May 1, 2017

Meet Keith Peterson of Selected Works Used Books & Sheet Music in South Loop

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Keith Peterson.

Keith, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I had worked in other bookstores – Kroch & Brentanos, University of Chicago, Aspidistra – and made the decision that I had enough experience in bookselling to try it on my own with my own store. I didn’t know the business part of running a business, but I hoped I would learn that quickly enough to get by. This was in 1984, before the internet and it was in many respects a different world – good used books were fairly easy to find in thrift shops and at book sales, people who were moving would bring in good things – finding good stock was mostly a matter of spotting the good ones and avoiding the too common or worthless books. And, people were still building libraries of real physical books, just like educated people had for the past few centuries. The cultural drift towards digital media was only barely hinted at with the appearance of a new recorded music format called the CD.

My first little store slowly expanded to as much shelving as I could cram into it, and I began buying and selling used sheet music and scores too, as I kept finding good material and it seemed a shame to pass it up. My customers responded to that too, and I slowly became known for my sheet music too.

About ten years later I moved to a larger location a couple blocks away, and then later on to my current location in the Fine Arts Building here in the South Loop. The cultural shift towards digital, streaming and on-line media and entertainment is, of course, now in full swing, but I meet the challenge with my hand-selected stock of good books, hard to find used music scores, and my secret weapon – Hodge the cat.

Hodge came to Selected Works a few months after I moved to the South Loop as a 10 week old Korat kitten, who was beautiful, smart, a bit crazy, and a customer favorite from the beginning. On a daily basis, he has more visitors asking for him than I do, and makes new fans every day as well. To add to his fame, a friend, of mine, Suzanne Erfurth, wrote, or ‘channeled’ his book The Secret Life of Hodge, the Bookstore Cat, which was illustrated by another friend of ours, Beatriz Ledesma. We call him Chicago’s most famous literary cat. We’ve been interviewed on Public Radio because of the book and have been featured on a Japanese television show.

We were named by the Chicago Reader a couple years ago as the Best Bookstore with a Cat, which Hodge let me know really meant Best Cat with a Bookstore.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Running Selected Works was a smooth road for a while – the late 1980s and the 1990s were boom years for me, but the internet began changing my world in the early 2000s, and it took me a while to understand what was happening. I came late to selling on-line, because I reasoned that it didn’t make sense to ‘dumb down’ my store by selling the best items to people who never set foot there, making it less interesting to those who did. But, in the end, I had to admit that I had to sell my books to whoever was willing to buy them or I would no longer be in business to sell books to anyone.

The world of the internet did open possibilities of selling obscure and collectible books to anyone anywhere, which was good. On the other hand, the availability of good used books began to dry up as more and more people would sell their own books on eBay and other on line markets instead of bringing them to stores like mine. And it became fairly common for even small book sales to look up the values of books on the internet and the result was that all the good books might be cherry-picked out and priced beyond practicality at a ‘collector’s table’ – so all that was not so good, but Inevitable. In general, everything became harder, including commercial rents, which never go down. This is the reason there are fewer used bookstores than there used to be, and why many dealer simply sell on-line and forego a storefront operation.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Selected Works Used Books & Sheet Music story. Tell us more about the business.
My bookstore tends to focus on the Humanities – literary fiction, poetry, history, philosophy, art, classical studies, drama, music – and within those categories I try to avoid commonplace books. As far as music goes, I try to keep on hand all the well-known classical composers as well as anything that seems old and unusual. It’s all a matter of what I can find, of course, or what people bring to me. Popular music is much the same – the good solid stuff plus the odd and unusual. I avoid what are known as ‘remainders’ – books that are discounted and dumped on the market, and I might be the only bookstore with any substantial selection of sheet music.

Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
I have had a number of brushes with good luck in my career – on two separate occasions years apart, I nearly moved my store to new locations but could not for different reasons. I think now that either of those moves would have been a bad idea, perhaps fatal. And, on the other hand, my wife toured the Fine Arts Building on an Open Studios night and said to me later that I might take a look at that location as a possible place for my store. I went, saw its possibilities, and surprised her by making arrangement to move here. It was definitely a good move.

There is, of course, luck involved in stumbling across good libraries – typically I would luck on to one once a year that would be of the caliber to make me want to celebrate. Every used book dealer has those stories. One species of luck that running my store has brought me is coming in contact with some very interesting people, and the making of good, life-long friends. I prize that luck over that which led me to good books to sell.

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