While her son gets excited about being downtown around other kids and the vivacious sense of place the bookshop creates, Spafford has her own needs. Currently working on a novel, Spafford cites Coonerty's personal grooming of local authors, arranging time-consuming readings and signings, as some of the nurturing extras that make Bookshop Santa Cruz a cultural force. It feels like a place where you'll be warmly received. It's a home. Many patrons feel so much at home that they stay for hours, all day, day after day, openly reading books that they may or may not buy.
Visitors also feel at home.
While the reopening marked the return of the bookstore to the very spot where it had begun 30 years ago, the long shadow of Crown Books was just over the horizon. When the Super Crown store did butt into Bookshop Santa Cruz's downtown turf, Coonerty responded by offering discounts on bestsellers, instituting a frequent reader's program, and turning on an educational PR campaign to let the community know that independent booksellers were dying all over the country, swallowed whole by huge mega-chains whose discounts no small store could match. He appealed to our souls. Coonerty agrees that the idea of encouraging free browsing at his bookstore was, well, different. People might not buy the book they were reading.