Caliban keeps rare and used books relevant

When John Schulman began working at The Tuckers, a used book shop in Squirrel Hill during the…When John Schulman began working at The Tuckers, a used book shop in Squirrel Hill during the late 1970s, he didn’t foresee himself turning his passion for books into a career.

Instead, Schulman attended Pitt as an undergraduate studying English Writing and later returned for his graduate degree in education, planning to become a teacher.

“I decided I wasn’t really a natural teacher,” Schulman said. “I was selling used books to pay rent.”

But today, Schulman has converted his original job into a career. He and his wife, Emily Hetzel, co-own Caliban Book Shop, a popular local bookstore selling used and rare books.

Located on South Craig Street in Oakland, Caliban Book Shop is a local treasure that breaks from the traditional bookstore layout. The bookstore is an unlikely establishment that supplies a variety of commodities. Different from the typical modern bookstore model that is currently suffering under the hand of electronic reading devices, Caliban remains true to its mission: to sell used and rare books.

Schulman and Hetzel — daughter of Frederick Hetzel, the chief editor of the University of Pittsburgh Press for 40 years — opened the bookshop in 1991, and today both act as co-owners.

“I married into Pittsburgh book royalty by marrying [Frederick Hetzel’s] younger daughter,” Schulman said.

Caliban Book Shop houses more than 40,000 titles of rare and used books. Selling books about philosophy, photography and history, among many other topics, the bookstore has a wide selection that encompasses a multitude of interests.

Currently, Caliban Book Shop is selling first-edition titles of books, such as “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut for $1,000 and “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac for $300. Both the store and its patrons benefit from the intrigue surrounding collectors’ items.

Schulman explained that if a modern-day literary classic is first published after 1920, it is expected to have the dust jacket on to be sold for its maximum value as a collectible. Without it, the book sells for significantly less — as is the case with the first edition of Kerouac’s famous novel.

But that doesn’t take away from the volumes’ intrinsic value.

“They are hot commodities. They’re still considered rare books,” Schulman said.

Within the bookshop also exists Desolation Row — a record shop opened in 2004 by store manager Kristofer Collins.

Collins, a ‘96 Pitt graduate with a degree in religious studies and American literature, began working at Caliban Book Shop almost a decade ago. As a long-time worker at the bookshop and frequent visitor prior to his employment, Collins has seen the store develop and evolve over the years. In 2004, Collins pitched the idea for a record shop inside the store to promote the music that the bookshop played throughout the day.

“I turned 30 and panicked, and thought I needed to be adult and do something. So I opened a record shop,” he said.

The corner that the record shop now sits in used to be home to a few unnoticed bookcases. Customers tended to keep away from this “blind spot” of books, so the area was comically named Desolation Row. When Collins opened his record shop, he placed it in this previously neglected area, and the name of the corner stuck with today’s record purveyor.

The bookshop is also a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA). Working to promote interest in rare and antique books since 1949, the ABAA is the main professional organization of book dealers and appraisers. The organization specializes in rare books.

Schulman has invested his time in appraisals, as well. As an appraiser for estate, legal, tax and insurance purposes, Schulman decided to take his gig public as an appraiser on “Antiques Roadshow” — a PBS television program that takes a collection of appraisers from leading auction houses and independent dealers to do appraisals of antiques and collectibles. This summer he even traveled to Corpus Christi, Texas, to offer appraisals.

Through his encounters with other antiques, Schulman has realized the importance and affordability of collecting rare books.

“They’re still one of the great middle-class collectibles,” he said.

Unlike other collectibles — for example, paintings — that only produce one first edition, which sells for an extremely high price, books are issued with thousands of first editions. Over the years, first edition copies of famous books continually pop up, ready to be sold. Books like Kerouac’s “On the Road” were typically produced in the thousands, Schulman explained, and the current copy at Caliban is one of 15 copies that have gone through the store.

Because of the bookshop’s less mainstream appeal, Schulman doesn’t expect the growth of the competitive new book business to have a huge impact on Caliban Book Shop.

“It’s a different economy,” he said.

And Collins agrees. Electronic reading devices may affect bookstores that sell newly published books, but Caliban Book Shop has dodged this latest trend.

“The Kindle and the Nook haven’t really affected this end of the book business,” Collins said. “It’s a different side of the business that doesn’t get as affected by trends as new bookshops do.”

But that doesn’t mean that Caliban remains in the dark ages. With more than 200,000 books in the bookshop’s warehouse, located in Wilkinsburg, Pa., the Internet has become the best place to reach a broader market outside of Pittsburgh in an attempt to sell more goods.

Scott Silsbe, the bookstore’s warehouse manager, works among the racks of books five days a week. The warehouse acts as a holding station for the surplus books that come in and will eventually go to the bookshop, as well as a source to document an online inventory. Currently, the warehouse has more than 43,000 books listed online, which helps to expand the bookstore’s revenue.

Still, Schulman notes that the Internet does generate a few negative consequences. The entire concept of purchasing goods online generally isolates people, keeping them inside their homes and separated from in-store interaction.

“I don’t know if it’s really great as far as promoting the idea of books,” Schulman said.

And that mentality is what Caliban Book Shop seeks to represent through its used and rare books. Located between the campuses of Pitt and Carnegie Mellon, the store is surrounded by academia that helps to fuel its profits.

Silsbe received his masters degree from Pitt in 2004, and as a student he found used book stores to be a valuable resource.

Though the bookstore doesn’t buy back textbooks from its neighboring universities, it does draw from the support that both Pitt and CMU generate for the area, or what Schulman terms, “that academic support system that’s necessary for a good used book store.”

“[Used book stores] are a safe place off of a university campus to not only discover new authors, but to meet peers and other authors,” he said. “Somehow writers get turned on by used book stores.”