Tsunami Books has been in the same 1949 building since it opened its door roughly 30 years ago. We hear about their new effort to crowdfund money to purchase that building and its long history on Willamette Street.
Plus, how the company keeps going through a time where book stores have struggled and its unique employee-owned model.
The following transcript was generated using automated transcription software for the accessibility and convenience of our audience. While we strive for accuracy, the automated process may introduce errors, omissions, or misinterpretations. This transcript is intended as a helpful companion to the original audio and should not be considered a verbatim record. For the most accurate representation, please refer to the audio recording.
Zac Ziegler: I'm Zac Ziegler, and you're listening to Oregon Rainmakers from KLCC. On this edition, I talk with the folks at Tsunami Books.
People have been talking about the downfall of the physical bookshop for more than a decade, dating back to an era when major chains like Borders and Walden Books were shutting down, and the remaining industry giant, Barnes and Noble, started closing stores. But it's hard to say there's been much of a downturn for books in Eugene, where several independent bookstores dot the business community. Tsunami Books has been a long-time stalwart of the city's book scene, and it has made headlines in recent weeks with a unique ask of its customers: Help us buy our Willamette Street building. Tsunami dates back to 1995, when original owners Peter Ogura and David Rhodes opened the shop in a building that was approaching 50 years old at the time. Ogura eventually exited the business. His exit made way for Scott Landfield, who we'll be hearing from a lot today. We'll also be hearing from two other employee-owners, Emily Poole and Steve Ellerhoff. Scott starts by taking us back to when he made a career change and became a bookstore owner with David Rhodes.
Scott Landfield: I was a tree planter. I'd been planting trees for 20 years, reading and writing, and I was good friends with both of these fellas. Dave asked me, 'Hey, buy them out, we'll get rich.' So...
Ziegler: That's something you don't hear these days. Let's get rich selling books.
Landfield: Yeah, I was a simple guy. I'd been out in the woods. People could take me, they still can take me. That's one reason why I don't like being in charge. I like groups. So, 30 years later, we've been building it. Dave and I worked side by side for 12 years. Still best friends. He's still a shareholder and occasionally a worker-owner here, although he's in New Mexico, and we just keep growing. We started with basically nothing, a high-interest loan on a house, which I lost, and $500. We built the whole thing out of recycled product. Our theory was energy equals capital, which is the opposite of the modern way of doing it. Either capital equals capital or debt equals capital. We thought human energy would do it, and it's actually done very well over the years. It's a slow-growth model under those circumstances.
Ziegler: We've heard plenty of mention already. I'm guessing this shop is organized under something of a co-op style, given that your employees are introduced as worker-owners, and that's how you introduce yourself. Is that the case?
Landfield: I don't know about co-op. That was a word people were using when we first formed 29, 30 years ago. There were a lot of co-ops in this town. I prefer to call it worker-owner. It's sort of a middle ground between the hierarchical structure and where unions step in to let workers have some say. When I first got here in '78 there were probably 60 worker cooperatives, worker-owner situations in town. It was very hip. People were coming from all over the world to experiment with it here. I happened to join up with the Ho Dads, which were up to 600 people at one point, woods workers, all muscle. When we wanted to do something, we had the brains. We had people from Oxford, Oxford brains, and world-class athlete muscles. This is sort of a middle ground. Co-ops also have problems. Democracy is a sticky subject.
Ziegler: I'll turn to you two then. What does it mean to have some say beyond just the voice of an employee, and what you kind of earn through respect from your bosses in your workplace?
Steve Ellerhoff: Tsunami really is a community business. It's a community. People have called it an icon. We've had some musicians come through who travel the country and the world and say, 'Oh, we're playing Tsunami. It's an icon.' They brought that word to us. I've been here for five and a half years, and it opened up Eugene to me, being brought in as somebody who works here. The bookstore is mostly used books. People always say, 'Wow, what a great curated bunch of books you've got here on your shelves,' and I always say, partly that's the discerning eyes of book buyers here, but also it's just that Eugene is a city of readers who have really great taste. So you're looking at the used books of a city with just the best taste in books. We're very lucky to be where we are and living in this community.
Emily Poole: Moving into a worker-ownership structure actually didn't really change the feel of very much for me, because we've always made decisions by committee and always had more of a group attitude on the staff than a hierarchical managerial structure. So it just sort of felt like the natural next step to the way we were already operating within the store.
Ziegler: Bookstores have seen quite a contraction since the '90s and 2000s, in part because one of the biggest retailers in the world, Amazon, started as an online bookseller. How has this shop managed to make it through that and continue to be, as people have evidently told you, an icon?
Landfield: In a way, we're all gig workers here. We can't just do it with one thing. We can't do it with floor-to-ceiling used books like the old days. We can't do it with all new books, because we're not financed, and that takes major finance these days. So we do a little bit of everything. We serve the community any way we can, through politics, through readings, through theater, through music. Every one of those brings in a little bit of money. Many hats. The good thing about gig working here is you might do three or four real jobs in a day, including stagehand, without leaving the building.
Ziegler: So how do you two like getting some of that rotation in your life? The kind of job where you walk in and think, OK, what's in store today?
Ellerhoff: Oh, yeah. One of the things we do is sell books online, used books. One of my favorite things is when I get here in the morning and see what the internet brought in overnight, then hunt for those books around our little cubbies here and there. There are lots of collections around the store, and then we send them out. We had one go today to Latvia, an academic book called 'Hybridity.' There's a buyer in Latvia who got a book from Tsunami Books today. That's pretty cool. And you just never know. Another one was 'Flying Saucerama,' which looked like quite a great read.
Landfield: Where'd that one go?
Ellerhoff: I think that one went to Ohio. Mostly we're talking other states, but some of them go abroad.
Ziegler: That's something I wouldn't have necessarily expected. But when you get those quasi-rare books, people are willing to go to some serious lengths to find them.
Landfield: People have come from all over the world to Eugene. Eugene is an icon. Everybody knows the name around the world, and they come here with their books. Sometimes that's all they have. I saw a collection that came from North Dakota yesterday, 95 years old, still in the same shelves, dusted twice a year.
Ziegler: I'm Zac Ziegler, and you're listening to Oregon Rainmakers. My conversation with Tsunami Books' Scott Landfield, Steve Ellerhoff and Emily Poole continues.
The big thing that has brought this shop onto the minds of many people is the effort to buy the building you've been in for a while now. Tell me what spurred that on at this moment.
Landfield: Well, a war broke out. It was a very dark moment. Steve and I were keeping up to date on all the news of the world, as booksellers do, and we showed up on a Saturday and heard about a girls' school in Iran that was blown up in the first wave. I have daughters. I have a great relationship with countless young women, old women, all women. I couldn't take it. And the store was full of people. For three days it was packed, just like pre-COVID. People were getting books, they were in the store, they were quiet, they had faraway looks in their eyes, they were getting stacks of books, and we had to be supportive, we had to be friendly, we had to maybe even make people laugh when we could. After three days, personally, I was toast. I felt my mind going, and ideas of securing your home front and a peace dividend came into my mind. I had to do something. I made the call at that moment: What are we going to do? Let's secure the home front. Let's get the building to where we've got work here. People want it here. There's no question about that. Small businesses should own their buildings. What if you're poor? What if you're an average American? My mind wasn't right, and I needed direction. I picked it, announced it, and then came to my co-workers and mentioned it, and they were supportive. It was unilateral. It was not the best move to be unilateral, but I'm very happy to have done it, and happy for the reaction. Now people come in and they're like, 'How's buying the property going?' And they're smiling. They've got a direction. We've had over 1,000 people chip in already, and it's just beginning. It's only been six weeks.
Ziegler: So for you two, whether you're at the register or walking around putting things back on shelves, what's the general reaction? What's the vibe you get from customers talking about this?
Ellerhoff: Support. This being such a community place, it's almost like the town square. I learn more here from people coming in and telling me what's going on in Eugene than from any other avenue in my life. The support has been great. People ask about it, people come by dropping $10 in. I think the fantasy is kind of this idea of 100,000 people dropping $10 in. People come in asking, 'How many $10 bills have come in today?' Somebody comes in, drops a $20 and says, 'This is for two people.' That's what I'm hearing.
Landfield: And there's no qualms about taking $10. I don't have a single feeling about it. People are writing bigger checks, and serious people are very serious, and I feel obligated, a sense of duty. Just accepting something as a gift is an art. But $10, I'll ask anybody in America, anybody in the world, for $10 to get this building into what it needs to be, for as long as South Eugene is around. Why not? We have friendly owners, owners who, you know, somebody came in with this idea two years ago, a good friend of the store, and we talked to the building owners, and they were like, 'Yeah, sure, that sounds fine.' It didn't quite work out. Money like this, you're always weaving with it. But the idea was there. We're not attached to owning this building. This is not a money thing. I don't hear a word about how it's going to play out in numbers for each of us personally. It's more responsibility. What we want is this building kept as what it is. And if we are starting a movement that goes beyond us, great. We'd love that. Land trusts are an option. I've heard about small LLCs. I've heard these terms used by lawyers and accountants we're talking with. If we raise all that money in $10 bills quickly, we'll have to think about something else. But there are lots of options. Number one: get the building.
Ziegler: For you two, does knowing that this place will be here in perpetuity change anything? You don't have to worry about the owner getting old and deciding to sell, and it ending up in the hands of some corporation that says, maybe we'll level that and drop a Starbucks there. Does it help with any feelings about that?
Poole: Absolutely. I mean, when you've spent, I've been here 10 years in October, and you've spent that much of your life building something and helping watch it run, you wonder what the future is going to hold. It would be so wonderful to see it keep going on our behalf and on behalf of the community, because during all my time here I've seen what it means to so many more people than just the staff members. We've had engagements here. We've mourned members of the community here. Countless memorials have happened in this building as it is now. To see it leveled or sold off for some other purpose would take a piece of memory from not just the people who have dedicated years of their lives to the business, but from all the people who have really important memories stored here in this building.
Ziegler: It's odd how quickly a particular building feels like it becomes a part of you and your community.
Landfield: We had a woman come in from Berkeley the other day. She fell in love, and she was kind of comparing it to the status of the Berkeley bookstores. She said, 'Oh, this is a fascinating store. I love it, and I'm from Berkeley.' That's a bellwether for people like us. But she talked about being a member of an artist collective there for 30, 40, 50 years. The old guy died, and the big developers all wanted it. It was choice property, going for top dollar, and the community said no. Finally, a couple of artists with a lot of money stepped up just last year and purchased the building. It's there. It's an old, funky building that could stay old and funky for a long time. We have brand-new buildings all over town they're tearing down, so the fact that this is old has nothing to do with it. It's a decent building.
Ziegler: Yeah, it's from that era when they knew how to build things.
Landfield: They did. These guys just got out of the wars. It's 1949. We have a back door here, a garage door. Apparently they used to bring trucks in here. We were going to tear it out when we were remodeling, and we looked at it and were like, oh my God, this thing was built. 1949 steel, 1949 wood. We've kept it, and people have tried to break in the back. They can't get through the door.
Ziegler: You come in and see some scratches and they've just kind of given up.
Landfield: You know?
Ziegler: One thing people always wonder about: typically, if you've got someone looking for donations, it's a nonprofit, a school, something along those lines. This is a functioning business. What's the case for making that donation to a business, to a corporation?
Landfield: That's a very good question, and it's asked all the time. People have done it here before to extreme extents. That's another reason for asking for $10. Nonprofits are overrated, I think, as far as giving goes. The tax breaks are wonderful, but what kind of tax break do you get on a $100 bill? What kind of tax break do you get on a $10 bill? For bigger donations, we are also working with organizations where we may be able to tie some nonprofit giving, if we can find a proper land trust who wants to partner with us. All the money being raised would go straight to the land trust. We don't want to be paying taxes on it. We're just workers here. Not one of us in the bookstore owns two houses. Not one of us owns one house. We're not wealthy people. We are book people.
Ziegler: Well, excellent. I think we've covered a lot of what I was hoping to talk about today. Anything I didn't ask about that I should have? I always like to ask that at the end.
Landfield: We're very excited. We are a little publishing house and have done a couple of books. Steve has written and published a number of books. And Emily, who we're very proud of, has illustrated, how many books have you illustrated now?
Poole: Sorry, I don't want to lie.
Ziegler: Enough that you had to take a moment to think and count.
Poole: Eight.
Landfield: Eight? Oh my God. A major press and a nonprofit, Mountaineers, gave her the opportunity to create a book wholly herself, illustrations and text. It's coming out this September. It's a big printing. It's going to be big all over the West, probably all over America, because of the artwork. We're just pleased. We're going to turn the shop into an art venue. We'll have more than 100 of her works up, and her husband Jordan's as well. That's another thing we love to do. That's what we're about. That's the fun of this place. And we will make a living that month. September is a hard time to make a living in the book business.
Ellerhoff: Yeah, Emily's going to give us a nice bump there. 'Cascade of Life.' That's the book.
Landfield: That's what the book is called?
Ellerhoff: Yeah, it's a beautiful book. I've seen the original artwork, and it's stunning what you've done.
Poole: Thanks for the plug.
Ziegler: It tells you something about a workplace when you're that hyped to talk about something your co-worker does.
Ellerhoff: Oh my gosh. I had to run something over to where she lives, and she said, 'Would you like a sneak peek?' I said yes. She brought me in and showed me where she's working, painting after painting after painting. My eyes were just popping out. I got goosebumps, and it's happening again right now. I got this sneak peek. It's going to be a beautiful book.
Poole: Well, that is something I would like to say. Tsunami has been an amazing place to be an artist and grow as an artist in Eugene. I would not be where I am without having started here, and Tsunami offering me these opportunities to grow. Scott hates when I tell this story, but he gave me the money up front to invest in my first round of greeting cards to start selling my art more widely.
Ziegler: And I see a rack of them right over here.
Poole: Yes, so it's not just a place you clock in and work retail. It's so much more than that. We're all developing as people together here.
Ziegler: Well, thank you all for taking some time to sit down and chat with me today.
Landfield: Hey, Zac, thank you very much, man. The very best here in Eugene.
Ziegler: That was Scott Landfield, Steve Ellerhoff and Emily Poole of Tsunami Books. This has been Oregon Rainmakers from KLCC. I'm Zac Ziegler. Thanks for listening.
