PALO ALTO — Faith Bell’s bookstore is stacked wall to wall and top to bottom with the original pine shelving that her dad built when he started the store in 1935 on the bet that one man’s failure would be his success. At just 24 years old, the professorial pipe-smoking bookworm Herbert Bell bought an inventory of books for $2,300 and slowly transformed the stacks of bound paper into a landmark store of Palo Alto and the Stanford community.

Faith Bell, Herbert’s daughter and the store’s current caretaker, tends to nearly 300,000 volumes that fill up a two-story building a stone’s throw away from Lytton Plaza downtown, selling some of the rarest books in the Bay Area at prices likely to stun even the most avid reader. From a $25,000 first edition of the Lord of The Rings trilogy to obscure academic texts and New York Times Best Sellers, Bell’s Books has managed to stay afloat even as other bookstores across the country close their doors.

Though it may seem inconceivable, the tens of thousands of books have moved five times throughout Palo Alto in an attempt to chase the cheapest rent and keep the legacy alive. With the coronavirus pandemic wreaking havoc on retailers across the country, and as the store celebrates its 85th anniversary, Bell’s Books has suffered, too — but Faith Bell isn’t ready to call it quits yet. Here’s what she had to say when she sat down with Bay Area News Group.

Q How did Bell’s Books get its start?

A My father was trying to become a reporter in Paris in the 30s but couldn’t make it so he moved to Pasadena to work at a bookstore. The man who owned the store wanted to open a branch for Stanford students in Palo Alto but he couldn’t make it work. My dad bought him out for $2,300. These are still the original shelves that he made in the store. The amazing thing for me was that any time he could get cheap rent he’d knock down all the old pine planks and put them up again. He moved all these books five different times to keep it going.

Q When did you take over for your father and start running the store?

A I don’t even remember when I first became conscious of this as an entity that other people would recognize. For me, it was just my parents’ books. I ran around in here as a kid and my family were prolific readers. If there were new releases that my parents were interested in having my opinion on, I’d review them for them. I would sweep the front sidewalk and wash the windows and dust the books.

After high school I decided to move away. I hitchhiked up to Canada and fell in love there on a farm and raised goats and had my children. Then my father got leukemia and my kids were getting older and there weren’t many opportunities in the country of Northern Canada, so I came back and took over the store. By then we were well known among Stanford professors and students. The community allowed us to have much more esoteric academic materials than you would normally find in a bookstore.

Q Since the start of the pandemic retailers across the country have been dealing with a sharp decline in clientele, and bookstores are no exception. What were some of the immediate effects of the pandemic on the store?

A We were extremely conservative in reopening. For the first three months or so we didn’t have anyone coming into the store at all, it was totally empty. When we were able to open back up in a limited way, we kept our distance and took a look around the store for things to do. We took advantage of the time to do a massive cleanup and rearranging. The biggest shock was the loss of all the students and the social interaction.

When we first decided to open, a lot of people were overjoyed. People came up to me saying this is the first place they came to when restrictions got lifted. Now, we’re constantly counting how many people come in and how many are going out. We were surprised to find out how exhausting monitoring that would be.

Q Unlike a lot of other bookstores that deal mainly in books written in the past few decades, Bell’s Books sells some of the rarest works that can be found in the Bay Area. How does that affect business? Has the store been able to make money?

A It’s been tough but we’ve managed to pay our staff full time. We got some coronavirus relief loans and we’re just hanging by our fingernails at this point. We have the advantage of owning our own building, but the new roofs and new paint jobs and all the problems that come with a building from 1924 add up. The toughest part is that we’ve barely brought in any money for a year. That’s massive. We’ve had some months that are in the negative. I’ve taken no income for the past year and actually spent about $60,000 keeping this going.

With us at least the books don’t rot on the shelves so it helps because these businesses have very small margins. We’re relying a lot on doing big sales. We sold a first edition of Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak for $4,500. We sold a Charles Dickens set for many thousands. We sold a signed Robert Frost and signed Kurt Vonneguts. These are a big part of us staying in the black. But honestly it’s much more exciting this way.

Q You’re 65 years old and have been doing this since the 80s, do you want to retire? And who is going to take over the store after you?

A I don’t know who would want it after me or how that could work economically. I’m not opposed to that idea. On the other hand, I know a lot of booksellers who have literally dropped in their tracks and I’m planning on doing that. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to do some planning on the way, but the way I feel about it right now is I’d like to still be here.

I had hopes that one of my grandsons would be interested, but I’m not sure that that’s still going to happen. That doesn’t meant there couldn’t be other people doing it and doing it well if they were the right people, but I don’t know.

People say ‘What can we do to help? How can we help you?’ The most basic thing that people don’t really get is that you just have to buy books from us. It’s very simple. Buy our books. We don’t need to become a nonprofit, we don’t need donations, we just need people to buy books.

WHO IS FAITH BELL?

Position: Owner of Bell’s Books
Work history: Bookseller, dairy goat farmer and surveyor
Age: 65
Education: A little bit at the University of Alberta, Foothills College and Stanford University
Family: Husband Christopher Storer and two step children
Residence: Los Altos Hills

FIVE THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT BELL’S BOOKS

  1. Bell’s Books got its signature look of soaring shelves and tall ladders after its third move in 1948 to the landmark Cardinal Hotel in downtown Palo Alto.
  2. It was the back-breaking work of the head of the German department at Stanford and a local police who took pity on Bell’s that all the books were saved after one landlord threatened legal action before the store’s final move.
  3. Even the store’s youngest employee, 24-year-old Emma Beckman, has deep ties to the store, having been around since she was ten when her mother worked there. She did a lot of her high school homework in the back room.
  4. Store founder Herbert Bell, Faith’s father who died in 1992, left his family home filled with 30,000 neatly categorized books and a harpsichord he built by hand.
  5. Don’t ask them what the rarest book in the store is. As bookseller Kevin Shlosberg has it on a sticky note next to his register: “The rarity of a book devoid of interest is a matter of no concern.”