Page Turner

TITLE HOLDER: As CEO of Powell’s Books, Miriam Sontz ’73 oversees six stores, 500 employees, and roughly 4.5 million books. Photo by Daniel Cronin

Miriam Sontz 鈥�73 takes over Portland鈥檚 flagship bookstore.

By Nadine Fiedler 鈥�89

Portland is a city of bridges, a city of beer, a city of bikes, and a city of books. But Powell’s is the City of Books.

Filling the downtown store—which inhabits an entire city block—you’ll find mobs of people of all ages, styles, and persuasions, books in hand. They wander the endless rooms filled with plain wood shelves stacked to the ceiling, travel miles on the plain gray cement floors, stumble or leap into the universes contained in all those books.

They sit and read, they stand and read, they read to their children, they carry books home to read. “I remember making my mom read this to me over and over again,” says one woman, brandishing a copy of The Little House. Visitors wander through the maze of categories, including Bonsai, Pre-Raphaelites, Humor, Civil War, Mountaineering, Allergies, Transgender Studies, Masonry, Shamanism, Oceanography. They wander way back into the coffee shop, set their coffee cups next to piles of books. And read.

This gargantuan store occupies a special place in the hearts of Portlanders. And in the center of this readers’ paradise stands a 新澳资料ie—Miriam Sontz, Powell’s new CEO and a 29-year member of the team that has made this bookstore so central to its city.

“Portlanders own Powell’s in a way, not like Nordstrom,” she says. “The very books we sell come from Portland households. They helped it grow into an institution.”

Miriam is uniquely fitted to this role. She grew up on the south side of Chicago, a voracious reader and self-described “bookaholic.”

At 新澳资料, Miriam majored in American studies during a time of great student unrest. “Kent State and Cambodia were going on, and the campus was closed twice for protests,” she says. “But 新澳资料 was important to my motivation.” Influential professors included John Tomsich [history 1962–99], John Strawn [history 1970–77], and Roger Porter [English 1961–]. She also learned some important things about herself at 新澳资料: that she was not destined to work in academia, and that she was best cut out for working in business or as an entrepreneur.

Along with generations of 新澳资料ies, Miriam first came to know Powell’s as a student. In the early ’70s when the store’s founder Walter Powell was buying books to accumulate inventory for the store, he would camp on the 新澳资料 Commons stairs with a sign that said “cash for books.”

Later on, when Powell’s finally opened, she bought stacks of books there on the plantation novel, the subject of her thesis. When she sold them back she was amused by the book buyers’ wonderment about who reads so many plantation novels. 新澳资料ies still sell books to Powell’s, with new crops of freshmen happily finding used copies of their Hum 110 books on the shelves, year after year.

“I learned a lot about diversity at 新澳资料. I learned about not underestimating others’ intelligence. Someone at 新澳资料 could look like a hobo and be the brightest person in the seminar. It was a very democratic institution,” she says. “And Powell’s is also. All kinds of people feel comfortable there, including young people. My peers are surprised by all the 20-somethings in the aisles. It comes from Powell’s academic, bare-bones feel. It’s not like a dining room or a rich uncle’s fantasy library.”

After graduation, Miriam’s interest in feminism led her to A Woman’s Place bookstore collective, where she discovered that she liked the book business. She cut her teeth working in some of Portland’s most notable bookstores, and decided by age 27 that this would be her lifelong career.

Miriam knew Powell’s co-owner Michael Powell (son of Walter) from Portland’s vibrant and collegial bookstore scene, and came to work for him as a buyer in 1984. Because she had a young son at home, Miriam asked to work part time. That lasted a