Profile Walter Carr -- Service With Style Thrusts Bookstore Into National Limelight

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- Name: Walter Carr.

- Age: 47.

- Position: Founder, Elliott Bay Book Co.

- Goals: Create the complete personal bookstore.

- Quote: On chain bookstores: ``They haven't put us out of

business because we're selling 90,000 things that they aren't.''

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Walter Carr? A counter-intelligence agent? You mean, like a spy?

Wait a minute. Are we talking about the same Walter Carr?

Carr, the 47-year-old mild-mannered, bookish, bearded founder of Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Co.? The same Carr who was seen in the July 16 issue of Newsweek lounging like some intellectual centerfold upon a table of tomes, posing for an article that ranked Carr's shop among the nation's premiere independent bookstores?

That's the one.

Carr and his Elliott Bay Books have become prominent fixtures in the historic Pioneer Square district.

With more than 100,000 titles in stock, a picture framing and poster shop and a cafe, Carr is still expanding his Elliott Bay enterprise. He is about to open a new upstairs cafe, next to the bookstore. In fact, the cafe occupies the original space where Carr first set up a 10,000 title shop, in June 1973.

Although Carr declines to disclose annual sales figures, he acknowledges that Elliott Bay is now a multimillion-dollar business. Along the way, Carr has earned a reputation as an astute businessman who studies his own every move before making it.

``Walt loves to innovate,'' says Grant Jones, of Jones & Jones architects and Carr's landlord, ``but he hates to take risks.''

Carr has applied those same planning skills as a community booster, to help improve the Pioneer Square area.

``He initiates lots of new ideas on how to market Pioneer Square,'' says Robert Koch, chairman of the Pioneer Square Business Improvement Area advisory committee and a partner in Anderson Koch & Smith, another architectural company. ``But he doesn't make them grandiose schemes. He makes them incremental plans, and that is how you pull things off.''

Carr looks more like a graying ex-hippie than an Army spook or a prototypic businessman.

But sit him down in the back reading room of the store's underground cafe, and you discover that his is another of those strange-days stories from the 1960s, when the Vietnam War shaped every young man's life in one way or another.

And it was the war that pushed Carr into one of the more curious chapters of his life - his job as a spy.

The son of a Palo Alto, Calif., executive, Carr suddenly found himself classified ``A-1'' and about to be drafted, back in 1965, just as Vietnam was heating up. Carr was attending a private school, Colorado College, majoring in chemistry and biology, but somehow had slipped below the minimum number of college credits required for a deferment. Rather than join the infantry as a draftee, Carr signed up and chose intelligence as a specialty.

``I was trained as a special agent,'' says Carr. ``I ended up at Army headquarters in Germany, and that's where I spent the rest of my Army career, in Heidelberg. We were on the counterintelligence side so our job was . . . sort of spy vs. spy.''

But Carr says that the life of a spy was not as exotic as it sounds, nor as stressful. He spent two years and nine months in Germany, living more like a tourist than a soldier.

``Here were hundreds of thousands of guys over there (in Vietnam),'' says Carr, ``and yet it was like we were in Disneyland or something. It was just like I wasn't in the Army.''

Part of his job was to keep track of draft dodgers who were fleeing to Sweden, but Carr's sympathies were with the people he was assigned to monitor.

``Here I am looking at these guys who've taken off and gone up to Sweden and I am thinking, hey, I want to do that,'' he says. ``I didn't like that war.''

When he got out of the service, Carr quickly gravitated back to Colorado College, leaving his military past behind him like a John Le Carre paperback. The experience, however, left its alienating mark. Although his sympathies were with the hippie generation charging through the streets around him, he was never quite a hippie. Nor did he consider himself a ``real'' Vietnam-era veteran. Carr went his own way.

He graduated from Colorado College and briefly tried doing some graduate work at the University of San Diego in computer modeling of ecosystems.

``I detested graduate school. So I didn't last too long with that. Actually only one semester,'' he says.

He found himself dreaming of owning his own business, and a bookstore was the most interesting business of all to Carr.

While the idea was maturing in his head, Carr dropped out of graduate school and took a job back at his alma mater, as assistant dean of Colorado College's summer session.

``It was a fascinating job,'' says Carr, ``not unlike running this place. (It required) somebody who could do a lot of different things. Juggle a lot of things.''

During his two years as an administrator, Carr honed his management skills and focused in on the idea of opening a bookstore.

``I grew up admiring a number of bookstores,'' says Carr. ``At one time I think I aspired to be writer. I am probably very thankful that I didn't do that.''

His favorite bookstore - and one of the models for Elliott Bay - was a place in the San Francisco Bay area called Kepler's, founded by Roy Kepler, who was active in ``the beatnik community'' in the `50s. He was one of the first book sellers, Carr recalls, to take paperback books seriously.

``He, at one time, had everything in books and print that was in paperback,'' says Carr. ``He had an enormous store that was almost sort of warehouselike. A lot of his shelves were made out of like plywood.

``It was this voluminous high-ceiling place,'' Carr says, sounding a bit like someone describing a childhood candy store, ``and he always had these enormous high-fi speakers playing classical music in the store.''

Carr recalls a little counter with some simple chairs, pastries, coffees and teas.

Kepler died years ago, and his business changed hands and directions, says Carr, but the memories of Kepler's helped shape Elliott Bay Books.

In 1973, longing for the West Coast, Carr made an exploratory trip from Colorado to Seattle, searching for a location for his bookstore.

He'd only been in town two or three days when a friend with whom he was staying took him out for the then-mandatory tourist lunch at Ivar's and a trip to Pioneer Square.

``He brought me down and as soon as I saw it,'' says Carr of Pioneer Square, ``I didn't look anywhere else.''

Four months later, on June 29, 1973, he opened his shop.

He married Maggie Rudow in 1977 and they now have three children.

As the splash in Newsweek might indicate, the bookstore has done well not only financially but in terms of prestige.

When Salman Rushdie published his novel, ``The Satanic Verses,'' in 1988, and Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the author put to death, Carr was among those publishers who did not blink. Carr had extra copies on hand because Rushdie was scheduled to read his book at Elliott Bay. While a few book sellers around the nation pulled the books from shelves after threats, Elliott Bay sold out despite Rushdie's cancellation of the reading, and ordered more.

``That was the scariest challenge that we've ever had,'' says Carr.

Nor have the big discount bookstore chains swayed Carr from his course.

``They haven't put us out of business because we're selling 90,000 things that they aren't,'' says Carr. ``We're also selling personal service, which is very thin at those places.''

Carr has no grand ambitions of his own chain of Elliott Bay Book stores.

``I don't ever want to have more than one store. Because I feel it's beyond my capabilities, No. 1,'' says Carr.

``No. 2, what is appealing to me is to have one store that people will travel from afar to visit, because it's so unique . . . It's really well-run and it's got everything that it should have, or it knows how to provide it . . . And it has service up and down, combined with a real comfortable environment.

``That's always been in everything I've ever done here. The comfort factor. That's why we have this place open till 11 p.m. because of comfort,'' says Carr.

He looks around the room at the white tile floor, the bare bricks and exposed wooden beams. The espresso machine is hissing in the background, its fragrance temporarily overpowering the smell of old books lining the walls.

A lunch crowd is starting to push out the morning readers, hunched over books. They'll be back, and Carr with them.

``That's what I love about this basement,'' he says, ``is just hanging around here.''

Profile appears weekly in the Business Monday section of The Seattle Times.