HAZEL DELL — It was an honest oversight. When I wrote a story last week about a new bookstore opening in UptownVancouver, I mentioned that there were only a handful of independent bookstores left in Clark County, and I listed a few examples.
A couple days later, Hazel Dell Book Exchange owner Ron Pedersen contacted me to let me know I’d missed one — one of the oldest independent bookstores in the county, in fact, with 44 years in operation.
To be fair, I never said my list was exhaustive. But I wasn’t trying to snub anyone, and a glance through Columbian archives showed that the Hazel Dell store had also been left out of several previous stories about Clark County bookstores, so I decided to check it out.
Books and rare coins
The store is tucked into one of the suites in an office building at 9901 N.E. Seventh Ave., near Interstate 5. According to Pedersen, it was founded in 1975 by a woman named Rita Wilder and a business partner, and was originally called the Leaf Through Book Swap.
Wilder became the sole owner in 1978, but had to move away two years later. Pedersen bought the business in 1980 and has operated it ever since. He changed the name to Hazel Dell Book Exchange.
“I was a customer of hers, and I always wanted a bookstore,” he says. “It was the only bookstore in the county (at the time it opened), and people were waiting with boxes of paperback books to trade in.”
Independent bookstores have enjoyed a resurgence since 2010, but their numbers diminished substantially in the 1990s and 2000s due to competition from big-box retailers and online sellers. Clark County’s independent bookstores felt the squeeze as well, Pedersen says, particularly after Amazon launched in 1995.
“Cable TV didn’t hurt it too much,” he says, “but when the internet started being successful, that’s what really dinged it.”
Many of the independent bookstores that predate the rise of e-commerce have had to find ways to adapt and reinvent themselves in order to keep going.
Some, such as east Vancouver’s Vintage Books and Battle Ground’s Literary Leftovers, have stuck around by focusing on live events and growing their online presence. Others have had to close their doors, including Zephyr Used and Rare Books in Uptown Village, Spencer’s Bookstore in Orchards and most recently Cover to Cover in downtown Vancouver, which became an online-only seller in 2015.
The Hazel Dell Book Exchange survived by branching out into a second product category: vintage coins. When sales began declining, Pedersen and a friend combined their rare coin collections and began displaying them in the shop, kicking off a coin exchange business.
The coin side supplies about 95 percent of the store’s profit, Pedersen says. Three rows of coin display cases line the store’s main area. But that doesn’t mean the book side has been neglected — 10,000 books still line the shelves on the walls and in the rear half of the store, and the space below the coin cases has been repurposed as additional bookshelves.
The reliance on coins has allowed Pedersen to take a relaxed approach to bookselling. All books in the store sell for $4 or less, and the book inventory is restocked solely from trade-ins.
“The best part of the business is my inventory walks in the front door,” he says. “It’s also the worst part, but you have to deal with that frustration.”
Pedersen has been a lifelong reader, and said he spent many hours as a kid in bookstores in Portland. He built his career in teaching, and was still working when he bought the Book Exchange. He and his wife would each take a shift at the store, he said, and their children would occasionally help move books around.
The store was originally in a shopping center at the corner of Northeast 78th Street and Hazel Dell Avenue. But the site was rebuilt in 2006 and Pedersen was unable to secure a new space for the store, so he moved it to its current home.
Pedersen, 86, now devotes his time solely to the bookstore, operating it six days a week — but he says compared to how hard he used to work, managing the store is easy.
“I’m not working,” he says. “This is fun.”
Pedersen admits the store’s customer base isn’t as large as he’d like — “I’ve outlived two generations here,” he says — but he says he still gets visits from a lot of “quasi-customers and full-time friends.”
When asked about the long-term future of the store, Pedersen expresses doubts about the viability of independent bookstores and hobby shops, and he mentions that he’s not sure if the store makes enough for anyone to justify buying it.
But he adds that his own plan for the store has been to keep it going until it starts losing money, and so far that hasn’t happened. And Pedersen says he’s still in good health, so he expects the book exchange to stick around for the foreseeable future.
The oldest?
I mentioned at the top that the Hazel Dell Book Exchange is one of the oldest independent bookstores in Clark County. That’s admittedly a bit of a hedged statement, and I did of course try to find out if it’s the oldest bookstore outright — but it turns out that’s a tough one to call.
The main rival contender for the title of oldest bookstore would be Vintage Books, which moved into its current home at 6613 E. Mill Plain Blvd. in 1985. But the business dates back to 1975, when owner Becky Milner began operating a mail-order company out of her house, selling needlepoint kits, books and antiques.
According to a 2005 Columbian story, the business moved to its first physical location in 1978, and gradually dropped the other products in favor of an expanding book selection.
So as a physical location, Hazel Dell Book Exchange comes in ahead by three years. But the title of oldest bookseller in Clark County might be a tie.
