Focus on Business:  Books Galore is moving to make room for more

by Tracey Bruce special to the Post Dispatch (originally appeared in the May 18, 2000 edition)

    Moving is a chore for just about everyone, but for John Gilbert and Barbara Patterson it means packing up about 60,000 books, setting up shelves, and knowing your ABC's.

    Books Galore has moved.  The shop book lovers frequented on Rock Road in DeSoto has moved up to 408 A North Main Street.  The bookstore will still offer its customers some of the most interesting reading in town, just more of it.

    The shop now has 2000-3000 square feet of space to stack books, and the owners are moving volumes they once had to pay to store.  Now with more space and more books on the shelves, Gilbert and Patterson hope to make their bookstore a regular haunt for browsers, gamers and collectors.  They plan to make the store a comfortable place for readers and set up tables for games.

    "We want to be a part of the community," Gilbert said.  

    "We hope people will come in, browse and look around,"  Patterson said.  "We want to get to know our customers."

    Their greatest volume of customers, however, now come to them electronically on the Internet.  We are able to have this bookstore because we sell books online," Patterson said.  

    The globe gets a little smaller when a business starts selling its wares online," she says.  Customers order books from all around the world.  

    "We actually had a man call us on his cell phone from his car somewhere in Australia to order a book," Patterson said.

    They have sold books to researchers with network television programs, such as the Oprah show and David Letterman, publications such as People Magazine and CBS News.  

    "When the Pope visited Cuba, CBS News called us because we had a book on Castro's views on religion," Gilbert said.

    For local shoppers, however, Books Galore has a selection of books from a wide variety of genres including fiction, fantasy, western, science fiction, westerns, history, biography, mystery and true crime.

    "Compared to a mall store, we have a bigger selection, more depth and more obscure books," Patterson said.