Like the bookstore he’s worked in for the last 50 years, Rick Simonson is full of stories.

Some stories are quite recent, like in September, when he ran off to get a book for author Yann Martel’s talk at the Seattle edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival.

He struck up a conversation with a woman who’d recently moved here from Southern India. As they talked, Brinda Sarathy, dean of the University of Washington Bothell’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, approached.

“The woman I was talking to was [Brinda’s] eighth grade English teacher [in India],” Simonson said, still flabbergasted. “Here’s somebody who probably had a hand in... shaping the writer and scholar she would grow up to be. And they’re both in Seattle.”

Simonson is a deeply humble man. He has a tendency to leave out some of the more spectacular moments in his stories, moments when he helped shape the literary world around him.

“I was glad he brought up Yann Martel,” said Tracy Taylor, co-owner of Elliott Bay Book Company, who’d sat down with another bookseller to listen to Simonson talk to KUOW. " We had Yann Martel here for ‘Life of Pi,’ and 10 people showed up. No one knew the book. The book had just gotten published. No one had heard of Yann Martel. Rick had read an early copy of that, went to the publisher, got them to send Yann Martel out to the Pacific Northwest, and we had 10 people. A year later, we had Yann Martel back in the store for the paperback, and we had to turn people away from that reading. That is who Rick is."

Simonson is also the kind of person who tells the story of how books reunited a student with her long-ago teacher rather than the story of how he very likely introduced a great author to the region.

He’s been doing both — building community in Seattle and hobnobbing with literary luminaries all over the world — for 50 years now. Elliott Bay Book Company invited readers to celebrate Simonson on Nov. 7, though not everyone could wait until Saturday.

" Rick and I have walked many trails together. But Rick is always too modest, and he always deflects," said Simonson’s best friend and a legendary bookseller himself, Paul Yamazaki. As Yamazaki talked about his friend’s modesty, Simonson turned away before he cut in, “He does it, though! He does it! He got tagged with an award he couldn’t get out of!” (Yamazaki received the National Book Foundation’s 2023 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.)

Yamazaki, principal buyer at City Lights Booksellers and Publishers in San Francisco, said they met “through conversation, through serendipity, and we found ourselves knocking at the same doors.”

It was easy to see how serendipity led to a decades-long friendship. Talking to the pair is a lot like reading a good book — they tell stories that sweep the literary world with characters like English novelist John Berger and Sonny Mehta, editor-in-chief of the publishing giant Alfred A. Knopf. But they don’t just tell a linear story, no, not these two. They both suffer from a kind of ultra-modest syndrome. As one talks, the other is laughing in embarrassment (Yamazaki) or turning away from the conversation and shaking his head, trying to politely find an opportunity to turn the topic around (Simonson).

They’ve been everywhere together, yucking it up on the streets of Chicago in the middle of the night (Tracy Taylor heard them a block over) and marveling over the luxury of the original Jaipur Literature Festival.

" I’ve stood at the bottom of a stairway in Jaipur, in India, and all of a sudden... everything goes quiet," Yamazaki said. “And somebody says, ‘Oh, Rick is here.’”

How Simonson got here exactly is, of course, another story, one that shows just how deeply ingrained he is in the fabric of Elliott Bay.

He’d been working at a restaurant around the corner from the shop’s original location in Pioneer Square, and in 1976, founder Walter Carr offered him a job — in construction.

And so, Simonson started working on one of Elliott Bay’s first expansions, “hauling sheet rock and cutting up two-by-fours and sweeping up sawdust and prying things apart,” along with his coworker from the restaurant, now also a prominent bookseller, Peter Miller. Miller owns Peter Miller Architecture and Design Books and has written several books, including this month’s KUOW Book Club pick, “Lunch at the Shop,” and a book about dishwashing, which Simonson gave him a hard time over because Miller cooked at their old restaurant gig while Simonson did the dishes by hand.

“At the end of [the construction], Walter realized a second person was needed to work at night. It had been a one-room store. Now, it was a two-room store,” Simonson said of his move into bookselling, noting the store was also open until 11 p.m., an hour later than it is now.

Like so much about himself, Simonson tells this story well but in simple terms, as if it just makes sense that he literally helped build Elliott Bay into what it is today. Co-owner Tracy Taylor later pointed out tables in the current space that Simonson and Miller put together. His fingerprints are everywhere, from the furniture to his staff picks and the plastic USPS mail tubs that he personally ensures are always behind the checkout counter for frequent runs to the post office.

" He’s the person who takes all the mail to the post office all the time. He picks up all the bins for us. We’re, like, running out of mail bins, but, oh, here comes Rick with a big stack of mail," said bookseller Rania Spade, who Taylor said knows all of Simonson’s secrets but who insisted Simonson has no secrets. “There is not a thing in the bookstore that he wouldn’t do.”

Whether someone has worked with him for just a few years like Spade, known him for decades like Yamazaki, or looked up to him from another operation in town, Simonson has undoubtedly made an impact on nearly everyone in the book business in Seattle.

Sofia Brekkan, Elliott Bay’s events manager, was working at Third Place Books when she first got to know Simonson. He didn’t care that Third Place was a “competitor.” He attended events at their shops, too, just as he does at other bookstores in town and all over.

" I’ve met Rick many times for the first time, but I do not remember the first time. Do you remember?" Brekkan asked Simonson, who’d suddenly appeared at her office to chat. He didn’t remember either, but he took the opportunity to try to downplay his role in a story Yamazaki had told earlier.

Despite a decades-wide age gap, Brekkan rejects the notion that Simonson is something of a grandfather to her and other Seattle booksellers.

" He’s way too much of a homie," she said. “It’s almost like age is completely irrelevant once you start talking to him, because, yes, he has stories from the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s literary community, but it’s also like every story is so timeless as if it just happened yesterday. There’s never a moment where I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, it must’ve been so crazy back in the old days.’ I’m like, ‘No, we are living in the old days because Rick is here, and he’s telling us these stories.’”

Simonson is not the young man hauling sheet rock anymore, just as Elliott Bay Book Company is not that two-room shop. He hadn’t been talking for five minutes before he mentioned how he and Yamazaki did their work “with an eye to who’s coming after us.”

“We’ve said goodbye to a lot of colleagues and friends and family members,” he said, noting City Lights opened in 1953, “which is the year I started on Earth, and Paul was not so old himself.”

“We’re not forever, but we’re doing what we can while we can,” Simonson said.

A lot has changed since he started in this business. Technology and the seemingly endless supply of lists of this or that critic’s favorite books has changed the game, making conversations with booksellers less frequent and shorter now, he said. But there are also more books on the shelves, he said, translated works and more stories from authors of color, authors of all ages. You won’t catch Simonson being pessimistic about the literary world and the future of reading. People just need to see others reading more, he said.

“Paul and I were at a booksellers’ breakfast a couple years ago, 8 a.m. The poet and writer Ocean Vuong is there,” Simonson said. “He told this story of how his mother didn’t read... and she would take him to the door of the East Hartford Library, and said, ‘You have to go in and find out what’s in there because there’s ways of knowing things that we don’t know, that I don’t know.’ And he talked about a book that was written by Lawrence Ferlinghetti about poetry.”

“‘Poetry as Insurgent Art,’” Yamazaki filled in.

“Yeah, and it was published by our other friends at New Directions,” Simonson continued. “And that was enough for 17-, 18-year-old Ocean to take a bus across the country and go to City Lights bookstore. He was that lit up from that. And of course, he’s read by many younger, well, people of all ages. But he’s a great example of what writing and books and all that goes with it can be.”

What Simonson won’t say is how he’s an example of that, too.

" I knew of Rick before I started working here. I have been shopping at Elliott Bay since I moved to the U.S. when I was a kid, so Elliott Bay has always been this sort of beacon," his now-colleague Sofia Brekkan said. “When I found out what Rick was doing, it just kind of escalated [my interest]. ... And when I started working here, he welcomed me with open arms. There was not a chance in the world that he wasn’t going to be the most kind and inviting person ever.”

That’s part of the joy for Simonson, seeing the next generation come up alongside him. He expertly dodged a question about retirement, choosing instead one more story to celebrate what the last 50 years has meant to him and to Seattle.

" I feel lucky to be at this age and stage of things and to still feel passion about what I do and who I do it with and its meaning," he said. “We’re coming here a few days after an election. ... The second time I voted was 1974, which was the last time [we saw] change of this kind. ... I remember 10 years ago, when everyone, at least in this neighborhood and probably most of the city, was feeling kind of wretched. And somebody you probably know, Eric Liu, got in touch with the store [to use the basement after the election].

“The room filled up with people to talk about things, and that became part of the start of his Citizen University. It was packed. He did maybe another one there, then it outgrew the store, so he started doing those all over. But to be able to be in a place... watching younger people step into it, and let them, when they’re ready, take on even more — it’s good. We’ll see where it all goes.”

Katie Campbell is a reporter with KUOW.

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News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/11/08/seattles-elliot-bay-book-company-celebrates-50-years-with-rick-simonson/