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Black Sun owner Peter Ogura is hanging it up after decades at the helm of the independent south Eugene bookstore. New owner Kel Weinhold says she has thought for about 20 years that she’d like to someday buy the store. She plans a few changes, including a new name.
Peter Ogura has spent most of the last 34 years in the same spot: behind the front desk of south Eugene’s Black Sun Books, nestled into a corner of a cozy storefront teeming with theory, history and fiction titles from floor-to-ceiling shelves.
But sunset is approaching. Ogura, 71, will retire from the independent bookstore later this month. Next month, it will become Outliers Books, dedicated to stocking marginalized writers with a renewed focus as a third space under new owner Kel Weinhold.
Ogura, who has been considering stepping back over the last five or six years, said that he’s grateful for years of chatting about books with his well-read customers.
“I’m pleased that over 33 years that I’ve not been asked to carry books that I don’t want to carry,” he said. “No one has asked me for romances.”
Weinhold’s Outliers Books will focus on bringing in undersung authors in different disciplines. (There will also be a romance section, focused on queer, Black and brown love stories.) But she said the Black Sun Books collection — rife with humanities-driven titles to fit a literary, university city like Eugene — has laid much of that groundwork.
“There’ll be voices that come in that aren’t here, but there’s a lot of those voices already here,” she said. “That’s one of the things that I really respect about this bookstore. Find me a bookstore that has as much Japanese in translation, Spanish in translation, and voices of Black, indigenous, queer authors in the fiction section.”
Life in the stacks
Ogura opened the bookstore in 1992 after leaving behind a “highly unsatisfying” career in law and moving to Eugene in 1989. In law school in San Francisco, he said he had spent much of his time as a student in bookstores, where the germ of wanting to run his own started to grow.
While working odd jobs in Eugene and driving around town, he noticed a storefront going out of business at the collection of stores between 24th and 25th avenues on Hilyard street; the landlord, Ilene Pascal, was supportive of a new bookstore when he asked.
It started as a used bookstore, but expanded to include new releases after customers kept asking for them. He’s never carried Harlequin romance books, typically a bread-and-butter inventory item for a used bookstore (but does not knock the rise of romance as an important subgenre in recent years). He’s similarly skirted titles in business, personal finance and computers.
Instead, Black Sun’s niche in the humanities deepened over the years as reader requests refined the catalog: foreign literature in translation, Continental philosophy, fine arts.
Ogura’s last day at the bookstore is planned for March 21. He said he’s hoping to travel, as retail work has a way of tying people down to one spot. After that, the store will close for two weeks as Weinhold prepares for the grand opening of Outliers Books on Tuesday, April 7.
Ogura said that he’ll miss interacting with his neighboring businesses at Hilyard and 24th — like Seize the Cafe and Sundance Natural Foods — as well as his regular customers. He’s asked his very first customer, former Lane Community College psychology professor Cynthia Adams, to be the last person to purchase a book from him, “as a matter of symmetry.”
When a person comes into a bookstore, Ogura said, it’s not like a grocery run, where customers can be in foul moods. In Black Sun Books, he said, people are at least neutral, often cheery.
“I get to deal with humanity in a very positive way,” he said. “For that, I’m very grateful.”
A new vision for the store
Weinhold said she’s walked by Black Sun Books “endless times” across the years, often making the same remark for around 20 years.
“I have said out loud to myself and to many people, ‘I’d love to own that bookstore,’” she said.
Weinhold, a former journalism professor at the University of Oregon who is now a productivity coach with the academic consulting group The Professor Is In, told Ogura a few years back if he ever wanted to sell, she would be interested.
Outliers Books is named after “Outliers and Outlaws,” a documentary from The Eugene Lesbian History Project focused on the influx of lesbians into Eugene from the 1960s to 1980s, and the resulting thriving community.
Weinhold is a friend of Dr. Judith Raiskin, a producer of the film and the co-founder of the history project. She wanted the bookstore to evoke that same legacy of collective action in Eugene, hence the “Outliers” name.
Ogura said his shared politics with Weinhold, who called herself “an old-school radical,” aligned, and he was confident that what he’s built at Black Sun Books will carry on.
But changes are coming to the cozy store, with more spaces for hanging out and reading, a larger craft section, and, yes, romance books. While the store will stick to its intellectual roots, Weinhold said that levity and joy are critical to survival under tyranny.
When it comes to the actual scholars with work on the shelves, Weinhold said, the goal is to include more work from the same disciplines and genres, but less of the traditional, authority-driven selections typical of academic syllabi.
“You’ll see people like Dr. Meredith Clark from UNC, who wrote a book called ‘We Tried to Tell Y’All: Black Twitter and the Rise of Digital Counternarratives,’ replacing Noam Chomsky,” Weinhold said. “We’ll see philosophers like Dr. Megan Burke, who does trans philosophy, and other philosophers so we can bring in a little fewer Žižek.”
Ogura’s advice for Weinhold as she takes over the store is to listen to the customers, and particularly to requests for new titles to gauge Eugene’s ever-changing literary interests.
“It’s so difficult to keep up with the thousands and thousands of new releases that happen continually,” he said. “So often, I have never heard of a book until somebody says, ‘Do you have this?’ or “Can you get this?’ It’s a continuing education, every day.”