Jake Reiss got into bookselling for the money and the girls. Now that he’s ninety years old, he cares less about both, but he still gets up seven days a week and goes to work at what might be the strangest bookstore in America.
Outside, the Alabama Booksmith is so unassuming it’s as if Reiss had forgotten that he was running a retail business: a two-story, nearly windowless structure, surrounded by office parks and parking lots, on a dead-end street in a suburb of Birmingham. Inside, the vibe is half 1970, half 1870, with wood panelling, rattan chairs, and a drop-tile ceiling—but also patterned tablecloths, cozy curtains, a functioning fireplace, and an oversized hourglass. As for the books, they sit on uncrowded shelves along the outer walls, almost all facing out so that customers can, indeed, judge them by their covers. Collectively, they are what make Reiss’s store the only one of its kind in this country: the books are all hardcovers, virtually all first printings, all signed, and, except for a handful set aside on a small shelf, all for sale at the regular retail price. “Our books don’t cost more,” Reiss likes to say, “but they are worth more.”
Reiss has a roster of such slogans, some of which he’s put on little placards around the store. Boosterism comes naturally to him: he has been working in retail since he was six years old, although it took him half a century to find his way into the book trade. He’d never been much of a reader, even after he opened the Booksmith, but somewhere along the way he became one—a salesman so good that he sold himself on the books he was selling.
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Reiss is the third Jacob Reiss to call Alabama home. The first was a native of Budapest, born in 1861, the year the American Civil War started. Twenty years after the war ended, he made his way to the reunited States, eventually becoming one of the biggest men in Mobile: an Elk, a Mason, a Shriner, a Rotarian, a trustee of his synagogue, a member of the local lodge of B’nai B’rith, and the owner of a sprawling shop on Dauphin Street. Despite the Ashkenazi custom of not naming children after a living relative, he gave one of his sons his name—oddly, the youngest of his three boys, who became the second Jacob Reiss. Junior inherited the family’s business sense, running his own clothing shop, and its substantial Southern pride, leading Mobile’s Mardi Gras celebrations and passing on the patronym once more.
But Jacob Reiss III rarely uses his Roman numerals, and he prefers to be called Jake. The nonagenarian has an unlikely ponytail and an ornery smile, which he flashed throughout a recent visit. While I signed books, he told me that his role model was not anyone on his father’s side of the family but rather his maternal grandfather, Isadore Prince, who was born in Romania and immigrated to America as a teen-ager. “He came on a boat to Canada, then walked from Canada, pushing a handcart all the way to Mobile. Can you imagine?”
Prince married a Jewish woman whose family had fled the Pale of Settlement, and the two raised nine children above a modest Army-Navy store that he had opened in downtown Mobile. Reiss started working in that store when most children start school and learned just about everything he needed for a lifetime in sales. When it came to a traditional education, though, he was less interested; he did eventually give college a try but soon dropped out and came home to his father’s clothing store, where he worked for nearly a decade before opening his own tailoring shop in Mobile: J. Reiss, Gentlemen’s Attire.
Reiss loved custom tailoring, and he became known as the Tailor to the Pros when he developed a specialty in outfitting professional athletes, making suits for the likes of Jack Kemp, Tommie Agee, and Lee Roy Jordan, a Dallas Cowboy who later served as the featured model in the advertising for a short-lived venture that Reiss branded “the world’s largest turtleneck store.” Turtlenecks turned out to be a fad of the sixties, though, and however fun it was to pal around with sports legends, taking measurements in locker rooms around the county did not pay as much as Reiss thought it might, so he tried expanding his custom tailoring to other cities in the South. “Sadly,” he said, “I discovered custom-tailoring stores do not franchise as well as hamburger stores.”
By then, Reiss had a daughter and two sons, but he and his wife had separated, and soon she and their children moved to Atlanta to be with her family. One of his sons, Jacob Reiss IV, followed him into custom tailoring; the other, Frank, wanted to be a writer, and left Georgia for San Francisco, where he collected rejection letters and paid rent with a job at an antiquarian bookstore. “My brother and my dad came out to visit me,” Frank told me. “And, you have to understand, my dad was the least literary person on the planet—he didn’t even like reading. They only came out West to go skiing and to go gambling. But he came into the store, and he saw all these leather-bound books that were hundreds of years old, and they were selling for thousands of dollars, and he started quizzing me about how it all worked.” Reiss was struck by the economics of the secondhand-book business: “It seemed to me like these people were buying books for pennies and selling them for dollars, and I thought, I could do that.”
Eventually, Frank Reiss moved back to Atlanta and opened A Cappella Books, a shoebox of a store in Little Five Points, and Reiss watched his son’s success with admiration and even some envy. “I followed Frank to library sales to buy books,” he told me, “and then I asked him for a list of the top one hundred writers, and I started going to garage sales on my own, looking for those hundred writers, spending ten cents or a quarter buying each book, filing up my spare closet and then the whole spare bedroom. And once I had done that, I started looking for a location.”
Reiss brought the same flair to bookselling that he’d used elsewhere: the shelf labels were made with the tailor shop’s monogram machine; bolts of paisley tie silk were made into deluxe shopping bags. But he found the actual selling of used books to be a little boring, so another form of arbitrage he exploited was the surfeit of literati who felt that getting to spend their days in a bookstore was practically paycheck enough: in those early years, the employees he hired all knew more about books than he did and almost ran the place themselves. He mostly amused himself playing softball, tennis, and touch football.
Like the Jacob Reisses who’d come before, he seemed to know everyone in town, so it wasn’t surprising when he finally figured out a way to make his bookstore into its own kind of civic institution. That began in 1995, when Reiss learned that the local radio personality Don Keith was about to publish a novel and was hoping to do an event for it. “We said we’d do a book signing, whatever that is,” Reiss remembered. What it was was successful: “We sold a bunch of books and we had a good time, so we thought, Let’s do that again, and that was the start of our signed books.”
For most people, signed first editions conjure images of white gloves and Plexiglas-protected display cases, but Reiss doesn’t generally deal in rare or even old books. Some of his biggest sellers over the years include Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Be Useful,” Debbie Harry’s “Face It,” Joe Namath’s “All the Way,” and, as of this month, Governor Gavin Newsom’s “Young Man in a Hurry.” Like those books, most of his inventory was recently published, and most of his authors are still with us. The Booksmith’s shelves feature an eclectic mix of poetry and literary fiction, plus local and regional titles, along with whatever other nonfiction Reiss has a mind to sell. It might be the only bookstore in Alabama where you can’t find a copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and the only one in the world where you cannot buy a Bible, not to mention anything by J. K. Rowling.
How Reiss manages to acquire enough autographed books from actors, athletes, and best-selling authors to stock an entire store involves a mix of courtship, logistics, and luck. He won’t sell anything signed that isn’t a book, and the books are all first editions—almost no reprints, and never any paperbacks. He has long-standing relationships with publishers and small presses, so he’s often first in line for the signed copies that they distribute around the publication of big titles, though those are slightly less collectible since they generally feature “tip-in” signatures: pages, signed by authors at home or wherever they want, that are then bound into the book later. Because Reiss guarantees sales of several hundred copies, he can sometimes convince publicists to add a book-tour stop in Birmingham, even if it’s just for a lightning signing during which he and his team serve as a kind of human conveyor belt, shuffling signature-ready books by so speedily that the author can make it to a nearby city for another event that same night. When that strategy doesn’t work, he’s not above begging authors directly.
Sometimes it seems like authors are the only people who visit the Booksmith these days. The majority of Reiss’s customers are remote, and it is not a sign that the business is suffering when he says “nobody calls and nobody ever comes by.” That’s just the reality of being online, where the Booksmith is open “24/7” with a bare-bones website but with thorough entries for every book, including a photograph of the author’s signature and a description of where they signed it. The day I visited, just one person called, but it was the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Rick Bragg, one of Reiss’s closest friends, and one person walked through the door, but he bought the most expensive book in the shop, a signed copy of Paul McCartney’s “1964: Eyes of the Storm,” one of the few books selling for more than the retail price—in this case, north of seven thousand dollars.
That sale aside, most of Reiss’s business appears in the store’s inbox, and most of it is more on the scale of thirty-five dollars plus tax and shipping. He maintains an e-mail list with five thousand or so devoted customers from around the world. “We do not solicit,” Reiss explained. “The only way to get on it is to make a purchase and request inclusion.” Almost every Monday afternoon, Reiss e-mails the list about that week’s select titles, and since roughly a thousand of the recipients are regular buyers, many of them respond right away, and Reiss stays at the store until nine or ten at night handling their orders. It’s a convention of the publishing industry that new books come out on Tuesdays, so that’s one of his busiest days, with anywhere from twenty to two hundred orders; a smaller number trickle in throughout the week, though Reiss always knows whenever an author dies or wins a major award because, whatever the day, his inbox fills up with orders or queries about what he might be hiding in the climate-controlled warehouse that takes up around half the store’s square footage.
Aptly enough, the former custom tailor now runs what might be best described as a bespoke bookstore. Those who love and admire Reiss’s business model, and they are legion, are ongoingly baffled by how well it works. One of the store’s “best friends” is the novelist Ann Patchett, who always signs for Reiss, and considers him one of the most interesting booksellers in America. Carla Diebold, who runs Armadillo Alley Books out of her home in Carrollton, Texas, reselling signed and first-edition books online, discovered the Booksmith several years ago, and was stunned that all its books were both signed and regularly priced. “We thought they were insane,” she told me. “Obviously not, since they’re still around, but I have no idea how they do this.”
It helps that Reiss has a small staff, just three employees. These days, he personally chooses all the books that the store sells. That transformation was inspired by marquee events with Southern giants like Bragg, Fannie Flagg, and Pat Conroy, events so well attended that Reiss wondered what all the fuss was about. Soon the former nonreader was devouring two hundred books a year. No one is more surprised by that literary transformation than Frank, who still runs A Cappella Books, in Atlanta. “Like son, like father” is how he likes to describe their business relationship.
The novelist Joshilyn Jackson got to see how carefully Reiss considers his choices when she sold her first book, more than two decades ago, and walked into the Booksmith to talk about it. “Alabama Booksmith was my parents’ bookstore, and my editor had said it was important to meet with independent bookstores, so I decided to practice on Jake,” she told me. It was so early in the publication process that Jackson printed the manuscript of “Gods in Alabama” herself on computer paper, but Reiss talked with her about what she liked to read and said that he’d look at her stack of papers. He liked the novel and started telling other bookstore owners in the South how much they’d like it, too. “If Jake loves a book, he goes to war for it,” Jackson said. “He’s just such a champion of writers, especially new voices.”
Plenty of new voices are featured in the Booksmith’s signed-first-editions club, which costs about five hundred dollars a year: subscribers get a signed book every month, a curated collection of famous and, as Reiss says, “soon to be famous” authors. (He borrowed the idea from his friends at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi.) Reiss’s children joke that he has a bit of P. T. Barnum in him, and there is a certain ringmaster energy in the way that Reiss does business: the certificates of authenticity he places in every book he sells; the special rate he negotiated at a nearby hotel for out-of-town customers; the roadside banners he has made for every author who signs at the store, which he likes calling his “showroom.”
My most recent visit to the showroom was on a Friday, so things were slow, except for Reiss, who can still race up and down the stairs to his office. He and Lauren Skinner, one of his sales associates, were planning to spend the afternoon packing up books for that day’s shipment—sealing them in plastic and wrapping them in bubble paper before fitting them into boxes. Because collectors have always been a big part of the Booksmith’s business, careful packaging is essential; when the coronavirus pandemic began, Reiss was better prepared than most bookstore owners because he already had hay-bale-size stacks of bubble wrap and forty different kinds of boxes for shipping.
Not as many customers request personalized inscriptions anymore, but some do, with the date or maybe birthday wishes or someone’s name who is graduating or celebrating some other special occasion. Gifts are a big part of the Booksmith’s business, and I did half my Christmas shopping there last year. Even before he learned to love to read, Reiss the retail genius recognized what every real reader knows: a book is not just its contents but also, and inseparably, a special kind of object, a portal of sorts between people and places and ideas.
Every independent bookstore survives by nurturing that connection between audiences and art, and the Booksmith has thrived by making those invisible connections between writers and readers visible. “I’m a fan and a believer in Charles Darwin,” Reiss told me. I was asking how he had weathered the storms of Barnes & Noble and Amazon, and what he thought about the future of bookselling. “I think bookstores have to evolve,” he said. “We did, and that’s why we’re still here. A lot of people lose their butts in a bookstore, but the successful bookstores are becoming more successful. Darwin said the strong will survive, and that’s true of bookstores, too.” ♦
