Books by the Way, an institution on the Island for some 35 years, has new owners: Jennie and Dave Wilke.
Dave Wilke, 35, works full-time as facilities director for the Vashon School District, so, although they both own the business, Jennie, 34, will be the lead person at the store.
Last Friday evening during a welcoming open house, Jennie got some help from her 6-year old son Simon, and Saturday she enlisted 8-year-old daughter Amelia to punch in a purchase on the register from a person buying a card.
The emphasis on family seems to come with the territory for the Wilkes. Jennie says that Dave’s parents, who are co-investors in the shop, will eventually move to Vashon, and as a former high school English teacher, Jennie has had a long interest in books.
But she’s particularly drawn to children’s books. She and Dave have three kids (Phoebe, 4, is the third), and she says that she wants to expand the children’s section. She also plans to offer a series of readings from children’s books so that parents and kids can come together and spend some time with books.
Jennie added that she wanted to find a way to make space for more places to sit. “I want people to be able to sit closer to each other,” she said.
Books by the Way, owned for the past five years by Jan and Charlie Peterson, has been long known for keeping a good stock of current books, and Jennie says that she plans to continue that practice.
She said she also knows employees help to cultivate that loyalty, and Jennie said she’ll retain the people who have been working at the store for the Petersons, who bought the store after leaving a similar business in Colorado.
The Wilkes came to the Northwest from Phoenix, Ariz., where Jennie taught for four years while Dave completed his studies at a university. They came to Vashon two years ago when Dave began a course of Bible study in Tacoma.
In 2005, they visited the area looking for a place to live while Dave studied.
“We travelled up and down from Bremerton to Seattle. We were in a real estate office and saw Vashon on the map, and we said, ‘What is this? Is this an Island?’
“And the broker,” she continued, “said, ‘That’s Vashon. You don’t want to live there. They’re weird, and they don’t even have a Target.”
Hearing that, they were immediately attracted, and in the fall (their first trip was in April) they brought the kids along.
“I feel like I’ve been making this decision to live here my whole life,” she said. “And Simon told me last week, ‘It seems like we’ve been here for hundreds and hundreds of days.’”
Jennie said that her aim with the store is to be a blessing in the community, in the same way that Bettie Edwards of The Little House and Melinda Sontgerath of The Hardware Store Restaurant are blessings to the community.
She and Dave have been looking for that chance for a while. They put a backup offer on the Homegrown Restaurant when it was for sale not long ago and looked at the Burton Store, which has been for sale for a while.
But one day there was an ad in The Beachcomber which Dave saw. He called her and said, “You’ve got to check it out.” The whole process of changing owners took about two months, and now the Wilkes are under way.
