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June 11, 2004/Sivan 22 5764, Vol. 56, No. 38
Changing Hands grows, evolves, turns 30
BETH OLSON
Staff Writer
For many patrons, stepping into Changing Hands Bookstore is like coming home.
The new and used bookseller was a fixture on Mill Avenue in downtown Tempe for more than 25 years before moving to its current location on the southwest corner Guadalupe Road and McClintock Drive in Tempe.
The store had humble beginnings as a 500-square-foot store purchased in 1974 from a previous owner who was going out of business. It was "about as big as someone's living room," laughs Gayle Shanks, co-founder and co-owner of the store.
When Shanks and her husband, Bob Sommers, purchased the store with former co-owner Tom Bro-dersen, it turned fantasy into reality for the former high school teachers, who spent their after-school time discussing the path they wanted their lives to take.
"One of the ideas we had was to have an alternative book-store where people could come in and talk about politics and the environment and spirituality and we could have really good books that would spur them on to self-discovery," Shanks recalls.
Sommers, who was teaching at Arizona State University at the time, worked as an adviser to Shanks and Brodersen for the first year and then came to work full time.
"My parents were in mer-chandising," he says. "From the first day in the bookstore, I felt like I'd come home."
The store opened at a time of resurgence for the down-town Tempe area.
"It had been a main street downtown for many years and had kind of gone the way of mainstream downtowns when shopping mall moved in," says Shanks.
The area was having a "small renaissance" when the book-store opened due to funds available to the city govern-ment for refurbishing the downtown area.
"The developers started developing a project on Mill Avenue and you were able to get more money if you were able to reposition an existing business into a new building, so Changing Hands was asked to move into the new Mill Avenue Shops," which they did in 1978 - to a space three times as large as the original space.
Over the next 20 years, the store expanded three times at its Mill Avenue location before closing it in 2000.
"Unfortunately, the devel-opers discovered Tempe in the '80s and '90s and said, 'There's a gold mine here' and subsequent to that they turned it into plastic down-town, Anyplace, U.S.A., as opposed to a unique down-town. Once that happened it stopped being this connector place to me and for a lot of other people as well," says Shanks. "It was quite wonderful and unique and it did give all of us, I think, an idea of what a real com-munity-based downtown can be and, unfortunately, it went in another direction."
And while Shanks and Sommers are nostalgic about their beginnings in downtown Tempe, Changing Hands' early years were not without challenges.
"There were times when the river flooded and the only path across the Salt River was the Mill Avenue Bridge, which was right next to our store," Sommers recalls, "so there was this sea of traffic in front of our store that didn't allow people to get to it. We had months where almost nobody could make it to our store."
The goal, according to Shanks, was always to be a community bookstore where people would feel "comfortable and welcome."
Early customer Pinna Joseph, a cantorial singer at Ruach Hamidbar, would frequently visit Changing Hands in downtown Tempe and would spend hours chatting with Shanks.
"It (was) a place to go and really talk about life, books and community," recalls Joseph. "It was a place that was comfortable and turned into meaningful."
Eventually, Shanks asked Joseph if she'd like to work at the store on Sundays and it turned into a long-term arrangement. A co-owner, she's now been with the business for 26 years and is the director of marketing and communications.
Shanks is currently general manager of the store and also serves as buyer, as she has for 30 years. In those years, she says, she's sees more and more people buying books. She points out that 30 years ago the top-selling fiction title was James Michener's "Centenn-ial," which sold 330,000 copies. The 2003 best-selling work of fiction was "The Da Vinci Code," which sold more than 5.7 million copies that year, according to Shanks.
Sommers also serves as a buyer and does technical support and prepares financial reports for the business. The new location is a spacious 13,000-square-foot bookstore, gift shop and event center, where Changing Hands plays host to numerous classes, workshops and speakers, including visits by Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), and Al Franken. More than 300 events a year fill the store's calendar, and have helped the store blossom in its new location.
"The '80s and early '90s were a wonderful time on Mill Avenue - a wonderful spirit and real entrepreneurship, a lot of community feeling," says Sommers. "We're beginning to feel that here."
Changing Hands Bookstore is located at 6428 S. McClin-tock Drive, Tempe. Call 480-730-0205 or visit www.changinghands.com.
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