The Biz Beat: San Jose’s Recycle Bookstore — an oasis of printed culture

Emma, the Instagram-famous Persian cat that roams Recycle Bookstore in San Jose, is “prissy, finicky, very loud and opinionated.” According to store owner Eric Johnson, there is a long tradition of cats in bookstores, dating back to the practical need of stopping mice from nibbling away at the inventory.

But Emma, Johnson said, has a different function entirely: to give human beings the feeling they have all the time in the world to luxuriate and do whatever they like.

“That’s what every customer wants,” he told San José Spotlight. “The time to rest and read.”

A good bit of time is required to take in the full breadth of Recycle’s sharply curated 100,000-plus inventory of used, new and rare books, much less read them all. Housed in a labyrinth of connected rooms, volumes in every subject fill cases stretching to the ceiling, with some piled here and there on the floor, vying for a place on the shelves.

“I don’t think there’s a customer that we do not have a book for,” Johnson said, who’s owned the store for nearly three decades. “Anybody can walk into the store, find something and feel at home, no matter what their interests or their price range.”

And for people who come in for something more than a selfie with Emma, the chances for discovery are vast. Unlike a store strictly limited to new books, Johnson said, the inventory at Recycle potentially draws from the entire history of the printed page, from the most recent bestsellers to long out-of-print titles that are the cornerstones of world culture.

“The idea that the only good books are the new ones coming out is ridiculous,” he said. “There are really solid books here you didn’t ask for and may have never seen that broaden the range of what you can explore.”

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to the inventory. Affordable editions mingle with the rare and unique: Recycle has handled items such as the scarce first edition of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” but customers can also find paperback copies of Mark Twain’s classic on the shelf for just a few bucks.

Recycle’s inventory relies in part on books purchased over the counter — about 500 books a day — in a process that relies on a symbiotic relationship between customer and buyer, learning what customers want to buy based on what they sell. There is also a lot of observation and experience brought into judging the salability of a book you may never have seen before from an unfamiliar subject area.

“You develop a kind of mystical book sense,” Johnson said. “I’m not a Russian history expert, but I know what people who read Russian history are interested in, and you learn to recognize what they get excited about.”

Lance Ehrman, one of Recycle’s buyers, says the most essential part of selecting inventory for the store is to cater to the broadest interests of the customers, regardless of personal taste.

“It’s not a case of carrying the books that I want to carry,” Ehrman told San José Spotlight, “but also carrying things that I wouldn’t particularly care to read in my free time that other people would be interested in.”

As Ehrman has discovered, the books brought in for sale can occasionally be astonishing, such as when a customer offered him a copy of Joshua Barnes’ edition of “Euripidis Quae Extant Omnia (The Complete Works of Euripides),” a book significant enough for a copy to be housed in the famous Bodleian Library at Oxford.

“It was a random Thursday afternoon,” Ehrman said, “and a man, who was teaching himself Ancient Greek, just walked in with this book from 1694 in its original binding. We get some really interesting stuff.”

There is also a large selection of new books in the store, with an emphasis on multicultural children’s books and literature, a byproduct of Johnson opening a second store in historic downtown Campbell in 2004.

“It was obvious that Campbell’s clientele really wanted a partially new bookstore,” he said. “That fed over to the San Jose store as we realized it was important for us to have at least a few of the books that were current and connected with the community.”

On her first visit with her parents, young Melody Gonzalez had only been in the store a few minutes before she found a double armload of books she wanted, including one about Anne Frank and volumes in the “Phoebe and Her Unicorn” series about Phoebe Howell and a magical unicorn named Marigold Heavenly Nostrils.

“I already thrifted one of the books in the series,” she told San José Spotlight. “The unicorn’s very sassy, and I fell in love with it. I’ve found lots of other things today and was surprised that half of that collection was here, all in great condition.”

Johnson said the beauty of the store, to his eye, is being able to look across the aisles on a busy day and seeing an 85-year-old man with a walker looking for an old mystery while at the same time a child is shouting, “Mom, look what I found!”

“There’s going to be a book here that you will want to have,” Johnson said. “And if you let your intellect wander, you might stumble upon something that changes your entire mindset.”

Contact Robert Eliason at [email protected].

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