In Search of the New World (of Work)

The store's first employee was Anderson's youngest daughter, Sharon -- known in the family as Boots. Then 14 years old, Boots took on the critical task of sorting by genre, which she accomplished quickly by scanning covers and feeling books for their weight: A woman running from a house meant Gothic romance; a cowboy meant Western; a big, fat volume usually meant history. Boots also distributed promotional fliers throughout the neighborhood, although her mother wouldn't let her slip them under windshield wipers, lest they become litter. There was no book that Half Price wouldn't buy at some price; if a book was too worn or too banal to sell, employees shipped it to a conventional recycling plant or gave it away.

Within eight months of its founding, Half Price Books was moving so much inventory that the former Laundromat was ready to burst. Anderson and Gjemre needed to store books in another location, and it occurred to them that they might as well do some selling there as well. So, in 1973, the second store opened in what had been an old meat locker, on McKinney Avenue in Dallas. Some months later, there was a third store; soon afterward, a fourth.

In 1975, Ken Gjemre's son moved to Austin and began looking for a way to a make a living. Austin was a book town, a college town -- say, why not open a branch there? A year later, Boots Anderson was ready to strike out on her own, so she opened a new location in the Dallas suburb of Richardson. When her sister Ellen married a coworker, the two of them moved to San Antonio and opened a new store there. Half Price Books was becoming a Texas-wide chain, fueled by little more than the genius of its concept and the eagerness of its owners to help their children find a way to make a living.

Despite paying meager salaries, Half Price Books managed to attract just the right kinds of employees: creative people, graduate students, struggling actors, aspiring poets, and other folks who enjoyed being around books. What they looked like or how they dressed didn't matter a whit to the owners. Shoes became mandatory only as a worker's-comp requirement. A few employees carried infants in Snuglis. The only rules of the house: Keep costs low. Waste nothing. Keep the books moving. Each department within each store assumed its own personality and its own look, complete with hand-lettered signs and custom-made display shelves. Sometimes conflict broke out among the company's eccentric and strong-willed personalities, but Pat Anderson never failed to silence the combatants with her command to "cut the bullshit" and "carry on."

Experienced employees were vital. Like family members, they became a touchstone of business strategy -- that is, to the extent that the company had a business strategy. When Ed Szymanski, a key store manager, decided that he wanted to live on a beach, Half Price Books decided to roll into the coastal town of Corpus Christi, Texas. When Julian Reipe, another longtime employee, moved to Washington State for personal reasons, Half Price Books staked a claim there as well. The same went for Jack Darsnek, who relocated to his hometown -- Madison, Wisconsin -- and was soon running stores there and in Minneapolis.

The same down-to-earth approach shaped the leadership structure of Half Price Books. At one point, Boots came into corporate headquarters to serve as her mother's second in command -- not because of rank order (Boots was the youngest of three daughters) but simply because her sisters happened to live out of town at the time. "We did what made sense," Boots explains.

Pat Anderson delegated almost everything, but she worked overtime to keep a grip on the company's financial numbers. In fact, knowing the numbers freed her from having to know what everyone else was doing. Errors in isolation were no cause for concern, but recurring errors sooner or later showed up in those numbers. Every day, using each pencil until there was nothing left but an eraser, Anderson compiled a tally of store sales, making tiny, immaculate ledger entries by hand, watching for trends, spotting anomalies, and informing store managers and department heads whenever the numbers signaled an unwelcome change. Anderson, in short, kept her arms around her empire using little more than a pencil stub.

Otherwise, Half Price Books bore none of the usual trappings of corporate planning. Each store was different from the next. Each department bore the stamp of its employees. The headquarters was located in a Dallas strip mall. "We pretty much made it up as we went along,'' Boots Anderson recalls. Yet by the mid-1990s, Half Price Books, with 53 stores in 8 states and more than $50 million in annual sales, had become the nation's largest used-book dealer by far. (Today the company has 62 stores in 10 states; its annual sales come to $70 million.)