More than 20 years ago, Chris Weimer was working as a “book scout,” someone who bought books at garage sales and thrift shops and flipped them to used bookstores. One day he walked into the University District’s Magus Books, one of his favorite shops, and they told him, “We're not buying books right now. The store's for sale. Do you want to buy a bookstore?”
Turns out he and his wife, Hanna McElroy, did want to buy a bookstore, and in 2004 they took over Magus. By then it was already a fixture in the University District; the building had housed a bookstore since the 1930s. At one time it was called the Bookworm, then it was an anarchist shop called the Id, then it settled into its current identity as Magus in the 1970s. By the time Weimer and McElroy bought the store, it was known for its great selection of academic nonfiction.
They’ve kept that focus, while also keeping up with the times — they have plenty of romance and graphic novels these days, despite the couple not personally having much of an affinity for those genres. “As long as they're opening a book and actually reading, I personally don't care that much what they're reading,” McElroy says.
You might think that in the age of tiny screens, a resolutely analog shop like Magus would be struggling — but the couple says it’s doing better than ever. At least five times as many books are coming in as there were when the couple bought the shop, McElroy says, since used book sellers have fewer bookstores to go to. They’ve also seen an upswing in customers since the pandemic, and opened the Wallingford Magus “annex” in 2022.
“Our business increased precipitously because people were so sick of staring at their screens, and people were so sick of being isolated and stuck in their houses, and everything's on Zoom,” says McElroy. “Analog, in a lot of ways, has made a huge comeback.”
The couple is getting older and thinking about selling the store — neither of their children wants to take over the business, and McElroy doesn’t see herself as “a little old lady with a cane walking around the store.” But when they do decide to move on from Magus, they’ll leave behind a healthy business and hope that whoever buys it will continue the legacy that stretches back nearly 100 years.
“It's really important that it survives,” McElroy says. “There's no way that there can't be a Magus.”
