Bookshop Under the Stairs owner making move to downtown PO

By Elisha Meyer Port Orchard Independent • August 27, 2024 1:30 am
Elisha Meyer/Kitsap News Group Sinclair Inlet Book Co. opened in mid-July and is being presented as a gradual move away from the Bookshop Under the Stairs.
Elisha Meyer/Kitsap News Group Sinclair Inlet Book Co. opened in mid-July and is being presented as a gradual move away from the Bookshop Under the Stairs.

Like a certain “boy who lived” character in literature, Terry Heath had also been looking for a way out from the cupboard under the stairs.

That path would take the Bookshop Under the Stairs owner further away from his Town Square Mall location that opened in 2022 to an increasingly familiar territory for bookstores: downtown Port Orchard.

“I really wanted to find a spot, and when this opened up, I figured I’d better grab it,” he said, working from his new location at 821 Bay St. “Poulsbo has Liberty Bay Books, Bainbridge has Eagle Harbor.”

Now Port Orchard has the Sinclair Inlet Book Co., the third independently owned bookshop to open downtown in three years. Salmonberry Books had opened in 2022, followed by Find the Path Books last year.

Bookshop Under the Stairs is expected to remain open until March of 2025, when Heath’s lease of the mall space expires.

Heath said that he and the mall had not always been on the best of terms, highlighted by the decision by mall ownership to not allow a previously planned “Drag Queen Story Time” session last year for safety concerns. “It became sort of a longstanding, ‘Yeah, I’m not going to be staying here,’” he said. “It’s just a variety of things, but I don’t want to bad-mouth the mall. Obviously, the retail economy isn’t great right now either.”

Sale numbers had steadily increased at the mall store, though not to the level Heath might have needed to maintain his current space. That provoked the search for a smaller spot with a lower overhead, an approach taken to also manage the increasing levels of local competition. “The pie is only so big, and you can slice it so many ways, so it’s more sustainable to have the lower overhead,” Heath said.

Yet it can be agreed between the respective bookshops’ owners that the best kind of competition is a friendly one, especially one that could make Bay Street an increasingly popular destination for South Kitsap readers.

“The more the merrier,” Find the Path Books co-owner Karena Fagan said. “I hope we can bring different styles of books for different kinds of people. We were kind of hoping that at one point, we could get together and do some kind of thing between the three stores. Like a book crawl sort of idea.”