discount structures, and store marketing are all concepts that have a role in a successful bookstore, but if the magic isn’t there, and the romance isn’t there, or if they aren’t at least sought after, a bookstore becomes just another retail establishment, and a bookstore should aspire for more than that.

With a bookstore, once you take away the romance and lose the magic you have begun to disrespect the books themselves and the authors behind them and the people who read them, centuries of them, a whole tradition and history boiled down to a nonexistent share of a company, a lifeless thing with no soul, no heart, that you can buy for around the price of a hardcover book on the New York Stock Exchange.

Above all else (and there is a lot else) it’s the emptiness of a chain store, the hollow feeling caused by the sameness and weak-minded reverence to stock values and fear of making a statement or taking a risk that keeps me away from them and their mission. They are retailers. I am a bookseller.

What’s more, I am determined to think this way. I am by nature a problem solver and a planner, and I do enjoy those parts of the business, but I find myself constantly working towards my idea of bookstore pure. I turn to Sylvia Beach’s memoir about her life within her great Shakespeare and Company bookstore for inspiration. If I don’t know how to handle a situation in my store, I think about how Sylvia would handle it (or at least the Sylvia I have created), and I act accordingly. This allows me to serve the books and their readers rather than the other way around.

This may all sound heady or self-congratulatory, but that is not my intention. I am idealistic to a genuine fault, but at a certain point I decided I would no longer try to corral that and would instead embrace it and see where it takes me. Right now it is taking me deeper and deeper into a lifetime of bookselling, and I look forward to sharing some stories and perspectives with you over the next few weeks. I thank the Accountant for the opportunity to share these things.