Walter and Maggie Carr, the Globe Building and a 1973 opening.

Elliott Bay Book Company shares its name with Elliott Bay, the inlet of Puget Sound on which downtown Seattle sits, and it began in the city’s Pioneer Square neighbourhood. HistoryLink, the online encyclopedia of Washington State history, records that Walter Carr opened the shop on 29 June 1973, and Seattle Met, in a report published on 10 June 2022, said it was opened by Walter and Maggie Carr as a small family business. English Wikipedia also names the couple as founders. HistoryLink says Carr had no experience in retail or in books and wanted a change from a career in college administration. Peter Blecha, writing for HistoryLink in April 2010, placed the original shop in the historic Globe Building of 1890 in Pioneer Square.

The shop grew inside the old building and then beyond it. Wikipedia says it began in a 1,600-square-foot room of the Globe Building and expanded into a larger space there over the years. The Seattle Review of Books, in a profile published on 7 November 2016, wrote that the store spread outward into other storefronts on the same block, which gave it a rambling feel. Wikipedia names Kepler’s Books, with its high ceilings and classical music, as one of Carr’s models, and says he hired laid-off Boeing workers to help build the bookshelves. It describes the Pioneer Square rooms as having creaking wood floors and exposed brick walls, and says Carr stocked for breadth: a wide range of subjects, publishers and authors. HistoryLink adds that the shop opened a café next door and, in time, a graphics department of its own.

Readings became a large part of how the shop was known. Wikipedia dates the start of its author events to 1978 and a basement café to 1979, and Blecha also dated the café to 1979. The Seattle Review of Books wrote in 2016 that Elliott Bay hosts on average more than one event for every day of the year and has kept that schedule up for decades. Shelf Awareness, reporting on 6 July 2023 on the shop’s 50th-anniversary party, named Rick Simonson as the events coordinator whose career spans roughly the whole life of the store, and said the coffee shop in the television series Frasier was based on the original Elliott Bay Cafe.

A 1999 sale, a 2010 move and the cedar shelves that went with it.

The founders sold in 1999. HistoryLink says that in February 1999 Carr sold the store to the developer Ron Sher, who also owned Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, and The Seattle Review of Books gave the same buyer and year. Seattle Met reported in 2022 that Peter Aaron joined Elliott Bay in 1999, at the time of that sale, and was initially an employee; it said he became a minority owner in 2001 and sole owner in 2009. Wikipedia says Sher formed a partnership with Aaron in 2000, with Aaron managing day-to-day operations, and gives 2001 as the year Aaron became sole owner.

Under Aaron the shop left Pioneer Square. Blecha’s HistoryLink essay says Aaron confirmed the move on 9 December 2009, that the last book at the original location was sold on 31 March 2010, and that staff then packed some 150,000 books and all the old cedar shelving for a two-mile move. HistoryLink lists the pressures behind it: a 2008 snowstorm that hurt holiday trade, the recession that followed, new ways of buying and reading books, and a location with a perceived parking shortage and worries about safety at night. The shop reopened on Capitol Hill on 14 April 2010 with a soft opening, Blecha wrote, followed the next day by a block party with a ribbon-cutting, a rock band and a “Welcome to the Neighborhood” banner hung by its new neighbours.

The new home was another old working building. Blecha described it as a refurbished Ford truck-repair shop dating from around 1918, and Shelf Awareness gave the same date in 2023, placing the store in Capitol Hill’s Pike/Pine corridor with 19-foot ceilings and rows of cedar shelves. The Seattle Review of Books wrote that the handmade cedar bookshelves from Pioneer Square were dismantled and reassembled in the new space, keeping continuity in the visual language of the store, and that Aaron and the manager Tracy Taylor went to great lengths to make the move feel familiar. Wikipedia mentions exposed timber trusses and industrial sash windows in the building.

A name taken from the water, written on shelf cards and a staff newspaper.

Some bookshops take their identity from the building they occupy before any sign goes up. A shop in a former theatre, warehouse, garage or bank inherits ceiling heights, columns, stairs and windows it did not design, and those features often end up doing the work a logo might do elsewhere. Exposed trusses, a balcony or an old frontage become the backdrop to every photograph and every event, and they are hard to copy in a branch somewhere else. When such a shop moves, the question becomes what to carry with it: the shelving, the fixtures, a sign, or only the name. Keeping one physical element from the old rooms can give regular customers a thread of continuity in an unfamiliar space.

Inside, a great deal of the identity is handwritten. Staff recommendation cards clipped to shelves give each bookseller a small public voice, and their handwriting, paper stock and length vary from card to card in a way a printed label does not. Events and readings add a calendar to the identity: posters, a printed or emailed programme, a chair layout and a microphone stand become recurring images of the shop. Gift wrapping at the till, loyalty cards stamped or punched by hand and a store newsletter written by staff all carry the name into homes. When a larger company buys an independent shop and keeps its name, these local habits are often what keeps the shop recognisable to the people who used it before, so for designers the task is to document them as carefully as the mark itself.

Staff cards, punch cards and new owners from the neighbourhood.

Much of the shop’s voice is written by its booksellers. The Seattle Review of Books pointed in 2016 to a large Staff Recommends wall, a book club programme and Booknotes, a newspaper written by the staff, and Wikipedia says handwritten staff recommendations line the shelves throughout the store. Wikipedia quotes Walter Carr saying “we’re also selling personal service”. Seattle Met reported in 2022 that the half-filled punch cards carried by regulars would still be accepted under the new owners. Shelf Awareness in 2023 named Holly Myers as a member of staff since 1980 and described a café inside the store, Little Oddfellows. Wikipedia says that from 2019 to 2024 Elliott Bay worked with Hudson News on a bookshop in a terminal at Seattle–Tacoma International Airport.

The present owners came from inside the shop and from the neighbourhood around it. Seattle Met reported on 10 June 2022 that the store had been bought by Tracy Taylor, its general manager of 32 years, with Joey Burgess and Murf Hall of Burgess Hall Group, who had opened a Capitol Hill newsstand, Big Little News, with her in 2021. It said Aaron would stay on as an adviser through June to ease the handover, and that the new owners did not plan to change much. Shelf Awareness gave June 2022 as the month of the purchase and reported that Walter and Maggie Carr spoke at the 2023 anniversary party, alongside a statement from Aaron read by Myers. Taylor, Hall and Burgess have owned Elliott Bay Book Company since 2022.

For a design guide, Elliott Bay Book Company shows how a bookshop can carry its identity in fittings and words rather than a single mark: cedar shelves taken apart and rebuilt across the city, handwritten cards, a staff newspaper and a calendar of readings that runs almost every day. Compare Powell’s Books, the Portland bookseller further down the Pacific coast, and Tattered Cover, the Denver bookshop that also moved its name through several buildings. For this guide we use cedar, Sound blue and brick with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Elliott Bay Book Company’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.