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Eureka Books owner Solomon Everta says his favorite part of any given day is getting to talk to people about books.

“But I actually don’t get to do a lot of that because I’m the owner of the store,” he told the Outpost during an interview last week. The responsibilities of business ownership tend to keep him occupied in the back of the building most of the time — paying bills, researching better insurance rates, etc.

So when it comes to gauging customer demand, Everta listens to his employees, “because they know more about what our customers want,” he explained.

And what do they want? Well, manga, for one thing. When Everta purchased Eureka Books from local doctor and book collector Jack Irvine nearly four years ago, the store had a relatively modest inventory of the Japanese comics and graphic novels. 

The store’s selection has grown significantly over the past few years. Following the advice of his employees, Everta started buying more titles from customers who came in with “huge collections” of used manga and graphic novels. (Eureka Books, like its neighboring bookstore up the block, Booklegger, buys and sells used books, though Eureka Books’ ground floor is mostly occupied by new titles.) 

Soon, one bookshelf of manga and graphic novels became two. Then three. Then five.

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“It has been very successful,” Everta said. “So successful that we’re at the point of thinking that it could really use its own space.”

That’s the main motivating factor behind the bookseller’s new business venture, Omnibus. Located at 117 F Street, diagonally across the Old Town Gazebo from Eureka Books, the new store will carry not just manga and graphic novels but also role-playing games, related pop culture items (including films) and illustrator-focused art supplies.

For the tabletop role-playing games (TTRPG), Eureka Books will be collaborating with the owners of Dandar’s Boardgames and Books, whose store burned to the ground during the catastrophic Jan. 2 fire in downtown Arcata. 

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Eureka Books, of course, is located in the historic J. Lowenthal Building (aka “the J-Lo”). An Elizabethan/Corinthian structure built in 1879, it is among the city’s most recognizable landmarks. (Everta suspects that it’s the second-most-photographed building in Eureka, after the Carson Mansion.)

But the nearby Antonsen/Snug Building — the soon-to-be-home of Omnibus — is no slouch in the historical department, either. With Italianate architecture featuring tall, narrow windows and an overhanging eave, the 1890 building, like the J-Lo, is a registered Eureka historic landmark. (Once home to the Snug Saloon, the building more recently hosted a yoga studio and a children’s clothing store.)

Unlike the J-Lo, though, it has storage space, which was another big motivating factor in Everta’s new endeavor. 

“Even though Eureka Books is pretty big, it’s full,” Everta said. As far as he knows, his store is the only bookseller in a 300-mile radius whose owner will make a house call to pick up a large collection. This past fall, Eureka Books acquired a 5,000-volume library, which required Everta to rent two new storage units, on top of the pair he was already renting to house previously acquired collections. 

So, Omnibus (which is defined as a collection of multiple works published in a single volume — a format especially common among comics and manga) will house its own specialty stock as well as overstock from Eureka Books. Employees of the two stores will communicate with each other and walk back and forth to give breaks to coworkers or use the Antonsen Building’s kitchen facilities during their own breaks. 

“It’s all part of one business,” Everta explained. 

The planned partnership with Dandar’s, meanwhile, reflects Everta’s political convictions, which are oriented toward worker-owned cooperatives and economic democracy. Eureka Books supplies the books you’ll find for sale at both the Arcata and Eureka locations of the North Coast Co-op. It also has a partnership with Eureka City Schools — Alder Grove Charter School in particular — and Everta said, “We’re very much open to working with all of the schools in Humboldt County to be the place where they order books from.”

Such institutional buying power is an important means of supporting independently owned bookstores, which are often overlooked in favor of the ease and convenience of mega-corporate behemoths, Everta observed.

“If you’re working an institution, it’s easy to just get online, go to Amazon [and] order the things you want,” he said. “But there are a lot of folks in those institutions now who are becoming more aware and are realizing that they are the people propping up those large, horrible institutions like Amazon, which are really destroying our culture and our society.”

He contrasts Amazon’s merciless capitalism with the generosity of Dr. Irvine, who gave Everta “a really good deal and good loan terms,” allowing him to purchase the building after cashing in the retirement funds he’d accumulated from working a decade for the U.S. Forest Service. Irvine also “basically worked for free for the whole pandemic” to keep the store afloat. Eventually, Everta hopes to bring his own employees into the ownership circle.

“So we’ll see who on staff is up for the challenge and wants to join in,” he said. “But, yeah, that’s where I’m headed, which is why I do so much work.”

With a bit of self-deprecation, he adds that recruiting workers into partial ownership of an independent bookstore “may be relegating them to a life of poverty, because they are not known for being lucrative.”

But for Everta, the endeavor is clearly meaningful. He recalled that the bookstore’s unofficial tagline, which dates back to original owners Carlos and Marilyn Benemann, is, “Find your story at Eureka Books” (a play on the famous exclamation by Archimedes). He sees Omnibus as another avenue for local residents to do just that.

Everta is grateful to live in a community that shows so much support for independent bookstores, but he said that support shouldn’t be taken for granted. 

“In order for you to have bookstores in your community, you have to go to the bookstore and buy books,” he said. “But it’s not something like, you do it and you’re done. The community has to continue to do that and to teach the next generation that this is what we do.”

Omnibus is scheduled to open March 7.