It was one of the biggest days in the history of Point Reyes Books. On Saturday, March 14, it had “holiday-level sales,” said Stephen Sparks, who has owned and operated the Marin County, California–based independent bookstore since 2017. “We were up 350 percent.”



But Sparks wasn’t celebrating. “Bookstores are places where people browse and touch everything,” he said. “It’s a small space with everyone is shoulder to shoulder.” That evening he made the difficult decision to close the store to the public, starting on Monday. “Financially it was a very hard decision to make,” he said. “But ethically it felt like the only one we could make.”



In the end, the choice was out of Sparks’s hands. That Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued a shelter-in-place order for six Bay Area counties, including Marin. Since then Sparks has kept his business afloat fulfilling online orders. It’s “twice the amount of work,” he said, “because every book needs to be packed up and shipped” and only brings in “half the amount of money.”



He is, however, allowing a few people in. During our phone call Sparks stepped outside so one of his regulars, an 80-year-old man who comes in “three or four times a week,” could browse the store alone, safely.



Across the country, thousands of small bookstores are in the same predicament. Closed to the public, many are rapidly shifting into the unknown territory of online sales. Those with little to no web presence have no revenue at all. Large indies like Powell’s, The Strand, and McNally Jackson have laid off hundreds of workers. City Lights, the legendary San Francisco bookstore, has turned to crowdfunding, as have smaller stores.

