Eventually, Frank Reiss moved back to Atlanta and opened A Cappella Books, a shoebox of a store in Little Five Points, and Reiss watched his son’s success with admiration and even some envy. “I followed Frank to library sales to buy books,” he told me, “and then I asked him for a list of the top one hundred writers, and I started going to garage sales on my own, looking for those hundred writers, spending ten cents or a quarter buying each book, filing up my spare closet and then the whole spare bedroom. And once I had done that, I started looking for a location.”
Reiss brought the same flair to bookselling that he’d used elsewhere: the shelf labels were made with the tailor shop’s monogram machine; bolts of paisley tie silk were made into deluxe shopping bags. But he found the actual selling of used books to be a little boring, so another form of arbitrage he exploited was the surfeit of literati who felt that getting to spend their days in a bookstore was practically paycheck enough: in those early years, the employees he hired all knew more about books than he did and almost ran the place themselves. He mostly amused himself playing softball, tennis, and touch football.
Like the Jacob Reisses who’d come before, he seemed to know everyone in town, so it wasn’t surprising when he finally figured out a way to make his bookstore into its own kind of civic institution. That began in 1995, when Reiss learned that the local radio personality Don Keith was about to publish a novel and was hoping to do an event for it. “We said we’d do a book signing, whatever that is,” Reiss remembered. What it was was successful: “We sold a bunch of books and we had a good time, so we thought, Let’s do that again, and that was the start of our signed books.”
For most people, signed first editions conjure images of white gloves and Plexiglas-protected display cases, but Reiss doesn’t generally deal in rare or even old books. Some of his biggest sellers over the years include Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Be Useful,” Debbie Harry’s “Face It,” Joe Namath’s “All the Way,” and, as of this month, Governor Gavin Newsom’s “Young Man in a Hurry.” Like those books, most of his inventory was recently published, and most of his authors are still with us. The Booksmith’s shelves feature an eclectic mix of poetry and literary fiction, plus local and regional titles, along with whatever other nonfiction Reiss has a mind to sell. It might be the only bookstore in Alabama where you can’t find a copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and the only one in the world where you cannot buy a Bible, not to mention anything by J. K. Rowling.
How Reiss manages to acquire enough autographed books from actors, athletes, and best-selling authors to stock an entire store involves a mix of courtship, logistics, and luck. He won’t sell anything signed that isn’t a book, and the books are all first editions—almost no reprints, and never any paperbacks. He has long-standing relationships with publishers and small presses, so he’s often first in line for the signed copies that they distribute around the publication of big titles, though those are slightly less collectible since they generally feature “tip-in” signatures: pages, signed by authors at home or wherever they want, that are then bound into the book later. Because Reiss guarantees sales of several hundred copies, he can sometimes convince publicists to add a book-tour stop in Birmingham, even if it’s just for a lightning signing during which he and his team serve as a kind of human conveyor belt, shuffling signature-ready books by so speedily that the author can make it to a nearby city for another event that same night. When that strategy doesn’t work, he’s not above begging authors directly.