Although business has picked up for local independent bookstores, it was a sad day for some owners when Borders announced Monday it would close all of its stores.

“It’s sad because they’ve gone in all over the country and run independents out, and now that they are closed there will be vast areas of the country that will not have a bookstore,” Chaucer’s Books owner Mahri Kerley said. “Some other smaller publishers will go down with them because they were owed so much money. It’s a sad day for literature in this country when something like that happens.”

Kerley said that when she opened Chaucer’s, now at 3321 State St. in Santa Barbara, in the early 1970s, there weren’t any nationwide chain bookstores. Fast forward 37 years, with the coming and going of chains such as Crown Books, Waldenbooks, Barnes & Noble and Borders, and Kerley finds herself back in a similar position.

Chaucer’s is one of the few bookstores that sells new books in Santa Barbara. Readers can also turn to The Book Den, Lost Horizon Bookstore, Thrasher Books and Telocote.

“I’m still sort of, ‘How did this happen?’ and aside from that there is a vast responsibility in this juncture,” Kerley said.

The Canada native purchased an 800-square-foot store near Five Points Shopping Center and turned it into Chaucer’s in 1974 after moving from the East Coast to the West Coast. She studied literature and art but never had any intention of owning a small business. Yet, books were “in her blood.”

“I’ve always owned a lot of books. Even my grandmother had a big library,” Kerley said. “I guess books are in the blood.” 

Chaucer’s expanded to four locations before landing a 6,500-square-foot space at 3321 State St. in Loreto Plaza. 

“I didn’t know anything about the book business so I went in and learned by the seat of my pants and expanded over the years,” Kerley said.

While booksellers collapsed under the pressure of chain bookstores first applied by Crown Books, Kerley relied on her unique selection and quality customer service rather than discounted prices.

“From the beginning, the idea was to have something for everyone — that’s where some indie bookstores go wrong, when they only cater to their own interests and not to customers,” Kerley said. “Some think people won’t buy this book because they think it can’t sell. I have books I don’t approve of or like, but that doesn’t mean I won’t carry them.”

Chaucer’s carries an array of books with impressive mystery and history sections, and rarities such as Beginning Cherokee from University of Oklahoma Press. Kerley boasts more than 150,000 titles in 369 sections.

“If you don’t have it, you can’t sell it,” she says. “Ed (Conklin) and I are always buying books. We’re looking for interesting things and not just run-of-the-mill bestsellers. We have little jewels you couldn’t find in chain stores because they are more interested in what turns quickly.”

Chaucer’s has longtime staff who will help customers find those jewels. All but one of her 25-person team is full time, and most of them have been there for at least 10 years. She gives them full benefits, and in turn they “break their back” to help find customers the books they’re looking for — even if they need to be ordered.

“So much of it is having good staff and giving good customer service,” Kerley said. “We’re always hearing about people coming in who couldn’t remember the name of the author, but we found it right away.”

Customer Cathia Carre was looking for a Turkish writer but couldn’t remember the name. One of the Chaucer’s staff members pointed her in the direction of Elif Shafak.

“You don’t find this author anywhere,” Carre said. “It’s not like a chain where they have all the same books. This book selection is unique.”

Customer service is what some chain stores lack, Carre added. Kerley was appalled when she found out that she had more staff than some of the chains that were six times larger than her store.

“We have some employees that have been here for a long time, more than 20 years,” she said. “When you pay them well, their life insurance and pay into a 401k, they tend to hang around, whereas part-time people come and go and that’s often a problem with chains.”

She believes that stores such as Borders also bit off more than it could chew in terms of real estate.

“It’s unrealistic; they put their money into large real estate when they should’ve had smaller stores and more staff,” she said.

Eric Kelley, owner of The Book Den, a used bookstore than has been upping its stock on new books like Chaucer’s, shared a similar sentiment.

“I think they didn’t handle the change to online selling very well. They were late in selling online and hired Amazon to do it for them at first, which was a mistake,” he said. “They had huge stores with hundreds of thousands of titles, which was the way to go in the ‘90s, but not in the new millennium when we’re competing with Amazon.”

Sales have increased across the board for both stores since Borders and Barnes & Noble vacated State Street earlier this year, but they also had to adjust to e-books and e-readers. Chaucer’s began selling e-books earlier this year.

Jane Forsyth, a 24-year Chaucer’s employee, said a representative once compared e-readers to a scroll. A reader can get lost in the mass amount of words.

“A book rep pointed out when written material fist began it was in a scroll, then folios were invented for people to travel,” she said. “Electronic books are essentially a scroll — you never know where you are as you scroll through a mass of words.”

The book relates to the mind in a different way, she added, and one can often find specific passages through memory.

Kelley said says e-books are here to stay but the readers are not.

“Things are gradually going to shift in favor of online but not as fast as music did to albums to CDs to digital,” he said. “I think e-books will continue to gain market share as there’s erosion of brick-and-mortar outlets, although more independents are opening than closing. I don’t think bookstores will go away to the extent as music stores.”

Kelley said he didn’t celebrate when the chains left and Borders went out of business.

“I think it will be a problem for small presses that are owed a lot of money they probably won’t get,” he said, adding that it’s likely to mean smaller press runs for authors, and fewer books will be sold because people often buy things they don’t expect to in bookstores.

“Some of the $5 to $10 million in sales will come to us, but a lot of it will just go away because when someone walks in a bookstore they browse and buy things they didn’t intend to,” said Kelley, adding that he doesn’t expect another big chain to move into State Street anytime soon.

Forsyth said stores such as Chaucer’s and The Book Den are the ones left after the dust settles because Santa Barbara is a literary community that supports local business. Chaucer’s also gives back by hosting book fairs and fundraisers for local schools, donating 25 percent of the profits from each one to the participating schools.

Looking back over her 37 years in business, Kerley says she has only one regret.

“I’m proud,” she said. “It’s interesting over the years, I know it has been a good bookstore, but it wasn’t until the chains closed that I wished my parents were still alive so I can say, ‘Look at me now; I outlasted them all.’”

— Noozhawk business writer Alex Kacik can be reached at akacik@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Become a fan of Noozhawk on Facebook.