Defying the odds, a midtown mainstay celebrates 25 years in Kansas City this weekend

Amazon, smartphones, rising rents, shrinking attention spans: The cultural headwinds are blowing so hard against used bookstores these days that it almost seems a miracle or a mirage when you spot one out in the wilds of a city.

So, how does Prospero’s Books do it? How does this shaggy independent shop at the corner of 39th and Bell streets — the last of its kind in Kansas City — keep the lights on and three floors of shelves stocked?

“One thing about being the last man standing,” co-owner Will Leathem, 60, said one afternoon this week, “is that we’ve been able to pick up the juju of all these great bookshops that have closed. We’ve sort of slowly absorbed the ghosts and spirit of these places from the city’s past.”

Leathem meant that in both a metaphysical and literally physical sense. The hardwood floor beneath the upstairs table where he and co-owner Tom Wayne, 63, were seated had been salvaged from the old Paseo High School basketball court. Some of the shelving inside Prospero’s once cradled books in Bloomsday Books on East 55th Street, which closed in 2008, and the old Plaza library, which closed in 2001. When Billie Miller Books in Mission packed it in, Prospero’s bought 20,000 books from owner Dick Wilcox. Same with My Father’s Books in the River Market. Same with the Reading Reptile in Brookside.

“It’s a combination of things,” said Wayne. “There’s the attrition of other bookshops, and the growth of KU Med just down the street. But there’s also just being around for as long as we have. Customers come in, and as long as you don’t piss them off, they think of you the next time, and they come back.”

“We also don’t have to worry about an a--hole landlord,” added Wayne, who bought the building in 2002.

This Saturday night, Prospero’s will celebrate 25 years in business with a party that reflects the shop’s bohemian ideals: drinks, a little music, lively conversation, and cheap deals on books. It’s a milestone Leathem would have found hard to fathom back in 1997, when he and friend John Condra hatched the idea to open a used bookstore while drinking one night at Gilhouly’s.

“We didn’t necessarily plan to open in this neighborhood,” Leathem recalled. “We found five places we liked in the city and stood outside them with a piece of paper and ticked off the number of people who walked by. We ended up opening in a space about 50 feet from Gilhouly’s, right next to where Room 39 is now.”

Condra left the picture about a year and a half later — “He literally dropped the keys off at the counter and never came back,” Leathem said — at which point Wayne and Leathem made a “handshake sweat-equity agreement that we’re still kind of operating under,” Wayne said.

Leathem, a former political consultant, and Wayne, who spent much of the 1980s and 1990s working in commercial real estate, wanted to grow the business and escape their landlord. Their gaze eventually drifted across the street, to the 1890-built brick building at 1800 W. 39th St. They got the keys to the place the day after Christmas 2001 and swung open the doors in May 2002.

“We got lucky,” Leathem said. “There was a couple who was going to buy the building and live above it. One Saturday, they stopped by to look something over and a fight rolled out of (former 39th Street bar) DB Cooper’s at like 7 in the morning. So they ended up passing, and a little while later Tom was able to get the building. This was kind of a hurlier-burlier neighborhood back then.”

To many, the late ’90s and early 2000s were a golden age in the Volker neighborhood. Some of the city’s best restaurants, like Macaluso’s and Cafe Allegro, operated on 39th Street, and cheap rents and a healthy supply of one- and two-bedroom apartments attracted artists, writers and musicians to the area. Many found their way to the ramshackle bookshop on the corner where there always seemed to be something happening in the front room— a poetry slam, a political argument, a guy whaling away on some ancient musical instrument.

“Those first few years we were here, the neighborhood was shoulder-to-shoulder on Friday and Saturday,” Wayne said. “We’d stay open until midnight on the weekends. We thrived off that energy.”

As Amazon ravaged independent bookstores in the 2000s, Leathem and Wayne found clever ways to promote Prospero’s. Over the years, they had amassed approximately 20,000 runover books they kept stored in a warehouse. There wasn’t enough room for them at Prospero’s, and libraries, prisons and Goodwill refused to take them as donations. Frustrated, Wayne staged a 2007 performance art piece — some called it a publicity stunt — in which he burned a few dozen books outside Prospero’s, proclaiming to the local TV cameras that he was making a statement about the decline of literary culture.

“This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today,” Wayne told the assembled crowd.

The fire department arrived about an hour later and forbade him from burning any more books, but the story went national — CNN, BBC and The New York Times all ran stories — and sales at the shop doubled.

In 2010, Leathem and Wayne convened 219 poets from 19 states with the aim of breaking the world record for the longest continuous poetry reading. Each poet read for 20 minutes, and the group ended up nearly doubling the previous record at 120 hours. It also earned Prospero’s a good amount of publicity.

“But I would not do that again,” Wayne said. “It went on for five days. It got weird.”

In 2014, Prospero’s expanded its operations into the building’s top floor, which Wayne had spent five years renovating. Sales rose 50%. “We had a third more inventory to sell, and it allowed us to host a lot more events here,” Leathem said.

Events haven’t been as much of a focus since COVID-19 entered the picture, but otherwise the pandemic hasn’t slowed business. “A lot of goodwill came out of it,” Leathem said. “Half-Price (Books) and the libraries were weird about buying books during that time, and I think a lot of people remembered that we make pretty good offers for good books.”

The loosey-goosey atmosphere they’ve cultivated over the past quarter-century remains a point of pride for Leathem and Wayne.

“We’re still a place where you can buy a bottle of wine across the street and come in and talk with us behind the counter,” Wayne said. “There’s not that many places left like that in the world, where you can get into a real live political or intellectual discussion and not have to hold your tongue.”

Depending on the day, you might find a psychic upstairs doing readings, or friends playing chess at a table. Downstairs is chockablock with curios: a “book beanstalk” that rises to the ceiling, a glass diorama on the stairwell, a couple of 100-year-old swinging ladders, a vial containing the ashes of a dead poet named Victor Smith. “God, he was a good poet, man,” said Leathem, whose publishing house, Spartan Press, published Smith.

And they still leave a couple of wooden book racks out front 24 hours a day for bus riders and hospital workers in need of some reading material. It’s an honor-system thing — $1 for paperbacks, $2 for hardbacks, slip the cash under the door if they’re closed — that, Leathem hearteningly reports, is largely honored.

As for the next 25 years?

“We don’t really make plans,” Wayne said. “It’s a ‘chop wood, carry water’ type of thing: Do what you need to do, get good at it, try to stay Zen.”

“I mean, sure, over the years, there’s been plenty of times when it would have made sense to close,” Leathem said. “But we walk to work, we listen to the music we want to listen to, we have great conversations all day, we hang out with people we like. It’s like, what the hell else are we gonna do with our lives?”

Saturday’s party

Prospero’s Books will hold its 25th anniversary party from 6 to 9 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 19, at the shop, 1800 W. 39th St. In addition to refreshments and some yet-to-be-determined entertainment, customers will receive 20% off all sales over $50.