After 30 years of renting, Tsunami Books makes a million-dollar push to own its building

The initial donation to help Tsunami Books buy its building is taped to the glass over the counter, right below a commemorative note from the Merry Prankster legend who threw it in: “First Dollar toward Purchase of Building Donated by Ken Babbs 3 – 4 – 26.” 

The independent bookstore, which after three decades of renting its signature mural-covered south Eugene building is making a fundraising push to buy its longtime home outright, still had $999,999 to go. 

It’s a lofty goal for a store that prides itself on being collective-owned — not to mention one reporting less than $100,000 in cash reserves. But Tsunami Books screams Eugene. Business meetings take place under a fig tree, books fill robust niche sections amid decades of knick-knack build-up, the wooden stage hosts bluegrass concerts and Beatles sing-a-longs, and its workers are dedicated to an insistently paper-and-pen modus operandi behind the counter. 

Yet it’s more than a charming community institution. It’s prime real estate: a 4,600-square foot building on Willamette Street with a real market value that’s gone up by more than a quarter of a million dollars since 2016. 

The store isn’t in danger of closing; there’s no impending deadline that’s prompting the push to buy. But Tsunami’s worker-owners think the wave can build to safeguard its future, which they’re coining a “$10 movement” to collect small donations toward a cash purchase. 

“We’ve had a million people come through here. If we had 50,000 ten-dollar bills, either come through GoFundMe or through our tip box, we’re going to have the building,” general manager and worker-owner Scott Landfield, 72, said. “And it’s only going to cost 10 bucks.” 

A third space on Willamette

Tsunami is a cozy, idiosyncratic corner of south Eugene. 

It hosts concerts, like a standing room-only Beatles singalong earlier this week. Local painter Cassie Taylor is a frequent fixture, commemorating musicians live on canvas. It hosts readings, like for the spring release of revived literary magazine Emergency Horse. Musician Billy Strings played a low-key show there, Landfield recalled, underwear peeking out and a joint in his mouth. (He gave a shoutout to Tsunami in his concert last year, and particularly to “the old guy” at the store.)

It tends to south Eugene’s intellectual needs. Worker-owner Emily Poole, who is the main buyer for the store, pointed to the difference between “Tsunami bestsellers” and what she was used to stocking at the bookstore she worked at in her hometown of Jackson, Wyoming. There, it was James Patterson and Bill O’Reilly; here, it’s botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 2013 book “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants,” or bell hooks’ book of critical essays “All About Love.”

Outside of its role as a third space for crunchy Eugene literati, Tsunami is home for creatives and conveners behind the counter. Poole moved to Eugene close to a decade ago, after calling bookstores all over Oregon and asking about a job. When she said she had bookstore experience, Landfield said: “You’re hired. Just let me know when you get to town.” 

The bookstore has become an artistic home for her, too, and her illustration work — prints, postcards, framed pieces — is on sale in Tsunami. 

“Eugene is a weirdly small town in that way for the size of the population — there’s not as much space for artists compared to how many artists there are,” she said. “I’ve felt very fortunate to kind of be the artist-in-residence” at Tsunami.

Steve Ellerhoff moved to Eugene in 2019, escaping years of “constant, rolling anxiety” as an adjunct instructor teaching American literature at an Iowa community college. A scholar specializing in Jungian theory with a doctorate from Trinity College Dublin, he has worked at Tsunami for five-and-a-half years, not needing to piecemeal gigs together like he did as an academic. He was given shares from community members last year, becoming a worker-owner in addition to his role as associate editor of the in-house Tsunami Press. 

Ellerhoff hopes that a purchase of the building would mean Tsunami can stick around for another 30 years. The precarity of not owning the building itself feels familiar.

“Some of what Scott talks about with the rent is akin to that rolling anxiety of being an adjunct,” he said. “It’s like, how do we get up over that hump? It’s a slog.”

Landfield himself is a fixture in Eugene, a former mayoral candidate and the second-place winner in Eugene Weekly’s ”Local hellraiser” Best of Eugene roundup from 2025. Originally from Quincy, Illinois, he’s the son of newspaper writers who took financially disastrous turns as bookstore owners in the Midwest. He first came out to Eugene in the 1970s as a “hoedad,” joining the worker-owned tree-planting Hoedads Reforestation Cooperative. 

The Tsunami business model is similar to the hoedads: collective ownership, split between the workers and community members. Right now, there are 14 shareholders. Landfield owns 45% of the shares and is the general manager, but Poole and Ellerhoff are worker-owners, who would also become part owners of the building itself. 

“It’s been a long, long time coming,” Poole said. “Every step we’ve made has been trying to move further into making this a community space and a community-funded space, a community and worker-owned space, and not just like, a business owned by a guy. That’s never been the vision.”

For Landfield, buying the building is a matter of securing his life’s work after three decades of paying the rent. 

“There’s a lot of things I’ve done that I’m pleased with, but I never really planned on doing them,” he said. “Some things that I planned on doing, like writing a lot of books, finishing them, I just assumed that’s what I was going to do with my life. 

“But trying to make it and pay the rent with your muscle, and your line of bullshit to the next customer, and that’s everything you got? It takes everything you got.” 

Pete Hegseth versus Gomer Pyle

There had been two stalled attempts to buy the building in the last five years, falling through when individual benefactors were unable to raise enough cash. But the latest push to buy the building started in late February, after Tsunami staff saw the bookstore become a haven for people in a tense moment: the start of the United States’ and Israel’s coordinated military strikes against Iran. 

Buying a bookstore in Oregon is a world away from the military action that has angered many Americans. But bookstore clerks are used to striking up conversations with customers, Landfield said, especially in a place like Tsunami Books that wears its leftist, working-class politics on its sleeve. The news of a deadly Feb. 28 missile strike on an Iranian primary school, the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, was particularly disturbing to Landfield. 

In the first days after the war began, Landfield said, people started coming into the bookstore in disaffected droves. They were looking for books on religion, Iranian history and literature. “Everybody needed a place to go, a haven,” he said. “Everybody had that faraway look in their eyes.”

Landfield began to think of himself like the main character of “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.,” innocent, frustrated, good-natured. He positions the Tsunami fundraiser as a kind of David-and-Goliath struggle against the type of United States that would go to war.

“It’s like Pete Hegseth versus Gomer Pyle,” he said. “Then I thought, well, Gomer always came out ahead.”

But that hope is stacking up against the reality of the real estate market in 2026. 

The property carries a real market valuation of $747,218, per county records, which has ballooned over the years thanks to market trends and the growth of south Eugene’s commercial corridor. The building and the 0.2 acre lot it sits on is owned by a private LLC, which Landfield has a friendly relationship with. Raising $1 million would allow the bookstore to make an outright cash offer with enough profit to close the sale amicably, he said. 

But part of that figure is certainly from the value Tsunami had added to the building. When Tsunami started in the late 1990s, Landfield said parts of the neighborhood around the store could be rough, with people frequently using heroin. Businesses including Tsunami started to coordinate with the police, but Landfield said he also had his own approach. 

“I enlisted ‘karate boys’ in the neighborhood to join me in the evenings,” he said. “We did no violence, but we became a neighborhood watch and we spooked them. We didn’t have to touch anybody. It’s been a much safer neighborhood. Property values have gone up.” (The “karate boys,” he said, were a loosely assembled group of young men older than 21.)

The building was first built in 1949 as a shop selling curtains, Venetian blinds and wallpaper. There have been decades of improvements to the building itself since Tsunami moved in: a new roof, shelves built from reclaimed gymnasium bleacher wood, 42 coats of concrete seal rolled on the floor over the years, six coats of black fill (an asphalt compound used for deep-crack repair) and 14 coats of paint to save the building’s south wall over time. Light used to poke through the concrete block pilasters; now, art is on the wall. These investments have been on top of just paying the monthly rent. 

“For 30 years, we’ve been paying rent on time, and we’ve paid over a million and a half in rent,” Landfield said. “When you’re poor and you got to pay that much rent, you can’t ever not be poor.”

Can a wave build again?

Tsunami has asked for money before. In 2017, a grassroots push raised $302,000 in gifts and loans for an escrow account as collateral to secure a 10-year lease on the building, after it changed ownership to a local real estate investor and developer. Now, Landfield said, over 80% of those loans have been paid back, but Tsunami is in a tight financial spot again. 

So now Tsunami is appealing to the community at a time when shops like it are part of what The Nation declared to be an “independent bookstore revival.” A record-setting number of shops — 2,000 — celebrated Independent Bookstore day in April, which writer Katrina vanden Heuvel attributed to a human push against Big Tech. 

Tsunami opened in 1995, the same year Amazon began selling books online. Three decades later, a secure future as a south Eugene book haven could be in sight. Landfield said the goal is to establish a legal covenant to keep the building in books, music and the arts in perpetuity. 

“Some clown comes and burns it down, it’s got to come back up,” Landfield said. “It can’t be bought by some developer in Phoenix or China who’s going to put up 12 stories and sucker a bunch of people.”

While it can be uncomfortable to talk about wealth directly, Poole said, Eugene — and particularly south Eugene — is a community where “affluence and impeccable moral compasses” come together more often than elsewhere. Back home in Jackson, she saw the “cow town” boom into a haven for out-of-state billionaires and mega mansions. In Eugene, pricey university housing projects have ballooned in recent years, stoking fears of a similar future for the Tsunami property.

“That’s a story I’ve watched unfold in my hometown in the most extreme way, and I really don’t want to see that happen in Eugene,” Poole said. “Of course, it’s happening everywhere. But I like to think that Eugene is the kind of town that would fight back to keep its character.”

Two months into the effort, the GoFundMe is standing at $22,641. The goal is to reach $200,000, then form a limited liability company to begin raising the other $800,000. 

It’s a long way to go, but there are signs of hope. When a reporter walked in on Friday, May 8, Landfield was excitedly holding a check for $2,000 someone had just dropped off.