ASHLAND – A number of new businesses have opened in downtown Ashland in the past several years but one type of business often mentioned that was lacking is a bookstore. Sometime this spring, that void will be filled.
Wes Wyse, owner of Useful Junk in Sullivan, is in the process of opening Ashland Books at 17 E. Main St. The location, next to the Essex House, previously housed Stickman Video Games before it closed last year.
Wyse has run Useful Junk, an antique store, for about 10 years. In recent years, the “book room” in the store has begun to overflow into the rest of the store.
“The books have kind of expanded beyond what we can handle in the antique store so I’m opening a shop,” Wyse said. “The books were confined to a room and then they started expanding outward and outward until they were taking up valuable antique shop space so we have started packing those away. And we’ve been buying real heavy. We’ve found some collections recently that we picked up. So we’re in good shape. We’ve got enough to open a shop now.”
Hannah Farley, who will help Wyse run Ashland Books joined Useful Junk as an employee a few years ago.
“I’ve grown up loving reading and I have a family that loves to read. So when I started working for (Wyse) and he found I that I liked books, I started getting more and more involved in the book room,” Farley said.
It was a comment Farley made that helped convince Wyse who has wanted to own a bookstore since he was young that now was the time to open the store.
“We were out at an auction one day and we stopped at the used book store in Wooster. Hannah just happened to mention that she’d like to work in a bookstore. And I said, ‘You know what. That sounds like a pretty good idea,’” Wyse said. “We’ve been thinking about it for years but when I found out Hannah was interested in helping with it, that became the impetus to get started with it.”
The new store has at least three times as much space as is allotted for books now in Useful Junk, allowing more books to be displayed for sale. Remodeling work is underway in the store and Wyse hopes to be able to begin moving in the middle of February with an anticipated opening date of March 1, if all goes well.
“We’re hoping to get in a few weeks before (March 1) and start filling the shelves,” Wyse said.
Ashland Books will buy used books, but Wyse said they won’t buy every book that comes in the store.
“We’re going to be focused on quality. We’re not going to have a lot of out-of-date cookbooks or money investing books from the 70s. Primarily modern and up-to-date kind of books. But we’ll have plenty of antique, collectible books, too,” Wyse said. “We’re not going to have books that are damaged or have a lot of writing in them or missing the dust jacket. We’re going to have books that are nice.”
Wyse and Farley plan to carry books by local authors and also will carry items like greeting cards, as long as they are locally made.
Wyse is excited about the growth taking place in downtown Ashland, which also inspired him to take the leap and open the store now.
“The day after Thanksgiving, I was shopping downtown with my parents and everything was packed,” Wyse said. “I hope downtown continues to thrive, because that would be great for us and great for everybody.”
The store will initially be open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wyse said prices for fiction books will be $2 for paperbacks and $3 for hardcovers and non-fiction books will range from $3 to $10. Some antique or collectible books may be priced over $10.
