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August 7, 2002
Willow Glen, California Since 1992 |
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Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
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Never-Ending Story: Willow Glen Books owner
Cathy Adkins recently celebrated the store's
10th anniversary. It is one of the few
remaining independent bookstores in the area.
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Popular bookseller celebrates 10 years in Willow Glen
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William Jeske
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It was a dark and stormy night.
Well, actually it wasn't. It was a bright
and sunny Saturday afternoon but that's not
how good mystery stories begin, even if the
story is about two exiles from the corporate
world reuniting 10 years later to celebrate
their successes at a Lincoln Avenue business.
The waist-high shelves usually reserved for
newly released hardcover books were put aside
to allow for cocktail appetizers and wine and
champagne.
Then, at 2 p.m. on July 20, several dozen
middle-class literati came and went to
congratulate business owner Cathy Adkins for
Willow Glen Books' 10-year anniversary.
Adkins invited one of her first employees,
Joan O'Reilly, to assist in the celebration.
Tagging along was O'Reilly's husband and
full-time writer James Murphy who signed
copies of his recently published first
mystery novel, The Frame, from
print-on-demand publisher AmErica House,
located in Baltimore.
Starting a new chapter
Evidently, Murphy and Adkins gave up bytes
for books.
Murphy skipped out on IBM after 24 years as
an advisory engineer in 1989 to take up novel
writing.
Adkins said that from 1980 until 1991, she
used her degree in business from San
Jose State University to work in
finance, systems and manufacturing for
high-tech corporations. "One of which was one
of those proverbial, small start-ups whose
stock became worth enough for me to open my
own bookstore.
"I worked for a medical instruments company
that went public," Adkins said, all
innocent-like. "And so with part of the stock
gain I decided I wanted to open my own
bookstore. And so I worried about it, planned
for it, and thought about it, from the summer
of 1991 until the summer of 1992.
However, that's when things started going
uphill. "I quit my job and spent a year
getting ready to do this."
So how did this big business expatriate sneak
her operation into Willow Glen? "Luck. Lucky
me," Adkins claims. "I wasn't looking at
Willow Glen because I didn't know that the
bookstore part of (Mr. C's) Tattler had
closed. It was a bookstore and coffee shop
combination, and it still said 'books' on the
outside and I hadn't been in it a long time."
Adkins said that the real estate agent she
consulted at the time said to come to Willow
Glen. "He brought me to this space and said,
'Here is the space you're looking for, lady.'
And he was right. And it's perfect. I mean
it's a perfect neighborhood for an
independent business because it is a
neighborhood."
Maybe so, but this neighborhood was still too
large for O'Reilly. She went to work for
Adkins when Willow Glen Books was only two
days old. She stuck around for three years
until 1995 when she and Murphy moved to
Lompoc where she opened her own bookstore
under the suspicious business name, "The
Bookstore."
"San Jose is a nice place," O'Reilly admits,
"but Lompoc is a nice, small community."
That may be true for O'Reilly, but for Murphy
the old maxim rings true: you can take the
novelist out of San Jose, but you can't take
San Jose out of the novelist.
Motive, means and opportunity
The Frame takes place in Silicon
Valley, where private investigator Gary
Chardoneau, a former drug enforcement agent,
accepts the case to try to clear local CEO
Clay Oeland of murder charges.
For Murphy, the case of the unpublishable
manuscript began with Frame's first
draft in 1993. He was in a Catch-22
that would make Joseph Heller's head spin.
"Agents don't want to represent unpublished
authors," Murphy said, "and publishers don't
want to work with authors who don't have
agents."
So, why keep trying? "I heard a writer in
Miami one time say that when asked that
question, he said, 'it's easy to tell you're
a writer: you try to quit.'
"I've been unsuccessful for 16 years, up till
now, so I think you just learn to roll with
it," Murphy said. "You don't let it affect
your life. I just never expected to get
published. But Joan's been the one who's been
telling me all along that The Frame is
the one that'll get me published."
The Frame is actually the third in a
series of Charboneau mysteries. Murphy said
he's reworking the first two to be prequels.
Art imitates life, or vice versa
Murphy can write about crime, but Adkins
knows the sting of it.
Earlier this year, a few new releases and
best sellers began disappearing from the
display shelves. It got so bad that Adkins
had to resort to installing surveillance
equipment.
"It felt horrible to set up cameras," said
Paul Adkins, Cathy's son. "I mean, to be
watched over kind of goes against the
character of a small bookstore."
Paul said the posted warnings of surveillance
have curbed crime dramatically, but, in
April, one unidentified culprit was caught on
tape. He's still at large.
Paul said he knows of at least two thefts.
One of litigation super-novelist John
Grisham's newest, The Summons, about a
retired judge nearing death who calls his
all-too-different sons to a reading of his
will. The other being Isabel Allende's
newest, Portrait in Sepia, a
historical mystery about a young girl in
search of her missing past.
Adkins is also worried about corporate
shenanigans. "They are bad. Their corporate
strategy - Barnes & Noble in
particular - is really to be fairly
predatory," Adkins said. "Scoping out where
there are successful independents and opening
stores with an eye to putting them out of
business. Nobody has scoped out Willow Glen
and said, 'Oh, we can put two bookstores out
of business if only we opened there,' as far
as I know. They're close enough and we're
kind of surrounded by them, but I'm surviving
because I have a neighborhood."
But will there be a happy ending, where
everybody lives happily ever after?
"But I'm really worried about what's going to
happen to my business when Santana Row (on
Stevens Creek Boulevard) opens and puts in a
Borders, and that's not very far away,"
Adkins muses apprehensively. "And it's going
to rival Willow Glen's destination shopping
character - and I think all the merchants here
need to start thinking about how are we going
to stay in business."
For more information on Willow Glen Books
contact 408.298.8141, fax 408.298. 8237, or
email wgbooks@att.net.
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