Lawrence poet Danny Caine takes over the Raven Book Store as it enters its 30th year

On a Wednesday in early August, Lawrence’s Raven Book Store was closed for an afternoon of repair work, and Danny Caine, surrounded by many quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore, dragged a couple of chairs over from Nonfiction, parked them in the small area in front of the counter and set about explaining how he had recently come to own a bookstore. First he had to get hired.

“Getting a job here was a prolonged campaign,” Caine, 31, said. “I came to Lawrence in August 2014 to start in the [University of Kansas’] MFA program for poetry. A friend I made, Meghara, who was getting her Ph.D. in literature, worked here, and once I found that out I really started working on her to put in a good word for me. I would come by the store and try to talk to Heidi [Raak, then the owner]. I’d always buy a book. Finally, after five months, Heidi agreed to interview me for a job — and 15 minutes into the interview, she agreed to hire me.” 

Caine made the most of his new gig. In addition to the usual clerking duties — running the register, stocking the shelves, writing those notecard recommendations for staff-favorite books — he also curated the Raven’s Big Tent Reading Series and worked events the store put on in conjunction with the Lawrence Public Library. It was at a Big Tent reading last year, Caine said, that Raak made an offhand joke about selling him the store once she was too tired to run it anymore. 

“She was like, ha ha, but I was like, ‘Actually, if you are ever serious about that, please talk to me, because I would be very interested,’ ” Caine said. “So, then we did start to talk about it a little bit over the course of several months. Then, as I got closer to graduating, those talks got more serious.”

Caine had always thought he’d teach for the rest of his life. After college, he taught high school in Smithville, Ohio, for three years, then went back to school for a master’s degree in English, before being accepted to the poetry track in KU’s MFA program. (He has since published a chapbook and recently sent a new manuscript to publishers.)

“But I’d been noticing the past few years that teaching didn’t feel right to me the way it used to,” Caine said. “Plus, it’s really hard to get a job as a poetry professor these days. To get the good job, you almost have to be famous before you hit the job market. You have to have a book out already on Graywolf or some other prominent press. And I didn’t want to do the adjunct thing.” 

Raak had been running the Raven since purchasing it from the original owners, Pat Kehde and Mary Lou Wright, in 2008. Though she had worked at a bookstore previously — Watermark Books, in Wichita — she faced a steep learning curve exacerbated by the relentless march of Amazon. 

“The first three or four years were very rough — I think everybody who owned a retail store during those years was having a hard time,” Raak told me. “It was not a moneymaking proposition. But eventually we turned it around, and I think a lot of that had to do with making ourselves part of the larger community here in Lawrence: partnering with the library, bringing in local and regional authors.” 

But after nearly a decade, Raak was feeling burned out. “At some point, I realized I didn’t want to invest so much energy in it anymore,” she said. “And Danny is super eager, a fast reader, high energy, and more outgoing than I am. And he had a lot of ideas. So we hatched a plan.” 

Caine graduated in May of this year, and on August 1, he became the new owner of the Raven. He’s in the process of figuring out QuickBooks and business taxes (“I never expected to have a job where financial paperwork was involved”) and has made some small cosmetic alterations to the place: custom-built bookshelves, a short row of antique movie-theater seats bolted into the floor near the front windows, a couple of new rugs, fresh lettering on the windows. “It’s a creaky-feeling bookstore, which is great and charming, and I don’t think we necessarily want it to feel brand-new,” Caine said. “This is more like just a small facelift.” 

When the Raven opened, in 1987, its niche was mysteries. But the days of a college-town bookstore surviving on a specific genre have largely passed, and though the Mystery section still occupies a considerable amount of real estate in the modest space, the store’s offerings have diversified over time. Literary fiction, children’s books, local and regional titles, and — particularly since the election — political nonfiction make up a growing chunk of Raven revenues. 

“In a way, we serve two markets,” Caine said. “The mystery readership is still strong. We’ll sell two cases [32 hardcovers] of the new Louise Penny novel when it comes in. The other core is college-adjacent people, many of whom might be professors or young parents who are coming to us for titles by Rebecca Solnit or Naomi Klein, or literary fiction, but also for children’s books. That’s kind of been the formula since I’ve been here, and I think it would be foolish to mess with it.” 

To celebrate the unlikely success of that formula — the Raven has outlasted every other bookstore in downtown Lawrence, save for the Dusty Bookshelf (which sells used titles) and Signs of Life (Christian-focused) — Caine, the staff and Raven resident cats Dashiell and Ngaoi are putting on a 30th anniversary party at the shop on September 8. There will be music, food and 30 percent off selected books. (Details at ravenbookstore.com.) 

During the 30 or so minutes Caine chatted with me about the store, a half-dozen passersby had pulled on the entrance door handle, inspected the “closed for renovations” sign and shuffled off. Now someone came gently rapping at the Raven door: two visitors from Game Nut, the downtown video-game store, there to pick up a large old green bookshelf that once housed the Current Events section. Caine held the door for them as they carried the piece out onto the sidewalk and disappeared from view. 

“A good bit of Raven history I learned while working here is that the day Borders opened down the street, in the late 1990s, was a record-breaking day of sales for the Raven,” Caine said, returning to his chair. “People really came out for us. So we’ve always had a pretty loyal following in the community. I think as long as we can preserve that here, we’ll be OK.”

Outside, down on New Hampshire Street, the old Borders space sat vacant. It closed in 2011. But the Raven — it still is sitting.