Books about Books: A History of Oak Knoll Press, Part 17: Expanding yet again!

By Bob Fleck

The always present problem of lack of space reared its ugly head yet again in 2001 - we had run out of room in spite of our expanded 5000 square foot third floor lease. This is such a sickness with booksellers. They can never be happy with the space they have and must keep expanding. John published 21 titles in 2001, and we had bought a large antiquarian collection, so space was at a premium.

We decided to lease half the first floor of our building and move our publishing fulfillment and shipping to that floor and even pretend to have a real bookstore presence. We moved in and John found a huge assortment of blue metal shelving being sold at a very good price by a warehouse. We bought the shelving and installed it on the first floor. These bookcases were handy in keeping a small number of each publishing/distribution title arranged by stock number and readily available for order fulfillment. Most of the inventory was kept in a large warehouse in the Newark, Delaware, area as New Castle is not very truck friendly, and we had no docking area at our Delaware Street location. New Castle is a charming city but doesn’t have much in the way of retail street traffic, so street sales didn’t increase much. However, the rent was very reasonable, and we had a lot more space.

Meanwhile my “other job” became closer to a full-time position as I was elected President of ILAB during the Scandinavian Congress of 2002. Millie and I have been to many Congresses, but this whirlwind trip through Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark was one of the best.

John managed to get out another 21 titles in 2002 and followed up with 21 more in 2003, 21 in 2004 and 18 in 2005. I must admit that I did not have as much time to give him as I had before taking on the Presidency of ILAB, but he was becoming an old hand at our type of publishing.

And of course, the strangest thing happened - we ran out of space again in 2005. The antique mall and tea shop had left the second floor, leaving it as empty space. I really didn’t need to be on the first floor, so I discussed the idea of leasing the entire building from the owner and taking on the responsibility for one monthly rental payment for the entire building. I would need to find appropriate sub-leases for the first floor to partially defray my costs. He agreed, and John yet again got a major task - find renters for the first floor, and move our operation from our half of the first floor to the second floor, thus adding 2500 square feet to our space. If we worked it right, we could significantly increase our space and reduce costs by sub-leasing the entire first floor, while moving books out of the Newark warehouse to further reduce our overhead. As usual, John accomplished this task in record time, and now our inventory shares the second floor with Annie Oakley’s ghost.


To be continued …

Bob Fleck founded Oak Knoll Books in 1976 to fill a void in the booksellers world. Today Oak Knoll Books maintains an inventory of about 20,000 titles on books about books and a rapidly growing backlist of over 950 titles published and distributed under its imprint, Oak Knoll Press. Bob Fleck is ILAB President of Honour. He was ILAB President from 2002 to 2006. Each Friday the Oak Knoll Biblio-Blog publishes an excerpt from Bob Fleck's autobiography (“Books about Books“, published in 2008). The excerpts are also presented on ILAB.org. Thank you very much to Bob Fleck for giving us permission.

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>>> Robert D. Fleck, Books about Books. A History and Bibliography of Oak Knoll Press 1978-2008

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