G ayle Shanks figured she’d run the bookstore for a year. As a young woman in her 20s, Shanks and some of her fellow teachers at an alter- native school would often sit around and talk about plans for the future. “One of the fantasies that we had was starting a bookstore that would carry books that we loved, we wanted people to read, and one day it just happened,” she says. That was the mid-1970s, and now, Changing Hands Bookstore will mark its 50th anniversary with celebrations at both locations — 6428 S. McClintock Drive in Tempe and 300 W. Camelback Road in Phoenix — from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Saturday. As Shanks tells it, the owner of a used bookstore on Mill Avenue, Caveat Emptor, was looking to liquidate inventory and get out of the business. His asking price was $500. Shanks, her husband, Bob Sommer, and original partner Tom Broderson scraped together the money, packed up the books and began looking for a storefront. On April 1, 1974, Changing Hands opened at 9 E. Fifth Street in Tempe in a former typewriter repair shop with mostly used books, plus one case of new ones selected from the Whole Earth Catalog. “I grew up reading books; I was a vora- cious reader,” Shanks says. “Tom did as well, and my other partner, Bob Sommer, was a big reader, too. So we were all into books and we just thought we would do it for a year and see what happened.” The initial clientele was “mostly hippies,” Shanks says. “It was a lot of people interested in spir- ituality and sort of New Age-y kinds of things. Buddhism was a brand-new thing, meditation, yoga — those were all really new things in the ’70s, and people were looking for books about those subjects. And they were also looking for poetry and books on politics. The Vietnam War had just ended, and there were really a lot of people thinking about questioning authority, the history of the United States and how it was playing into their lives. And the environment was really huge in those days, too. We didn’t call it climate change, but we talked about ecology, environ- mental politics and greenhouse gasses. “So we thought we were going to have a bookstore that was going to address a lot of the issues that we were facing in the world and as a local community. We were also very interested in ideas about culture and about philosophy and the way that we think about our world and how humans fit into it, and we just thought, what a great thing it would be to have a place that had books about those subjects and people could come in and talk about them,” Shanks adds. The early years weren’t always easy. In the summer months, when foot traffic dried up, the owners feared they’d have to close. But the business grew gradually, and in 1978, after outgrowing the original space, the store moved to 414 S. Mill Ave, where it flourished. G ayle Shanks figured she’d The initial clientele was “mostly Changing Hands Bookstore celebrates five decades in the Valley. By Jennifer Goldberg (Illustrations by Matthew Foltz-Gray) >> p 17
