After a half-century, Elliott Bay Book Company is surviving and thriving

Neighborhood Reads

When I moved to Seattle in May 2000, my first destination was the Elliott Bay Book Company. Elliott Bay was the literary heart of Seattle, a world-famous bookstore with a packed readings calendar that boasted the biggest authors in the world and a notoriously well-read staff. A few days later, after an interview with then store manager and current co-owner Tracy Taylor, I accepted a job as a bookseller.

It’s no exaggeration to say that working at Elliott Bay for eight years completely changed the course of my life for the better. My co-workers taught me about authors, books and ideas that broadened and deepened my understanding of the world. I made lifelong friends there, and I met and fell in love with the woman who would become my wife.

Nothing about my story is remarkable. Hundreds of people have worked at Elliott Bay since Walter and Maggie Carr opened its doors in a small Pioneer Square storefront on June 29, 1973. Hundreds of thousands of customers have walked through its doors in the five decades since. In 1976, the Carrs hired a young man named Rick Simonson who launched the shop’s reading series, and tens of thousands of authors from around the globe — from Haruki Murakami to Amy Tan to Salman Rushdie — have since read in Elliott Bay’s reading room. There’s a very good chance that you, reading these words right now, have a treasured Elliott Bay memory of your own.

While Elliott Bay feels to many like a fixed point in Seattle’s firmament, every decade or so the store goes through a period of rapid change. Taylor, who started at Elliott Bay in 1990, recalls that after decades of steady expansion, sales and foot traffic began to decline through the latter half of the ’90s. The Carrs sold the store to Third Place Books owner Ron Scher in 1999, and the employee Sher brought on to oversee the store, Peter Aaron, became minority owner of Elliott Bay in 2001 and bought the store outright in 2009.

“Peter really came in with a lot of optimism as to what the store could do,” Taylor explains, “and he built up things a little bit. But when the recession hit in 2008, sales really, really dried up.” With the help of developer Michael Malone, Aaron found a new home for the bookstore on Capitol Hill, at 1521 10th Ave. While commenters on news sites loudly lamented the loss of the Pioneer Square space as more evidence of old Seattle’s death, Capitol Hill embraced Elliott Bay immediately.

“The day we opened, on April 14, 2010, we had people lined up all the way around the block to just come in and see the bookstore,” Taylor says. “And every year since, we have seen our business increase.”

Almost exactly one decade later, the pandemic arrived. On March 3, 2020, “we had Dave Matthews in the store with 500 people,” Taylor recalls. But 10 days later, as panic set in, “we had maybe 25 chairs in the reading room, all separated 6 feet apart.”

Just days before lockdowns sent everybody home, Elliott Bay staff voted to unionize. Unlike large retailers like Amazon and Starbucks that are combating labor action, Aaron immediately recognized the union. Taylor credits him for doing “an extraordinary job of leading the store through both unionization and COVID at the same time, and working to get what I think is a very solid and reasonable first contract with the union, which is not an easy thing to do.”

By the time the store was on even footing again, Aaron decided it was time to move on. Taylor partnered with local restaurateur Joey Burgess and Burgess’ husband, former Nordstrom design director Murf Hall, to buy the bookstore in 2022. For the first time in the store’s history, the new owners point out with pride, Elliott Bay is woman- and queer-owned.

“Personally, I work better with partners,” Taylor says. “I’ve been there 32 years, and it’s really good to have an outside perspective.”

Neither Burgess nor Hall have bookselling experience, though both have been customers at Elliott Bay for years. “We’re avid readers,” Burgess says, “and for me, walking into that bookstore is magic. It’s my favorite shop in Seattle.”

Hall’s retail design background has reshaped the front of the store for the better, gently guiding customers first through the Northwest section (“because the out-of-town visitors that come to Elliott Bay want to take something from the Northwest home with them,” Hall explains) and then into an impressive wall of bookseller recommendations, immediately giving even first-time shoppers a sense of the store’s personality.

Astute regular browsers will notice that the new owners are experimenting with section placement. When a Glossier outpost opened across the street, its customers bought nearly every romance book in the entire store over a single weekend, Taylor explains, so now the romance section has tripled in size and moved to a more prominent location.

Hall, Burgess, and Taylor are already in the midst of planning events, art and merchandise to commemorate Elliott Bay’s 50th anniversary this June, along with a new chef and menu in the store’s cafe. Hall teases a plan for “a special feature in the kids section. We have two young daughters who beam every time they go into the bookstore, so we are really going to put some effort into making a special moment for the neighborhood kids.”

And while Simonson has restarted the reading series, the calendar is still nowhere near as bustling as it was in pre-pandemic times. “Publishers are not sending authors out in the way that they did before,” Taylor says, “but we would really like to ramp up our reading series back to the level that it was so that we’re doing free nightly events in the store and out in the community. People are eager to come back, and they want to come to readings.”

Burgess says when the 50th anniversary party happens in June, he wants it to be “a celebration of Walter and Maggie and Peter and Tracy and the booksellers and the union” who helped the store “survive, and then thrive” over the last half-century.

While many individuals have made lasting marks through the years, Elliott Bay is an institution that is greater than any one person. It takes a community of tens of thousands of people dedicated to the love of books — authors, readers, book clubs, children and scores of passionate booksellers — to build something this special.

What are Elliott Bay booksellers reading?

Books don’t often make it to the Elliott Bay Book Company bestseller list without the help of passionate booksellers. Co-owner Tracy Taylor says M. Wylie Blanchet’s “The Curve of Time,” an adventure story about a widow and five children embracing the peoples and nature of Northwest, “has been a consistent seller at Elliott Bay since we first opened our doors in 1973” because it’s charmed generations of booksellers.

Publishers are eager to get advance copies of books in the hands of Elliott Bay booksellers because their influence can result in thousands of sales. A bookseller named Chester recalls getting an early galley of Nicola Griffith’s feminist retelling of the Arthurian legend “Spear,” “and having to wait a year to start recommending it was agony.”

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Local authors and subjects get special attention at Elliott Bay. Rania recommends “Essential Labor,” by Seattle author (and former Elliott Bay bookseller) Angela Garbes, which “teaches us that mothering is highly-skilled, vital labor.” Graham calls BJ Cummings’ biography of the Duwamish, “The River That Made Seattle,” “an insightful, carefully researched history of the river, its watershed and of the people, both Native and immigrant.”

After Elliott Bay’s move to Capitol Hill, the children’s section ballooned to meet the demand of the young families who now lived within walking distance. Co-owner Murf Hall calls “Bathe the Cat” by Alice B. McGinty a “bouncy and rhyming story perfect for a read-aloud story time,” as well as “the best queer and diverse children’s book” he’s encountered in “a long while.”

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story misstated when Peter Aaron bought full ownership of Elliott Bay Book Company.