In a time when Amazon dominates the book-selling industry, a Tacoma woman is taking a different approach than the corporate giant.

Margaret Bostrom started a small “eclectic” used bookstore in February of this year. Like Amazon, Bostrom’s store, Owl in the Attic Books, is almost exclusively online, primarily selling on Ebay and Biblio. However, Bostrom said she rarely sells new books. Owl in the Attic Books specializes in used, and often rare, books.

“I’ve always loved books. I have worked at a couple bookstores,” Bostrom said. “I have actually always wanted to have my own bookstore but doing that full-time wasn’t really feasible.”

Bostrom said she wandered into this business by accident when seeing a book sale while returning books at a local library.

“All the books were 50 cents or a dollar. I looked through them and there were a few that I knew how much they were worth,” Bostrom said. “I just started doing it as a hobby.”

When she realized that she was not only having fun but also making money, Bostrom said she decided to scale the business up.

“I love books. I love being around them and handling them,” Bostrom said. “I like giving books to people that are looking for that particular one.”

Bostrom said she sources most of her inventory from library sales, estate sales, auctions and garage sales. She then takes those books and lists them online to find them new homes with people across the country.

“It’s very satisfying,” Bostrom said. “It’s still nice to know that people still love books. Used books are great because if they’re well cared for, they stay just as nice as they have always been. In some ways, some people find them cooler when they get older.”

Bostrom said her inventory is partially influenced by her own interests, as well as what is valuable to other people. She said first editions of classic or popular fiction, like horror, classic children’s books, history, how-to books and niche interest books are what’s popular in her market.

“I’ve sold books on kiln building, on earth-sheltered house architecture. I had one book that was entirely about antique doorknobs,” Bostrom said. “I’m learning more and more about what people are reliably interested in.”

Bostrom said her goals right now are to grow her inventory, which sits at around 400 books.

“They have sold faster than I expected so it’s been harder to grow my inventory than I thought. I would like to grow it to around 1,000 books,” Bostrom said. “If the right place to have a used book store appeared, I would love to. That’s definitely the sort of business I would want to run, sort of eclectic, you never know what you are going to find, small, used bookstore.”

With fears of physical books disappearing, many would think starting a bookstore today would be a failing endeavor. However, Bostrom said people have been saying it’s a weird time to be a bookseller ever since she worked at an independent bookstore in the early 2010s. Bostrom said it’s different being in the used collectible book market.

“For my business model it actually won’t work for me to have new books. They can be sold by big wholesalers for five dollars and free shipping on Ebay,” Bostrom said. “I am discovering the things that, because they are a limited run or because Stephen King has such a devoted fan base, hold their value right now and it is really interesting.”

Bostrom said she has done well in selling books that are nostalgic from her own youth such as the Harry Potter books or the Redwall series.

“For some books, I think it does get into the nostalgia market. People want the actually tangible object that they remember, that they remember handling at one point in time,” Bostrom said. “I was able to give someone a book that they lost in a house fire that I had gotten in a huge lot of books in an auction.”

Bostrom thinks there is less of a fear of books totally disappearing today, like there was when she first started working at bookstores and Amazon was incentivizing customers to download books to Kindles instead of buying books at independent bookstores.

“There is an enduring place for books as material objects that people are going to want to consume and consume again,” Bostrom said.

While her primary business is online, she said she has sold some books to people in the Tacoma area.

“I sell books locally but I need to be reached either through Ebay or Instagram at this point because my business only works if I keep my overhead as low as possible,” Bostrom said.

Bostrom has created a shelf of curated books for sale at the Barber Collective in the Hilltop neighborhood on Yakima Park Avenue S. Bostrom said the books at the Barber Collective are all $5 to $12 and there’s Venmo QR code with the shelf to purchase the book.

“I’ve enjoyed curating this little shelf of books for the Barber Collective,” Bostrom said. “If there were other businesses in Tacoma that wanted a shelf of thematic used books, I would be happy to create that for them.”

The logo, Toddrick the store owl, was illustrated by 15-year-old Sophie Corey Hendrickson, who is a 10th grader at SOTA. Photos courtesy of Margaret Bostrom.