SKAGWAY — The Skaguay News Depot & Books packs a lot into a small space with more than 750 Alaska-Yukon titles in stock, as well as contemporary literature, children’s books, magazines, newspapers, calendars, journals and more.
According to sales manager and book buyer Denise Welch, they can pack a lot of people in, too. During the summer months, when the town can get more than 15,000 tourists a day off cruise ships, “there’ll be 35 to 40 people standing in here, can’t hardly move, looking for their souvenirs,” Welch said.
The bookstore caters to the tourists in the summer and pivots to the locals in the winter, when Welch said four people in the town of 920 might enter the bookstore all day.
“Almost everything in here is either about Alaska, done by an Alaskan or is Gold Rush material for our town,” Welch said of their summer stock. “Come October we’ll move things around a little bit,” put out non-Alaska themed calendars and expand their new and used sections.
“The used books get kind of decimated in the summer” when visitors will buy six or seven at a time, “but all the local people read books and bring them in, so by the end of winter my shelves are full again,” said Welch, who has worked at the store since 2000.
In a town driven by its history, the bookstore fills an important role. In April, Welch was waiting for all the new tour guides and bus drivers to come in and get their “supplies” — the information they’ll dole out to tourists on Skagway and Dyea and its connection to the Klondike Gold Rush. The hiking guides come in for plant books and the National Park Service has used the bookstore — and Welch’s book-finding services — to stock a library for its own workers to use for research.
“I had a list of about 30 books that I had to see if I could find, if they were even still in print,” Welch said of that order. “We came up with most of them. There’s still a few of them that I’m searching for … but we’ll get them a copy.”
Searching for books for the shop is both the hardest and her favorite part of her job.
“Occasionally it’s like being a detective,” she said, “trying to figure out which publishing company has this new book that you’re trying to get. It took me three days to figure out who had (“The Queen of Heartbreak Trail” by Eleanor Phillips Brackbill) that I could call up and go ‘Yes, this is Denise from Skagway, please send me a case of twenty with an invoice.’”
She keeps track of townspeople’s favorite authors and searches each week for news on new books coming out.
Ask her for her own favorite though, and she’ll bow out, “There’s so many of them here that I like … I would have a real hard time choosing one.”
When pressed, she gushes about the Alaskan children’s books.
“I love the ones that are about the dogs, ‘Born to Pull,’ ‘Alaska’s Dog Heroes,’ all those are wonderful books,” she said. And she raised her daughter on the Alaska versions of “Aesop’s Fables” and “Mother Goose,” resulting in a memorable exchange when her grandmother in Oklahoma started to read the nursery rhyme over the phone.
“That’s not the way it goes, Nana!” said her daughter, four at the time, and proceeded to recite the Alaska version from memory.
“So we had to send Nana a book,” Welch said, “so she could see what it was the granddaughter was actually memorizing.”
The Skagway News Depot and Books is owned by Jeff and Dorothy Brady. It’s located at 264 Broadway Street in Skagway and online at skagwaybooks.com.
