News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Through the past two decades, Paulina Springs Books has been a cultural hub in Sisters.
Locals, part-time residents and visitors have all come to rely on the Sisters bookstore, not only for a good read, but also for a chance to gather to meet favorite authors and enjoy a powerful sense of community.
On Saturday, May 26, current owner Brad Smith will welcome the original owners Diane Campbell and Dick Sandvik, along with staff and customers, for a celebratory event marking the 20th anniversary of Paulina Springs. The event runs from 3 to 7 p.m. featuring cake, punch, anniversary pricing, magic hat discounts, and more fun.
The Anvil Blasters will provide live music from 5 to 6:30 p.m. Dick Sandvik is expected to join in the music.
Sandvik and Campbell launched Paulina Springs in May, 1992.
"We both decided before the bookstore that we wanted to live in Sisters," Campbell told The Nugget. "We spent some time trying to figure out what we could bring to the community."
Sandvik said his love for books was one motivating factor, but both he and Campbell wanted to "become an important piece of the cultural fabric of a small town."
In that, they succeeded. Paulina Springs Books has been the venue for author visits from renowned writers to regional authors just breaking into the industry. People gathered there for live music. And the shop was the incubator for the Sisters Folk Festival.
Campbell and Sandvik enjoyed a deep personal connection with customers and staff, building relationships that last to this day.
"If it wasn't for the bookstore, we wouldn't have the friends we have today," Campbell said.
For Sandvik, "being part of an engaged community - that was special to me."
Both acknowledged that bookselling is a tough business, with more to it than "sipping tea and talking about books," as Campbell put it.
"It was just an all-consuming job almost all the time we had it," Campbell said.
It never got easier.
"It's a challenging business and probably considerably more challenging than it was when we started," Sandvik said.
Brad Smith can vouch for that. Smith took ownership of the bookstore in 2003, attracted by the very things that made the store special to Sandvik and Campbell.
"What appealed to me was how ... Dick and Diane had built a store that was connected - so vibrantly connected - to the community," he said. "I was looking for something I could identify with personally, as well."
Within a few years, the publishing and bookselling business would undergo a revolutionary change - one that is still in progress.
Online bookseller Amazon.com has increased its dominance of the marketplace and the rise of electronic books has threatened to make good on the decades-old belief that print is dying.
Paulina Springs is adapting. Smith moved into used books "in a big way"; that market remains lively, with good margins. And he's added lines of toys and games.
"We're basically trying to branch out beyond books," he said. "It's not easy, but we're slowly building things up."
Paulina Springs has its own electronic book service, but Smith doesn't think that independent booksellers can make serious inroads in that market.
"Honestly, we sell digital books, but that's never going to amount to anything for us," he said. "People are always going to buy from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple."
As Sandvik and Campbell discovered, Smith understands that bookselling is something on the order of a calling, rather than a purely business proposition. It's becomes a way of life - one that has brought great value to the Sisters community and great satisfaction to the past and present owners of Paulina Springs.
The kind of satisfaction that allows Campbell to look back on her tenure there as among "the best 11 years of our life."
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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