On the job in Hopewell Valley
By:John Tredrea
Editor’s Note: This is the 15th in a series of portraits of people at work.
Jan Wyckoff and selling books are as suited to one another as a person and trade can be. But they were joined by happenstance, 10 years ago.
"The owner of the Family Book Nook, a shop in Hopewell Borough that’s closed now, was looking for a manager in 1990," said Ms. Wyckoff, who works in Alpha Books in the Pennington Shopping Center on state Route 31, near the geographic center of Hopewell Valley.
"We had a mutual acquaintance, who told the owner I loved books. I was offered the job. I took it, but I was pretty nervous. I had never sold books before, or, for that matter, done any other kind of retail work."
After the Book Nook left quarters now occupied by the HVN and two other Packet Publications weeklies, Ms. Wyckoff landed at Pyramid Books, which in 1993 opened for business in the storefront that Alpha Books now calls home.
"Pyramid Books became Bookmarks in 1998. Then Bookmarks became Half-Price Books. Now it’s Alpha Books," she said Friday. "I’ve stayed here through all the changes. It’s a good kind of work for me."
A Hopewell Township resident for 21 years, Ms. Wyckoff, who was born and raised in Basking Ridge, smiled with what looked like beaming gratitude and said: "I love books. They’re like traveling all over the world. You get to go places you’d never get to go otherwise, and meet people you’d never get to know. Here in the store, it’s nice to be around book people. You have something in common with them immediately."
Before getting into the book trade, Ms. Wyckoff and her husband raised two now-grown children Phillip, 36, and Sara, 30. When they had come of age, she went to college, first at Douglass, then Rutgers, where she earned a doctorate in developmental psychology, focusing on issues germane to how children learn to read. "In graduate school, I worked on a project on early language development and its relationship to reading skills later in life. It was fascinating," she said.
Business is good at Alpha Books, and has been getting steadily better for some time. The shop is right around the corner from the Pennington Quality Market, which became the first store in the shopping center when it opened over 40 years ago.
"This is a good location," Ms. Wyckoff said. "When I started working here, a lot of people who came in said they hadn’t even known these stores in this end of the shopping center were here. But you don’t hear that anymore."
She says the store offers the sort of good deals that develop a regular customer base that spreads the word to prospective newcomers. "All the books we sell are at half the cover price, except best-sellers, which are 20 percent off the cover price," she said.
Alpha sells many books by local authors. "Those are sold at full cover price, because they’re here on consignment," she said. "And we sell a lot of magazines, and books on tape."
For several years, the shop has featured live music by local performers from 7 to 9 p.m. each Friday. "It’s been well supported," Ms. Wyckoff said. "There’s really a lot of musical talent in the area. It’s even more enjoyable to be here when there’s live music. It picks everything up."
During her free time at home, Ms. Wyckoff likes to quilt several of her impressive creations are on walls at Alpha Books and, of course, read.
"It’s tough to beat being curled up in a chair or bed with a good book," she said, smiling that way again. "I remember reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy during a big blizzard years ago. The power was out, so I stayed in bed all day. Kept warm and kept reading. Used the sunlight to be able to see the book. Oh, it was all right, I’ll never forgot it."
Other favorite authors? "Nevil Shute, who wrote ‘On The Beach’ and ‘A Town like Alice,’" she said. "And I love to read Southern authors. Pat Conroy is one of my favorites. Characters in southern books are so multi-layered. You may hate some things about some of them. But you love them, too. I find that fascinating, and it puts something that seems really worth thinking about into your head. You keep turning it over and over, wondering about it."