Providing Help to Booksellers, When They Need It

Maeve Noonan still owns the first book she ever purchased.

It was Anne of Ingleside, the sixth book in the Anne of Green Gables series. “I bought it with my own money when I was in second grade,” she tells me over the phone, chuckling at the memory. “Even though I couldn’t read it at that point, I knew I wanted it. I wanted the whole series by Lucy Maud Montgomery. And that has stayed with me, that love of books.”

In fact, for 30 years, Noonan has transferred that love of books into a career. She’s been a bookseller since 1989, working at Barnes & Noble, Borders, and four independent bookstores. But without prompting, Noonan states unequivocally that the store she’s at now, Northshire Books in Saratoga Springs, New York, is by far her favorite. “This is just the best—the very best,” she says. “They’re such a beautiful company.”

She gushes for a while over her store, calling it a “dream place” that is “beyond description.” I let her gush for a bit, trying not to get too jealous that I don’t work there myself. When I ask what makes Northshire so great, she says, “Northshire just does it right . . . for me, a bookstore is a place of community spirit and knowledge. That’s what a bookstore should be. [At Northshire], they just embody that.”

Noonan found Northshire somewhat by accident when she walked into their original location in Manchester Center, Vermont in 1990. “I just fell in love with that bookstore, and I said, ‘Oh, if we ever live in Vermont, I want to work here, and if they ever come to New York, I’ll be there,’” she says.

It took 23 years, but eventually, her dream job came true. When Northshire announced they would open up a second store where Noonan lived, she started writing letters to the company. When they opened for positions, she immediately applied. She was hired in 2013 and helped open the store.

For a short time, things were looking up for Noonan and her family. She was finally working her dream job at her dream company. At the same time, her husband, a photographer, had been out of work for a while and started working full-time again. They were finding some stability after a rough few years.

But things didn’t stay stable for long. Just three months after she started at Northshire, on the day before her birthday, Noonan was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of breast cancer. “That week became a dark version of the song ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’,” she says. “The diagnosis was first. My 13-year-old car gave up the ghost. Then my washing machine died. Then our hot water tank died. All within the space of two weeks.”

Suddenly, finances were tight again. Noonan tried to keep up with all of the bills and medical treatments for six months. But that wasn’t the end of her troubles. When Hillary Clinton came to Northshire for a book signing in July 2014, the staff took a group photo with her.

“I’m looking at the photograph,” Noonan says, “and I look like a bullfrog. My neck is swollen, my face is swollen, my eyes are puffy, and I’m red and itchy all of a sudden.” As she soon discovered, the medicine she’d been on for a month had given her a blood clot in her jugular vein. “That’s about when I had it.”

Noonan went to her manager, Nancy Scheemaker, for help. Scheemaker made a suggestion she’d brought up several times before. “She goes, ‘Maeve, get in touch with BINC,’” Noonan says.

BINC is shorthand for The Book Industry Charitable Foundation, a nonprofit organization that provides financial support to the bookselling industry. If booksellers like Noonan are in need of any kind of assistance, BINC can pay their bills or help with other needs. The money isn’t a loan—it’s a gift, made with no strings attached. Since its inception in 1996, the foundation has helped over 7,000 booksellers and their family members and distributed over $6 million dollars in funds, according to Kate Weiss, BINC’s Communications Coordinator.

BINC began at Borders Bookstore when an employee got sick and his co-workers raised money to help him pay bills. From there, it grew into a company-wide foundation. When Borders went out of business in 2011, the foundation became its own 501(c)(3) and scaled nationwide, a process that has happened gradually over the last four years. In that time, BINC has made an enormous impact on the bookselling community.

“Our average grant is about $2,000 dollars, and the range [of requests] is really big,” says Weiss. Recently, BINC has done everything from paying medical bills for a sick person who couldn’t afford treatment to paying first and last month’s rent for someone who needed to escape an apartment with bedbugs. Other situations BINC has stepped in to help with include funeral expenses, evictions, utility shut-offs, and domestic violence situations.

Grants are also available for entire stores. In 2018, for example, BINC helped five bookstores through natural disaster recovery. “We take a multi-pronged approach,” Weiss explains. “We’ll help the booksellers; if they’ve lost more than a week’s wages and they’re suffering financially, we can replace some of their lost wages. We also can help a bookstore replace fixtures and pay rent and get services hooked up again.” The one thing BINC can’t do is buy replacement books, since publishers are some of BINC’s largest donors.

In order to get financial assistance, there’s a simple application process to assess need. But things get turned around fast, which is something Weiss says BINC is particularly proud of. Payments are never made to individuals, but to hospitals, landlords, utility companies, and other needs directly.

I’m intrigued by this idea of a foundation that helps the bookselling community by doing more than just helping stores. I ask Weiss why BINC has continued to focus on the non-work related needs of individual booksellers.

“It’s not a national secret that [bookselling is] not a profession you go into to make a six-digit income,” she answers. “We want people to feel secure in choosing to be booksellers. And because they’re often making an hourly wage that is sometimes less than competitive than other jobs you could get . . . we feel like it’s important, and that booksellers can sleep easier and contribute to their community and feel confident in their choice of profession because they know that they have a financial safety net.”

Noonan first heard about BINC when she worked at Borders. She periodically donated from her paycheck when she could, but never thought she would find herself in a situation where she would use them. “That’s for people who need it,” she says. “Catastrophe, disasters . . . you think of things like that.”

But Noonan didn’t know where else to turn, so she filled out an application. Within two weeks, BINC was paying mortgage payments and medical bills. “What BINC did for me was immeasurable,” she says. No longer having to worry about finances, Noonan had the space to breathe and think about her confusing diagnosis and treatment. She had time to research her best course of action when everyone was giving conflicting advice.

BINC helped Noonan out on three separate occasions over the course of three years. “Whenever I had a question, [BINC was] there, and they took care of it immediately,” she says. Recovery was by no means easy. Her treatments were extended and she wound up having a total of five surgeries, including a complete hysterectomy. “It was really a horrible time physically for me,” she says. “But spiritually and mentally, my job was where I came to heal. And that’s the way I look at the bookstore—it kept me going.”

Fortunately, thanks to BINC, Noonan’s story has a happy ending. She is now the Merchandising Manager at Northshire, and she’s been completely clear of breast cancer for over a year. “What I learned from all of this is: I know that without Northshire and BINC, I would have lost our home, my sanity, and most likely, my life,” she says. “I’m doing well now, but it took a long time.”

For Weiss, the greatest thing about BINC is that it doesn’t have to exist, but it does because booksellers decided to help one another out. “People didn’t have to come together at Borders and decide to be there for one of their colleagues,” she says. “And the organization didn’t have to decide to go national. But people have decided that this is important.”

Since BINC is still relatively new and not everyone in the industry is aware of its existence, I ask Noonan what she would share with her fellow booksellers across the U.S. who might be hesitant to ask for help.

“Bad things happen to people no matter what the situation is,” she says. “So that’s what I tell people: use the help that is offered.”

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If you or someone you know is in the bookselling industry and needs financial assistance, you can find more information and request assistance through BINC’s website. If you’d like to help BINC’s mission in supporting booksellers, consider donating.