Sam Burton unpacks stock for his soon-to-open York St. bookery.
Just when you thought downtown New Haven and the environs of Yale had plenty of brain power already, more Grey Matter is on the way.
Make that the Grey Matter used bookstore.
A branch of a successful used book store in Hadley, Massachusetts, Grey Matter is the brainchild of Sam Burton, who was in a space at 264 York St. this week getting it ready for a late-February opening.
Burton opened the popular Hadley store ten years ago. He is a veteran of Powell’s in Portland, Oregon, stores in San Francisco, and, initially at the Strand Book Store, in New York, where he met his wife.
Burton recently signed a lease with his landlord, Yale University, and is now hard at work putting up deep brown, floor-to-ceiling shelving, and filling them with stock. He’s also repairing and shining up the parquet floors at 264 York, the former J.Press clothing store. The space had previous lives as a shoe store, and before that, a Wawa convenience store.
He is stocking the store with books focusing on art and architecture, photography, theology, first editions, and also don’t forget film and philosophy.
The latter two because the peripatetic Burton earned a degree in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree in film from Temple University.
Among his favorite authors include Raymond Chandler and the German novelist W. G.Sebald. His favorite movie directors: Bunuel, Goddard, and Howard Hawks. That’s why you’re likely to find material at New Haven’s Grey Matter relating to Hawks’ film The Big Sleep, based on the Chandler novel, with a cranky screenplay credit for William Faulkner.
“I’ve seen the movie about eight times,” said the soft-spoken Burton. He also reminded me of important scenes in that noir classic that take place, yes, in a used bookstore.
The store in Hadley has also become a location for readings and music perfomances.That’s a distinct possibility for the York Street location as well.
Postman Paul Comins delivers Burton his first mail in New Haven — a bill.
Under the Yale lease, “I have to be open every night [until 9], so it’d be nice to get some people in to read and hear a little music,” Burton said, as he opened a carton of books containing a biography of Albert Camus and works by the Argentinian great Jorge Luis Borges, in Spanish.
“For me the biggest tension is between leaving space for public events and breadth in inventory,” he said.
Burton was asked if he is daunted by the demise of other small booksellers in New Haven — Labyrinth on York Street, Arethusa over on Audubon Street, Bryn Mawr on Whitney — or competition from Book Trader down the street on Chapel.
“What’s the critical mass for used bookstores in a town?” he responded. His business in Hadley is at the national epicenter of used stores in the general area of Northampton and Amherst. All help each other, he said.
“I’ve been to Book Trader, and I don’t think there’s much overlap.
“I also hear they have excellent muffins.”
Before he had a brick-and-mortar store, Burton and his wife ran the business completely online. “I got up, went down stairs, worked the computer, and sent the books out in an envelope,” he said.
The Hadley store has given him the human interaction he likes in the business. That was the heart of his pitch to Yale to rent the York Street space, along with the idea that the store will “advance the cityscape.” Interchanges that happen in a used book shop are more interesting and valuable than the human transactions in a chain store, he argued.
Not every day in a used book emporium is full of intellectual chit-chat and witticisms, poetry, or ideas for new novels, and bon mots. But many are, he said. “I fervently believe that.” He sees graduate students in literature, poetry, other students, regular older people who grew up in the heyday of the Strand and old bookstores as his target customer base, along with “young people who like vinyl and old books.”
The keys to success in his business is “having a sense of what people want.” But there’s more to it than that, obviously. There’s pricing, and also what Burton called a “virtuous circle.”
Burton and his wife live in Hadley with their teenage son. She, however, is no longer in the used book business with him.
“She’s now a psychiatric nurse. She’s gone legit,” Burton said. Then he went back to unloading his treasure troves of old books and lifting them from carton to shelf.