Ask a question - get Chapters and Verses

Member profile

He admits to being something of a “grumpy old man.” He doesn’t watch television and he doesn’t own a mobile phone. He is an independent bookseller that still has the common sense to admire some of the attributes of the major chains while backing himself to perform as a competitor. He owns a small store in a small provincial city and in the mid ‘90s he was chairman of Booksellers NZ.

Jeff Grigor of Chapters & Verses on Timaru’s main retail precinct, Stafford Street, doesn’t pull his punches. But unlike the shrill convolutions of commentators and callers on talk-back radio, his opinions are considered and grounded in a much-sought commodity: common sense. Unlike some in his line of business, he doesn’t believe the book market is all going to hell in a hand cart, but is undergoing a continuous process of organic change that the retailer needs to acknowledge and understand.

Jeff has had a few vocations in his time but settled into his current occupation in 1982 when he purchased the business he currently owns. A decade later he added the purchase of a music retailing business, dropping the instrumental side and concentrated on recorded music; vinyl and cassettes and latterly, CD’s.

Jeff exhibits that universal trait of most in the book business: unbridled enthusiasm for the product he is selling. He always wanted to run a “proper bookshop,” so you won’t find stationery in his shop apart from the range of greeting cards.

In a small town of 26,000, he still has the usual mass market bludgeoners like The Warehouse to compete with, but the only other book store is Whitcoulls, right across the road. He is adamant he has no problem beating the nationwide giant on price.
“They certainly slash the prices on their loss leaders, but on core titles they are generally about 10 percent more expensive.”

The regional demographic means Chapters & Verses has to have an across-the-board range of titles. But in saying that, Jeff is proud of his large non-fiction inventory.

He also loves good crime fiction and believes in putting his money where his mouth is. That means reading six to seven books a week so when we ask what he has been reading lately he has plenty to offer. Current picks being?

“Well there were a couple of fascinating debut novels; The Postmistress by Sarah Blake and Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson. Mr Rosenblum’s List by Natasha Solomons was very funny. I also enjoyed Race of a Lifetime, the classic account of the last US elections by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. Then there was Liaquat Ahamed’s Lord’s of Finance about the Great Depression and the four bankers who buggered the world.” He adds the latter even though he finds business books (and the people who read them) boring.

While Chapters & Verses may not be able to match the chain store across the road for promotional and marketing presence, Jeff uses catalogues for key sales periods and puts out five or six ‘newsletters’ a year. The newsletter is a handy publication crammed full of book reviews from Jeff and his staff; the real deal for avid readers. He mails them and has a computerised database of his main customers who receive it electronically as well.

We have a sneaky feeling that top of the page at key times may well have gone to local books, Baches & Cribs and The Big Chill (about the June 2006 freeze) both authored and compiled by one Jeff Grigor, someone who obviously knows his business from the inside out.

Jeff admires other good independents such as the Women’s Bookshop and owner Carole Beu who he says has identified and built a great business around a target market. “Their marketing and promotions are superb.” He also thinks Unity Books is great but notes there is a vast difference in managing and running book stores in major metropolitan markets compared to small towns.

He has a special mention for Peter and David Emanuel who owned London Bookshops before they were assimilated by Graeme Hart into Whitcoulls. “They were very good retailers that I aimed to emulate. They were also a tremendous source of inspiration during my time on the board at Booksellers NZ.” He also loves to visit Abbeys Bookshop and Gleebooks in Sydney; Readings and Hill of Content in Melbourne.

The music side of the business is gradually diminishing at Chapters & Verses, down to 30 percent of the business today compared with 50 percent a decade ago. The store now tends to specialise in classical, country, Celtic etc. But don’t look for the music or the books on a website. There isn’t one.

You may be starting to think Jeff is something of a Luddite. Don’t. He says, “Websites are one of the great overrated myths. For bookshops they don’t do a lot of business unless you have something very different to offer.” He says that the last thing that had any real impact on book sales was the advent of television when large amounts of leisure time was taken up by the new entertainment medium.

One particular issue that Jeff does feel strongly about is the slow but sure change of market philosophy amongst the publishing sector. “It really annoys me that most of the major publishers are cutting their representative forces to the bone and piling greater workloads on to the survivors. It doesn’t seem to stop them having more people than ever at head office level, usually with titles I have never heard of before, or understand. Whether this is helping the bottom line in an organic and meaningful way, I don’t know. Irrespective of ‘head office buying decisions,’ I do know the most important person to the retailer is the good publisher’s representative. After all, it is all about selling books.”