Last year, Warwick’s bookstore in La Jolla won Publishers Weekly’s Bookstore of the Year award for its active role in the community and dedication to hosting vibrant literary events. It is also the oldest continuously family-owned and operated bookstore in the United States, a fact Nancy Warwick learned from a customer.
"The key to that is that it's always been in my family," Warwick said. "My great-grandfather opened the first Warwick's in 1895 in Mankato, Minnesota."
W.T. Warwick moved the business to La Jolla in 1939. Now Nancy Warwick is the fourth generation to run the independent bookstore. Warwick recalls being a little kid making bows and folding gift-wrap boxes in the office where she now works.
"I love the store," Warwick said. "It's just in my blood. It's so much a part of my life. "It was really great because my parents always included us from a young age. They would ask our opinions. They would tell us stories. They'd be funny stories. They'd be sad stories. They'd be stories of shoplifters, bad buys, why did we buy this? They always included us, and they always asked our opinions. But the really great thing they did is they never pressured us to take over the store."
The bookstore was the family business but also a playground for Warwick, especially the dumb waiter.
"When I was a little girl, my sister and I used to sit in here and ride up and down and go as fast as we could," Warwick recalled. "If you look in the back of it, you can see that our parking lot used to start here."
As an adult, Warwick took over the store in 1997.
"The role of the independent bookstore, I can't overstate," Warick said. "I mean, the sense of connectedness between book lovers is something, that shared love of a great read and just wanting to hold it afterward."
Warwick noted that her grandmother worked in the store until she was 98, and Warwick herself has no immediate plans to retire.
"I'd like to work as long as I can work, so I don't have an exit plan," Warwick said. "But I will have to start thinking about what will happen next so that we continue this wonderful store, because there's not another Warwick left to take it over. So that's an odd one to figure out."
For now, she is enjoying the holiday season and the people coming in for books and gifts.
"We have this wonderful customer base," Warwick said. "People who shopped here when they were a child are now bringing in their grandchildren. We have customers that come in every day of the week, it's their morning routine, or we have customers that bring their dog in every day of the week for their cookie. The dogs drag them in. It's so smart to have dog biscuits in any store."
It also helps to offer great customer service, build community, sell more than just books and be in a neighborhood that can afford pricey hardbacks.
"I think it's really important to keep in mind that Warwick's is a bookstore, but we're also office supplies, art supplies, gifts, stationery," Warwick said. "Very important to our identity and our success and well-being over the years is our non-book side. I like to carry a lot fair-trade and handmade things from around the world, and with some items as inexpensive as five dollars."
As Warwick’s head book buyer, Mallory Groff has a bibliophile’s dream job.
"If someone had told me I could buy books for a living, I would have been like, 'You're kidding,'" Groff said. "But it's great. When I am buying books, I am thinking about what table they're going to sit on and where they would be sitting on the table. And trying to see what's out there, what is different, what's going to make someone stop and look at it because that's very key when we're working in a physical world."
Publishers now focus on the physical packaging to make owning a book feel more special. Groff likes to highlight that on the art wall.
"It is one of probably the rarest things you'll actually find in an independent bookstore," Groff noted. "But it is one of our most popular features in the store. We catch people's eye from the street."
Once inside, staff can pair customers with the perfect book.
"It is one of my favorite things," Groff added. "The fact that people put so much trust in our booksellers. It's a joy to watch different booksellers walk customers around, find them the perfect gifts."
Connecting people to books is part of what Julie Slavinsky does as director of events.
"There's something hallowed about these walls that people love to come and be part of the legacy of people like Salman Rushdie have been here," Slavinsky said. "There's nothing like sitting in the room hearing an author talk about their work. I mean, it is transcendent. So, yeah, I think that you can't reproduce that in a digital format or an audio format."
Warwick’s is definitely all about the in-person experience. Warwick sees the store as having a personality and even a life of its own.
"I don't know how it happened, but somehow the environment of the store makes people feel warm and safe," Warwick said. "I think part of that is intrinsic to books, but also it's about having so many long-term staffers who really like the customers. I mean, it's a warm atmosphere, and there's a lot of sharing stories."
Stories like these:
"I was straightening cards once, and I heard these two women were giggling away and having such a great time shopping cards together. And one of them says, 'I just want to be buried here someday,'" Warwick recalled. "And a couple of days ago, I was up here and I heard a conversation with a customer who's been coming here forever, and she was telling one of my new employees that she's been coming here for over 50 years and knew my grandmother. I was listening to them talk, and she said, 'I'm really hoping that someday my obituary will read, "She hoped there's a Warwick's in heaven."'"
There may not be a Warwick’s in heaven, but to many bibliophiles, this family-run independent bookstore is its own slice of heaven.
