Heavy Reading at Books by the Pound

Summer reading season is at its peak, and a buddy who lives in central Arkansas was telling me about the books he plans to enjoy while the sun is high in the sky.

It wasn’t the titles of his selections that intrigued me, though—it was the place where he said he’d purchased them: a store called Books by the Pound.

I thought he was kidding. But in the town of Searcy, Ark., population 23,000, a stand-alone store is doing something that might jolt the traditions of the genteel literary world.

As Americans feel the pinch of inflation and reconsider their spending habits, Books by the Pound sells used books the way a grocery sells ground beef or a deli sells chicken salad. Instead of “Give me a pound-and-a-half of pastrami” or “I’ll take 2 pounds of coleslaw,” though, it’s “Give me 3 pounds of William Faulkner and a couple pounds of Mary Higgins Clark.”

“My business background is in recycling, not books,” said Richard Howell, the store’s co-owner. He explained that millions of books each year go unsold in retail outlets or are tossed out by their owners and end up in garbage cans or crushed into pulp. Secondhand shops and online merchants have become the final home for many of them.

In Searcy, he and his co-owners have made a bet on a different business model. The price on the cover of a book is irrelevant at Books by the Pound. The only way a customer can purchase books is by weighing them on the scales by the cash registers.

“It’s $1.50 a pound,” Mr. Howell said. “The best deal for customers is the empty boxes we provide, which can hold 40 or more pounds of books. It’s $30 for a box of books, flat fee. You can get at least 40 books into one of those boxes.”

There are around 100,000 books always in stock, and each week an additional truck full of used books pulls up to the store’s loading dock. Inside, the store’s shelves and bins are divided into categories: religion, fiction, history, romance, sci-fi, biography, Westerns and many more. But some customers just ask for a random box of books from mixed categories. For $30, they figure it’s like a treasure hunt—there’s bound to be something in the box they’ll enjoy.

“People love to read, but money can be tight these days,” Mr. Howell said. Selling literature by the pound means that a slim volume by a Nobel laureate will be less expensive than a 400-page guide to refrigerator and air-conditioning repair, but he feels there is nothing undignified about the store’s business model. The important thing, after all, is that books end up being read.

The store in Searcy is currently a one-off, but the owners are talking about expanding to other towns where readers might like to take home six or seven pounds of leisure reading. “It sounds like a simple concept,” said Mr. Howell. “But sometimes those are the best.”

Mr. Greene’s books include “Chevrolet Summers, Dairy Queen Nights.”