Coming Into Bookselling—Independent Serves Nation's Largest State

Imagine you have arrived in Anchorage, Alaska, with your 12 sled dogs, ready to ride the rugged 1,150-mile Iditarod Trail to Nome. Even under the best of conditions, you might be traveling for almost a month; the nights are very long, and you cannot fit a human companion on your sled. Question: What are you going to bring to read?

Leave the dogs outside, stamp the snow off your feet, and plan to spend a lot of time browsing at the Cook Inlet Book Company in downtown Anchorage. Featuring the world’s largest collection of books about Alaska, Cook Inlet offers travel guides, maps, chronicles of polar exploration, and Alaskania from the Klondike Goldrush to the Exxon Valdez.

Compiling this exhaustive collection of regional books, along with a large general book inventory, are owners Lynn and Ron Dixon, Alaskans with a combined 60 years in the book business. Lynn Dixon carries on a family tradition of bookselling; in 1959 her parents founded The Book Cashe, a chain of 21 stores, all in Alaska except for two stores in Hawaii. "My parents liked to vacation there," Dixon explained. The 15 former Book Cashe stores in Anchorage included one directly across the street from the Cook Inlet Book Company. "New people bought the stores and began to focus primarily on the wholesaling side of the business," Dixon told BTW, "I worked for the new owners for a while, so did Ron. When the last of their stores closed, I realized that Anchorage needed a great bookstore. With the major chain stores here, we decided to focus on what we knew." In 1993, the Dixons opened Cook Inlet Book Company.

Books about Alaska and "the North" are of great interest to the many tourists who come to Anchorage, but Dixon noted, "The people here are very interested in the place they live. Most Alaskans feel they’ve discovered an exotic, almost secret place. And they want to learn all they can about it." The Cook Inlet definition of regional books is deliberately broad: "If it’s about caribou, it’s an Alaska book," declared Dixon.

Cook Inlet has tremendous ties to the community -- a community that extends to the outlying, roadless Alaskan towns. To serve these areas, the Dixons have books flown in for book fairs so children and adults can purchase reading material. To encourage reading, Cook Inlet participates in the state’s school competition called "Battle of the Books." Students are quizzed on many aspects of a selection of books at their age level. Cook Inlet offers a 25 percent discount on the entire list of selected books.

The Dixons joined the Book Sense program "as soon as we could." They have discontinued their bestseller section and display Book Sense titles instead. Dixon told BTW that she orders a minimum of two of every Book Sense 76 title. "We’ve seen sales of books that we’d never have believed we could sell," she said. She describes the typical winter shoppers as "mostly masculine" and expresses great surprise that "feminine Southern novels" have been selling well. "By concentrating on Book Sense titles, rather than taking a chance on others," she said," we have enhanced the general book selection. These are books recommended by other booksellers, and that’s a good reason to pay attention to them."

About BookSense.com, Dixon said, "We get a huge amount of sales from our Book Sense Web site. It’s been worth every dime we’ve invested. We’ve tried since 1994 to do a Web site ourselves. We went through three designers. Sales have quadrupled in the last year. People outside of Alaska looking for information on Alaska find us. It works beautifully because the design of the Web site allows us to include all of our regional information."

Dixon expects a break in the winter lull with the huge influx of visitors for Iditarod XXX, which begins on March 2. Mushers (the racers) and spectators alike can stop in at Cook Inlet to stock up on homemade candy, some Alaskan food products, and, sometimes, beef jerky. Once in Nome, the last racing team to cross the finish line wins the Red Lantern, but forewarned is forearmed, Nome has no general bookstore. -- Nomi Schwartz