New, used knowledge at Dark Star

Dark Star's manager May Cheow, owner Mary Alice Wilson and long-time employee Lee Blasingame along with four other staff members operate a busy new and used book business that has fed Yellow Springs readers for 27 years.

By Lauren Heaton

“I grew up in an intellectually impoverished environment,” Dark Star’s owner Mary Alice Wilson said of her eastern Tennessee roots as she sat surrounded by the 40,000-some books in her store. If she is, as she says, “still catching up,” it’s largely because she still loves to read and is happy to keep running the new and used book business she has had for 27 years.

Even without the serial comic books that started the whole thing, Dark Star was bustling last Friday evening with dozens of customers young and old from Yellow Springs, Cedarville and Springfield. They came to buy stacks of used books, they came for the one perfect Japanese cookbook from 1972, and they came for bookmarks and an in-house game of Magic the Gathering. Rich Smith came hoping that the latest edition of a Steve Niles graphic novel he had ordered back in the summer was still there.

“Is it here? Oh, I hope it’s still here,” he said as long-time employee Lee Blasingame searched the hold shelf, finally pulling out a twin set of thick comic books. “That’s...is that it? Yes! That’s it!”

Wilson had been watching and was pleased with the satisfaction her customer had achieved with his literary find. “That’s why I love selling books,” she said.

Bucking convention

There were two rules for girls while Wilson was growing up in Nashville. “You couldn’t read, and you couldn’t win in sports,” she said. A strong-willed, independent thinker, Wilson broke the first rule in kindergarten by learning to read along with the teacher, upside down. And when she memorized the first grade reader, the school was at a loss over what to teach her. So she went and found her own reading material: comic books.

While her father was playing the slot machines at the local drug store, Wilson struck up a deal with the druggist that she could read as many comics as she liked in the time it took to consume one chocolate soda. She read 10, and the one she always bought was Wonder Woman, because the author Charles Moulton respected women and featured an article in every issue about a real-life female heroine.

“That’s where I learned about Harriet Tubman, Julia Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and I wanted to read about them over and over again,” Wilson said.

Wilson graduated from Vanderbilt University and the Peabody School, married a professor and moved to Springfield, where he got a job at Wittenberg. Ill-suited from the beginning, Wilson said, the couple later divorced, but not before their two children, Rick and Kathy Wilson, both of whom graduated from Yellow Springs High School in the late 70s, took a liking to comics themselves. When Rick left for college, Wilson said, he chose from his large collection of comics “only the good ones” and left the rest for Wilson to deal with.

Traveling to the weekly flea market at Caesar’s Creek to sell new and collectible comics was a lucrative but tiresome job, and in 1980, Dark Star was born in King’s Yard. Within a couple of years, Wilson had moved the business to its current space, formerly occupied by the Village Variety Store, and was operating largely on the sale of serial comics and a steadily increasing stock of used books.

The used book business

There is an art to selling used books that starts with acquiring the types of books that others value, according to Wilson. It comes with experience, she said, but simple rules will tell anyone that a set of encyclopedias from the 1940s is not a good item to stock. On the other hand, a recently acquired playbill from a Duke Ellington production of Sophisticated Ladies gets put in a plastic sheath and priced at $15. And even paperback copies of Kurt Vonnegut’s Pearls Before Swine or Louis Fischer’s Gandhi, His Life and Message for the World have enough appeal after a quick dust-up to sell for a couple dollars. Anything worth less than that gets shipped off with the biweekly trips to Goodwill.

Change caused by the Internet has greatly facilitated the job of gauging widespread appeal and pricing for many books that Dark Star takes in through library sales and donations, Wilson said. With Advanced Book Exchange and BookFinder.com, at the click of a button she can have a pretty good idea of whether what she has on her hands is a $1,000 gem or a knockoff that should never have been published. Her business and life partner, Gary, who prefers to remain anonymous, sells the more expensive finds online, while the staff helps choose and shelve stock for the store.

Dark Star’s current manager May Cheow and expert cataloguer Ellameda Morfield have brought a new sense of order to the general chaos of organizing Dark Star’s vast empire of print. Employees Blasingame and Steve Bennett know and love books enough to sell and collect some of their own, such as Blasingame’s personal stash of every Star Trek and L. Frank Baum novel as well as over 200 books about Greta Garbo. And if books aren’t appealing, Yellow Springs High School student Zane Reichert runs Dark Star’s gaming events, which had five young Magic players gathered around a table on Friday using card decks assembled by Reichert and purchased at Dark Star.

Books trump comics

While Dark Star started with comics, in the last five to 10 years, the comic book business has become difficult for Dark Star to profit from, Wilson said. The price of a typical superhero comic has increased over the years from 25 cents in the 1970s to $3, a high price for a 10-minute thrill for kids, she said. Comics are also less precious now because most get republished in anthologies.

So when Tony Barry and Thad Cleveland, the two employees who had been managing Dark Star’s comic book business, proposed buying it and opening their own store last summer, Wilson seized the opportunity to focus more on new books.

While Dark Star carries multiple shelves of comic anthologies and gaming dice, t-shirts and paraphernalia, much of the front of the store is now devoted to the large selection of new bestsellers Wilson orders each week from Amazon.com. Currently in stock are Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, The Dangerous Books for Boys, Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, and Jessica Seinfeld’s new cookbook for kids.

Having a shop that could offer the latest Stephen King read right next to an 1880 coffee table book about the building of the Golden Gate Bridge excites Wilson, who reads three to five books every week and is always eager to see what golden find may turn up next. Wilson tried expanding with two comic book stores, one in Kettering, which was open for about 10 years in the 1990s, and one in Beavercreek, which was open from about 1997 to 2005. Though managed by former Yellow Springs resident Tony Arnett, the stores became a liability for Wilson, who found she enjoys her business much better by keeping things simple.

“What I like is having this nice big store and not having to be here,” she said of the three hours a day she spends at her shop, which is open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. “This is a very comfortable way to do this.”

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com