A Day in the Life — Shelter Island’s Black Cat Books

Here’s another chapter in our continuing series looking at the daily lives of Island businesses and institutions. 

Dawn Hedberg and Mike Kinsey, the owners of Black Cat Books on North Ferry Road, have been denizens of the world of book publishing for over 30 years, most of that as bookstore owners in Sag Harbor and Shelter Island.

The official hours of the store (across from Maria’s Kitchen in the Center) are 10 to 5, but business takes place all day and all night. In the decades Dawn and Mike have bought and sold books, their bookstore went from printed volumes sold from shelf and table to a 24/7 book, vinyl, and magazine marketplace of rare book dealers, collectors, and online auctions and bookstores.

Even when the front door is locked and the store is dark, business is conducted.  As with the cat for which the shop is named, there is plenty of nocturnal activity at this bookstore. Here’s a day in the life of Black Cat Books.

7:30 a.m. Julia Romanchuk, like most people who work for Black Cat Books, is a long-time, part-time employee. She comes in before the shop opens to list books with online sellers, working from a pile sorted by Dawn the night before.

8 a.m. Mike comes in, looks over the listings that Julia has entered, and sends them out into the online marketplace. “I’ll deal with all the inquiries from booksellers, sales via eBay, Alibris, Amazon and eBooks. Upstairs there’s a place for processing and shipping,” he says.

9 a.m. Eliza Dunning lets herself into the store and settles in at the desk in the rear of the main floor with a home-made breakfast of English muffin with vegan egg and cheese.

For an hour or so before the store opens, she prepares rare and collectible books for auction on the Internet.

On this day, she’s working on a gilt-edged, leatherbound set of Jane Austen’s novels published by Easton Press. “They do editions of well-known books by well-known people. Mostly for decorating purposes,” she says. “$550 for the set. These are no longer being printed. Somebody is looking for this set and needs it to complete their collection. We list them on eBay.”

10 a.m. Eliza goes outside to welcome walk-ins by putting up a flag, erecting an easel sign for people driving by, and uncovering the sale racks, which are encased in a tarp and bungee cord. “Mike is quite good at the MacGyver part of running the store,” she says in admiration of his creative solution to keeping the sale books accessible, visible, and dry. “The books are out here all the time under a tarp.  Some are dented or faded, but we sell a lot of books from the sale rack. It’s nice to know that they find a home.”

Finally, she flips a sign in the front window from Closed to Open. “The store sort of blends in with all the houses so we need a lot of signs.”

10:15 a.m. Mike turns the lights on upstairs, opening the nonfiction section of the store — history, general and antiquarian, science, illustration, design, theater and an extensive and little-known collection of plays. “When people from the theater come in, they always say, ‘You have the best selection!’ Eliza says. “It’s interesting how much you learn from working in a bookstore. I’m someone who loves to read, and I’ve learned so much … artists and writers who I never knew about.”

10:30 a.m. As she prepares one of their rare books for auction, Eliza is standing in front of a counter covered with a large sheet of light brown paper with a camera.

“I use this as our backdrop when we’re taking pictures. This one is a first edition of a Stephen King book. It’s usually something that’s rare or something that would appeal to a collector who would not ordinarily come in.”

She positions the book carefully to show the full dust jacket and demonstrate a square binding, which is preferred by collectors. “Sometimes a book will be what is called cocked, a little unbalanced.”

11:30 a.m. A customer with a dog at the vet across the street comes in to browse, buys a copy of “A Big Storm Knocked It Over,” by Laurie Colwin. “I love her books,” she says. “Haven’t read this one.” And picks up “How to Cook Everything Vegan” by Mark Bittman, saying, “A bargain at $6.50.”

1 p.m. Serena Kaasik, the weekday store manager, comes in and begins shelving a stack of cookbooks sorted by Dawn alphabetically by author, including recent books by popular authors such as Yotam Ottolenghi.

Lucas Deupree has worked one day a week since he was 16, a decade ago. Usually it’s Sunday, a day when browsers come in, often looking for a recently published novel or something local.

The store has a large selection, separated into East End, New York, Shelter Island, North Fork, and Long Island sections. Sometimes customers call first if they’re looking for something specific, like the one who called to find a local history and was thrilled to hear they had it. The book had the caller’s family history documented and they had been looking for it everywhere.

4 p.m. “The Girl from Ipanema” is playing, and Mike is going back and forth with a buyer in Britain who is interested in a book about horses, that was written by someone named Henry and signed by Prince Charles.

Mike says “We’ve had the signed book for a while, looking for a buyer who wants a book signed by the King of England. Henry was an equestrian painter.”

4:30 p.m. A walk-in customer is looking for a book called “I Am a Cat,” a Japanese novel that her book group will soon be discussing. Mike remembers that the book is by Soseki Natsume, checks the shelves for a used copy, and when it isn’t in stock, helps the customer find it online.

All Day: Rarely seen by customers in the store, Dawn spends her time on appointments examining personal libraries she might acquire for the store, a process that takes time and skill. She comes to the store in the evening to go through what she has bought and decide which ones are rare or valuable enough to sell in an online auction, which might interest a collector, and which books will go into the shop.

Mike estimates they currently have over 500 boxes of books in storage, waiting to be sorted, including the library of Tom Matthews, a 30-year veteran of Newsweek who served as New York Bureau Chief, which they bought sight unseen.

5 p.m. On his way outside to bring in the flag and close the store, Mike pauses to admire the store sign, a black cat drawn on a wood panel beneath an iron hanger that looks like something from a bookshop on London’s Charing Cross Road. “When we first opened in Sag Harbor in ‘96 there was a sign carver who wanted to make a sign for us, the same sign as a London bookshop.” There’s no black cat associated with the store, just two small, chipper, partially black dogs.

Mike takes down the flag, brings in the sign and covers the sale books for the night with his ingenious tarp and bungee-cord creation.