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Del Mar Times, Business Section, May 12-18, 2006

Bookworks prepares for next 30 years with new owners

Lisa Stefanacci assists a customer while former owner Milane Christiansen looks on.

By Barbara Davenport

One of Del Mar’s treasures has changed hands. Milane Christiansen, who opened Bookworks in Flower Hill in 1976, has sold the independent bookstore to long time customer Lisa Stefanacci. Bookworks will stay in the same space, and offer the same warm ambience that for 30 years has made customers feel that it’s their second home.

On a morning when customers lingered at the shelves and a book group met to discuss a novel, Stefanacci sat in a sunny alcove at the front of the store she’s loved since she was a graduate student at UCSD. She talked about the store as home, and about her shift from neuroscience researcher to bookseller.

Bookworks’ cozy space, the presence of fresh flowers, the 6-inch wide floor boards that creaked, and the vintage ceramics and garden sculpture that share the space with books reminded her, when she first found it, of her grandmother’s house. She knows from Christiansen that in the weeks and, after Sept. 11, 2001, traffic at the store increased sharply.

Old regulars and new customers alike told Christiansen that they wanted to be among people they knew, in a place that gave them comfort.

That sense of home is part of the Bookworks’ soul, Stefanacci says, something she wants to preserve. She plans no disruptive changes.

A new speaker series on mind-brain interactions already underway, draws on her knowledge of neurosciences and the area’s many researchers. A non-fiction book club now meets monthly, in addition to several fiction groups. She plans to carry more titles in neuroscience and philosophy, and increase Spanish language titles, first for children and eventually for adults.

Although she’s an accomplished researcher — her business card reads, “Senior Staff Scientist, Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, Salk Institute” — Stefanacci had increasingly felt that some piece of her life was missing.

“Last fall I started to need Bookworks more,” she said. “I came as often as I could, and then I asked Milane if I could spend more time here.”

Just before Christmas she learned that the store was for sale.”

It was like a knife going through her,” she remembered. She hid in the children’s book section and cried. Then she went home and looked at her savings and talked with her husband.

Three weeks later, she called Christiansen and said she wanted to buy the store. They met, and Christiansen told her all the reasons not to own a bookstore. At the end of the conversation Stefanacci thanked her, and said she wanted to buy the store.

Christiansen is thrilled to have her store in such caring hands. At Stefanacci’s request she’s staying on as a consultant.

“I want her to be a success more than anything in the world,” said Christiansen.

Christiansen always wanted to have a bookstore. She’d envisioned a place where people would come and gather, where she could invite great thinkers, where there would be books and good talk. In 1976 she quit a marketing job at SDG&E, secured a loan from the Women’s Bank of San Diego, and moved in as one of the first tenants of the new Flower Hill Mall. She laid California whitewood planking over the concrete floor, put up shelves, and brought in fresh flowers.

In 1979, she encouraged Bob Sinclair, owner of the Pannikin, to open a store next door.

“I told him that he’d have a bookstore without having to run one, and I’d have a cafe without having to run it, and people would come to both,” she said.

They knocked out the wall between them, and she persuaded him to co-sponsor music on Friday nights, a collabora- tion that still continues. Sean Holder, who now owns the Pannikins, says that Pannikin and Bookworks anchor the mall, and bring enormous foot traffic.

“We’ll miss Milane,” he said. “She’s a wonderful woman, great to work with.”

Christiansen sustained the store through “the holocaust years” for independent bookstores, the early 90’s when Crown Books offered deep discounts that independents couldn’t match, Amazon emerged as a ferocious competitor, and across the country independent bookstores closed. Bookworks endured because she and her staff had built a loyal customer base, people who valued the literary quality of her stock, and the store’s comfortable, inviting feel.