A Durham Bookshop Gets a Second Life as a Co-op

As many downtown Durham businesses struggle to adapt to a new economic landscape post-COVID, one bookstore is looking to build long-term sustainability through a new business model.

After eleven years in business, Letters Bookshop, located at 116 West Main Street, is transitioning into Letters Community Bookshop, a community-owned cooperative. Land Arnold, the shop’s owner, made the announcement on Tuesday.

“I believe a co-op is the best way to ensure a sustainable future for Letters and its staff, to build an even stronger reading community in Durham, and to strengthen a commitment to downtown,” Arnold wrote in a release about the news.

Cooperatives are organizations owned and managed by a group of people with an equally-shared investment in, and obligation to, the organization’s success. Typically, co-ops are owned by its workers, members of the community, or a combination of the two. Members of a co-op have varying responsibilities which include voting on board members and setting the vision for the organization.

The new iteration of Letters is offering $116 ownership shares, which come with voting rights, an ownership stake in the shop, and other perks. The price tag is a homage to the store’s address, a place Arnold hopes Letters will continue to call home for years to come. There’s also an investment opportunity for preferred shares in increments of $250 with a yearly dividend.

If a consumer owner decides to end their ownership in Letters, the stock is transferred back to the bookshop, according to the cooperative’s bylaws. The co-op will buy back the share at the price it was originally purchased.

Letters is not the first Durham business to pursue the cooperative model: The Durham Bike Co-op is a volunteer-led nonprofit cooperative that offers bicycle maintenance instruction and offers members access to repair tools for free at the Bike Co-op workshop. The Durham Co-op Market, a cooperative grocery store on Chapel Hill Street, has been around since 2015. Arnold is a member and visits the grocery store often, seeing the market as a model to follow for Letters and other businesses. 

“I go into the Durham [Co-op] Market almost every day,” Arnold says. “It’s my grocery store on my way home, and I was like, ‘Wait a minute, people really care about this place, and it started for the community, and it’s been supported by the community.’ That was the main inspiration.”

Arnold also took cues from other bookshops around the country that have adopted a cooperative model: Red Emma’s in Baltimore, Maryland has been a worker-owned cooperative bookstore, restaurant, and event space since 2004; Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas, is an employee-owned cooperative whose former owner wrote a book on bookstores and how to make them sustainable.

Arnold opened Letters at its original 313 West Main Street location in 2013. At the time, Amazon had already begun ravaging brick-and-mortar booksellers, from local shops to multinational outlets like Barnes & Noble, through its online retail marketplace. Conversely, downtown Durham was on the upswing as retail and restaurants flourished in the reinvigorated city center.

But now, a decade later, some small businesses are still fighting to reclaim their former glory post-pandemic.

“I’ve been around downtown with the shop for ten and a half years going towards 11, and it’s always had its difficulties,” Arnold says. “But ten years ago, it was like, okay, it’s difficult now, but we’re seeing all these hopeful things: ‘Ooh, there’s another festival coming, some of these storefronts are being filled.’ And right now, it’s kind of hard to grasp. There’s all this new construction. But even the new construction, very few of the storefronts are being filled. City Center next to us has been done since 2018 and like half the storefronts have never had anyone.”

Market forces aren’t the sole reason for the shift to cooperative ownership. Arnold, who recently became a father, has been in the business long enough to understand the unrelenting grind of entrepreneurship.

“It’s a response to a lot of things,” Arnold says. “I think it is the pandemic, and I think it is just trends in retail but it’s also personal to me. I have been in bookselling for a long time and I had a kid a couple of years ago, and that kind of changed how I value my time.”

William Page, a long-time employee at Letters, will become the bookshop’s general manager. A board of directors that includes seats for worker representation is in place to facilitate governance of the shop. The founding board is Arnold, William Page, Laurie Beaty, Stephen Conrad, Xaris Martinez, and Justin Pini. Arnold will serve as the president of the board until early next year when elections for the board will be held and a new president elected. Until then, Arnold says he will work with Page to allow for a smooth transition.

“I know what it takes to have a successful shop,” he says. “But I can’t put that 50 hours in. I don’t want to anymore.”

Arnold may be transitioning out of downtown business ownership, but his affinity for downtown remains steadfast. He says he plans to stay involved in supporting the district’s prosperity.

“I think there’s so much potential still in the shop that hasn’t been reached because I haven’t had as much focus,” Arnold says. “But also it kind of reflects there’s potential in downtown that just needs to be focused on as well. We need to figure out this car supremacy that we give constantly. We need to care about people, from our infrastructure, not just how quickly people can get through, not just how easily we can make it for delivery people, but for the experience of just walking around.”

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