Photo by J. Adrian Wylie
“I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew I liked books,” Gene Alloway says, seated at his desk in the middle of a shop full of them on a rainy afternoon.
Alloway grew up in Parsons, Kansas, a town so small, he says, that it didn’t have a bookstore. But it had a public library, and his mother’s friend, Miss Mast, worked there.
“I can see her face plain as day,” he says. “She was actually a dancer on Broadway, and she came back home to take care of her parents and became the librarian to earn a living while she was there.” She let him check out grown-up books on his mother’s card.
He was “an okay student and got better as I got further into high school—enough to get a scholarship” to the University of Kansas in Lawrence. “It was a partial scholarship, but there were other scholarships as well. So between all of those, my first year was paid for.”
And Lawrence had bookstores. “The university bookshop had some interesting history titles, so I’d buy from there. But at the foot of the hill—the University of Kansas is on Mt. Oread—at the foot of the hill there was a bookstore called J. Hood.” His face lights up at the memory. “That was a great bookstore. Imagine a store like Jay Platt’s [West Side Book Shop], but maybe twice the size. Some really nice stuff. …
“Then I come to Ann Arbor, and here’s Borders!” Those experiences, he says, “spoiled me. … [Motte & Bailey] is partly me refusing to accept you cannot have an academic bookstore in the twenty-first century in a university town. I refused to believe that.”
After graduating with a degree in classical studies, he took a year off “to make pizza and figure out what I wanted to do.” The answer was to work with books.
He earned a master’s in library science at Emporia State University then came to Ann Arbor for a U-M program that trained “librarians to be administrators.” From 1989 to 2006, he worked various jobs with U-M libraries.
One day in 1996, he “went to a garage sale that had a bunch of photography books.” He bought them, resold some, kept others, and still came out ahead: “I had all my money back plus enough to eat lunch and to cover the stuff I bought for me. So I started doing that more often.”
A few years later, “a colleague at the library, John Murphy, and I got to talking about running a bookstore and then I talked to my older friend—someone I’d known since high school, Paul Hare—and we decided we’d do it.”
With mentoring from Jay Platt and inventory on consignment from Tom Nicely’s Leaves of Grass Bookshop, Motte & Bailey opened in 2000 on E. Ann St. “Our first day resulted in $24 in sales,” Alloway recalls.
Motte & Bailey’s website says it offers “Ancient & Medieval history, Science fiction & Fantasy, Books About Books, and Military history. We also have very good sections of Children’s picture books, Architecture, History of Science, World history, Transportation history, and antiquarian books, including illustrated volumes and history.”
Taken together, they add up to a sustainable business. Murphy left to attend law school, but in 2006 Alloway and Hare moved around the corner to S. Fourth Ave. “Our first day [on Fourth] we had over $400 in sales,” Alloway says. “We’ve had better days since.”
Platt says Ann Arbor is “very lucky” in its array of antiquarian book shops. “We have more than most towns five times the size.”
Booksellers “each have our own ways,” Platt adds. “Gene has done a great job. He has his niche, I have mine, and everyone else has theirs.”
Motte & Bailey is “more academic,” he says. “I try to do a lot of literature.”
Alloway says that when people come in with stacks of books to sell, he usually can give a price on the spot. “I know what’s on my shelves, and I know where my gaps are, and I know what I want more of and what I want less of. …
“What it’s worth is another issue. But again, I can tell.” If a seller hesitates, “I give them the opportunity to take something out of the stack, so that they’re happy with the deal and I’m happy with the deal.”
Does he feel an emotional connection to all the books that pass through his hands? “It is emotional,” Alloway says, “but it’s more curiosity than love. I like seeing what books I’m going to see that week that I haven’t seen before,” he says. “I like seeing who buys the books. I like seeing what books sell, what books don’t sell. …
“It doesn’t matter if I like the book. I’m not a fan of Ayn Rand, but people still ask for her.”
He gets help with the children’s section from his wife, Jackie LaRose, a professor of teacher education at Eastern Michigan University who teaches children’s literature. “Our shared interest is books,” he says, and laughs. “She collects. We go to sales.”
But if you notice multiple copies of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, it’s because Alloway loves it. Why? “Toad is the most reprobate character in children’s literature! He has run-ins with the law,” he says. “He has no impulse control. He will break the law. He will steal. He is unhinged. What saves him is he has three good friends. It’s just a wild ride of a book.”
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As Miss Mast did years ago, Paul Hare recently “left to return to Kansas and take care of family,” Alloway says. He’s “no longer involved with the day-to-day of the business,” and Alloway is buying him out.
Looking ahead, Alloway wants “to bring on a junior partner and mentor them and make sure that they get paid. I’ve got some ideas. Some involve [putting] more stuff on the internet, but I also think being a little more picky [about what he buys] than I am now.”
Speaking of buying, he has some advice for people clearing out a collector’s house: rehoming the books “will take the longest. I’ve gotten so many calls, three days before the house changes hands … saying ‘We’re just now starting on the books.’” And they have 3,000 of them.
“Three thousand books! I can’t take three thousand books in four days.
“Start with the books.”
