• By ELLYN COUVILLION
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Mar 15, 2009

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When Tommy Savage opened his shop of used, rare and out-of-print books eight months ago, near the corner of Bluebonnet and Perkins, he wasn’t necessarily looking for a location right on the street.

People, he said, will find a bookstore.

They found his store previously in its St. Francisville location.

And, before that, customers found his first bookshop — one he operated for eight years — in the capital of Ecuador, a country he had fallen in love with in his travels.

In its present incarnation, the Thomas Savage Bookseller store is tucked away behind the Sprint store on Bluebonnet.

With limited parking but easy access back to the street, the bookstore can’t be seen from the road — though its sign can — but that doesn’t bother Savage.

“The difference between being on the street and not being on the street — it doesn’t really matter,” he said.

It’s something he’s learned, he said, in some 20 years of doing “nothing but eat, sleep, drink and dream the book business.”

Savage, 44, a native of Opelousas, who grew up in the Krotz Springs and Melville area on the Atchafalaya, said he was drawn away from his English studies at the state universities in Monroe and Lafayette by the lure of the book business.

The hook was a book he came across in Houston that he deemed to be a rare edition of a Hemingway novel.

Always a lover of books, Savage bought the edition with a $100 loan from his college roommate.

After some research, though, Savage said he “found out I had paid $100 for a $50 book.”

For some, that would be their first — and last — entry into rare book collecting.

It only piqued Savage’s interest.

“That’s what got me to drop out (of college) — the book business. I lost interest in school and found my passion for books,” he said.

His niche is the secondhand book business.

Without the money in his 20s to open a bookstore of his own, Savage said he got into the business as a book agent, traveling the country, looking for books for dealers in the pre-Internet days.

Traveling to secondhand bookstores from New York to Miami, from St. Louis to Portland, Savage would scout for books about Louisiana that might not interest readers in other regions of the country but would be welcomed by the high-end, secondhand book dealers he worked with in New Orleans.

“I not only had to learn who bought but what they bought. If I got it wrong, I had to ‘eat it,’” Savage said.

“You really had to know your market,” he said. 

At the same time, he was building his own collection for the store he hoped to some day open.

“I always wanted to keep more than I sold. I wanted to keep the ones I liked and learn more about them,” Savage said.

By 1992, he was ready to open a store “but I didn’t know where,” he said.

Even he probably wouldn’t have then guessed it would be Quito, the capital of Ecuador, a city with a population of more than 1 million that attracts international tourists — many of whom are English-speaking and would welcome a book to carry with them on their travels.

“I happened to go to South America for a visit. I didn’t know anybody and knew four words of Spanish,” Savage said.

After several visits to Ecuador, he decided to open a secondhand bookstore in a section of Quito heavily traveled by tourists. The store opened in 1994.

“It was a smashing success from Day 1,” he said.

Savage operated the business for eight years and opened a second location in Quito, the city where he also met his future wife, Lisley. The couple has two daughters, Camila, 10, and Marsha Ann, almost 8, he said.

When the family decided to move to the United States, Savage was able to sell his book business for eight times his initial investment, he said. 

The book store in Quito continues in operation.

The Savage family returned to the United States in 2004 and settled in St. Francisville, he said. 

There, Savage enjoyed spending time with his family and found his book collection slowly building up again. 

“My wife doesn’t have anything against books, she just doesn’t want to decorate with them,” he said with a smile. 

When a space came open on Ferdinand Street in St. Francisville in the summer of 2005, Savage figured he’d put his books there and open the business.

“Maybe a few people would come in” and help him pay the rent, is what he was thinking, he said. 

The store was successful.

Eventually, his growing book inventory prompted Savage to think about opening a store in New Orleans or Baton Rouge.

Baton Rouge was especially attractive, he said, because his family could stay in St. Francisville.

Having lived with his family on the 14th floor of a high-rise apartment building in a big city like Quito has made Savage appreciate the family’s Louisiana home, he said. 

Thomas Savage Bookseller, Used, Rare and Out-of-Print Books opened in Baton Rouge in July.

Finding the approximately 1,800-square-foot location behind Sprint means his rent is about half what it would be if he was leasing space facing Bluebonnet, Savage said.

Another plus is a commercial storage-unit facility across from the book store. 

Savage, who has more than 30,000 titles, can store his inventory there and devote the store space entirely to retail, he said.

While there are at least 20 book categories in the store, Savage’s two specialties are Louisiana-related books and literature.

“Louisiana-related sells so fast (the section) appears weak” sometimes, he said.

Savage, himself, enjoys collecting military history books, which fellow collectors can also find at the store. 

His store has mostly hardbacks.

“It looks nice, has a feel of its own. People enjoy browsing in a bookstore” like that, he said.

The business isn’t a book exchange; Savage doesn’t trade books.

He does buy used single books or collections, according to his Web site, http://www.thomassavagebooks.com.

At the shop, customers will find “second-hand, good clean copies for a really good price,” Savage said.

His books generally sell for $4.95 — a price, he said, that’s competitive with the Internet trade where a shopper might find a book for $1, but will pay above that for shipping, Savage said. 

In fact, he says he’ll match Internet prices on a book.

Incidentally, he credits one of his early mentors in the business, Gary Alexander of Alexander’s Books in Lafayette, with bringing him up to speed on the Internet when Savage returned to the United States.

Today, Savage also sells his books through online bookstore Web sites. 

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, several shoppers stopped to browse and purchase books.

“He has a very good selection, things I don’t run across anywhere else,” Pat McCoy said as she left the shop with several purchases.

“He prices so people can pick up something they wouldn’t try” otherwise, she said.

That day, she had picked a novel by Benjamin Disraeli, a two-time prime minister of England in the 1800s. 

“I had no idea he wrote novels,” McCoy said, looking at her selections. “It was cheap enough I could take a chance on it.”

Some secondhand bookstore owners open their stores so they can sit and read, Savage said.

It’s a philosophy that doesn’t generally lead to business success, he said.

“I’m not running a museum,” Savage said.

“I want to sell the books,” he added.

“When you come here in about a month, it will all be fresh books,” Savage said in mid-February.

He won’t necessarily have the titles just released that week, he said.

“If I did, I would be Barnes and Noble,” Savage said.

But, he said, if readers find an author they like, they can find his or her other books at his store and build a collection.

“The people who like my books enjoy what they’re collecting. They’re looking for a good book they haven’t seen before, at a reasonable price,” Savage said.