The word “eslite” made its debut in the French dictionary during the twelfth century, but within two hundred years it was no longer in use. By that time the modern spelling, elite, was already in vogue. Most French speakers today have long forgotten the archaic form of the word.
But seven hundred years later, and hundreds of thousands of miles away, it has reappeared. In Taiwan, Eslite is the widely recognized name for a chain of high-class bookstores that have brought a whole new range of choices to discerning readers and a whole new dimension to buying and selling books.
The five Eslite stores that have opened throughout the island in the past six years feature an enviable variety of high-quality books, many of them imported from the United States and Europe. With the largest stock of its kind among local bookstores, Eslite is the place to go for classical poetry or contemporary fiction, for a rare antique volume or the latest award-winning children’s book, for a special coffee-table gift for the family artlover/gourmet cook/photography buff/ travel hound/science enthusiast. Or it’s the place to go just for some high-brow browsing.
Unlike most Taiwan bookshops, Eslite doesn’t worry about patrons getting a free read. The store is even designed to make browsing as cozy as possible.
What also sets Eslite stores apart from other booksellers are their stylish settings. Sleek varnished wood, cool white marble, and shiny polished metal are some of the signature elements that go into the design of each store. The emphasis on quality and atmosphere is all part of founder Wu Ching-yu’s (吳清友) aim to offer a sense of refinement to match the island’s economic progress. Says Eslite deputy manager Tseng Chien-yu (曾乾瑜), “Mr. Wu hopes to help cultivate people to appreciate a cultured life.”
A businessman who earned his wealth selling kitchen equipment to hospitals and hotels, Wu got into the bookselling business out of personal frustration with the poor selections he found at local bookstores. He was especially interested in books on the fine arts, but those that were available were limited in variety and sophistication and were geared toward readers with only a general interest in the subject. “Mr. Wu is an art collector,” says Tseng. “He was disappointed that he could buy books to enlarge his artistic knowledge only when he traveled abroad. So he decided to open a bookstore of his own.”
Wu started out in 1989 by renting the basement of an office building. To run the store, he hired a group of experts with experience in the arts publishing industry, including manager Liao Mei-Ii (廖美麗), who had spent many years with the respected Hsiung Shih Art Publishing Co. The management started out importing books only on the arts, most of them in English. Unlike most local bookstores, which buy imported books through a large dealer, Eslite purchased its stock directly from the foreign publishing companies. Although this was more expensive, it allowed the staff to be more selective in its choices.
Comfort and class—At the main downtown store, left, parents and kids are welcome to peruse the latest children’s books. One of the newer suburban stores, right, draws in customers with a mod, split-level design.
Soon the shelves of the 600-square-foot basement were filled with highly regarded tomes on architecture, dance, film, music, painting, photography, sculpture, and theater. It was the first time that many of these books had been available in Taiwan. The collection was balanced with about half Chinese books, some of them locally published and some imported from Hong Kong.
From the start, Wu was also interested in creating an elite setting for his books. His basement store was located in a modern high-rise in one of Taipei’s choicest business and residential areas, at the intersection of Jenai and Tunhua South roads. He used generous quantities of fine light-colored wood to build the bookshelves, cabinets, floors, and stair case, then added an Italian designer’s table and chairs in one corner so that customers could sit down and peruse the offerings at their leisure. Soft classical music flowing from the sound system completed the elegant yet cozy environs.
No other bookstore on the island had ever taken care to create such an inviting atmosphere. Eslite broke the taboo strictly followed by most local booksellers: never encourage customers to get a free read. Tseng even appears happy when he admits that many people visit Eslite to browse rather than buy. “Some of them simply come to be embraced by the ambiance. Our bookstores make them feel intellectual,” he says with a smile.
But Wu didn’t stop with the book store. He also wanted to surround his customers with art and other fine things. On the same basement level, he opened an equally attractive gallery and began displaying works by local artists. Before long, the gallery became known as one of the island’s more respected exhibition forums. Wu also began renting the first floor of the building and filled it with high-class boutiques selling only the best-quality products, including Salvadore Ferragamo fashions, Wedgwood China, Waterford crystal, and Cassina furniture. A well-appointed restaurant rounded out the setting.
These posh stores not only helped to draw in customers, but also to fulfill Wu’s ambition to upgrade local lifestyles. “People had finally become rich and could afford expensive things,” Tseng Chien-yu says, “but Mr. Wu found many of them didn’t know how to appreciate a life of good taste.”
But customers were quick to appreciate what the new Eslite complex had to offer, although the bookstore earned by far the most positive response. Well known novelist Hsiaoyeh (小野), a frequent patron, has been impressed by the store’s refusal to cater to the mainstream best-sellers’ market. “The problem with most of Taiwan’s bookstores is that they tend to be too profit-minded and commercialized,” he says. “But not Eslite.” Instead of following mainstream tastes, he says, the store chooses its stock carefully in order to offer customers books that they can truly appreciate. Says Hsiaoyeh, “Bookstores should be able to guide readers in what to read because they know better which books are good and which aren’t.”
For some customers, Eslite out shines other stores simply by offering a clean setting and well-organized shelves. Andy Ho (何永賢), the Taiwan marketing manager for T.G.I. Friday’s Inc., an American restaurant chain, can quickly find the titles he wants on interior design and literature. “They’re not classified under just one big, general title but under various, individualized categories,” he says. The same books, if they were available at another store, might be in any of several sections. And at some bookshops, they might even be stacked up in a dusty pile of unrelated titles in one of the cramped aisles.
Avoiding the best-sellers’ market—“The problem with most of Taiwan’s bookstores is they tend to be too profit-minded and commercialized,” says one customer. “But not Eslite.” Other patrons appreciate the store’s well-organized shelving system, also a rarity among Taiwan booksellers.
Eslite’s clean and classy setting, however, does not appeal to everyone. Hsiaoyeh thinks some people find it too cold and formal, more like a library, and they prefer the freewheeling approach of Taiwan’s old-style bookshops. “Some of my friends don’t like to go there because it’s too beautiful,” he says. “Just being there makes them uncomfortable. They’re afraid they might spoil something.”
But plenty of other people quickly became Eslite fans. The steady flow of customers encouraged Wu to expand the bookstore in 1991. He reserved the original basement store for books on fine arts and opened an additional fifteen hundred square feet on the building’s second floor, for a total of twenty-one hundred square feet. Here, he began to house books on the other arts as well as classic and contemporary literature and a wide range of other topics, including travel, design, fashion, food, psychology, sociology, and religion. In keeping with the original store’s reader-friendly environment, Wu added comfortable sitting spaces in front of the windows. In one corner, he reserved a special room for children’s books, including a good selection of classics and contemporary award winners, as well as comfortable chairs and a low table for kids and parents to use together. As with the basement store, much of the upstairs stock consisted of imported English-language books.
The store has rounded out its intellectual identity by publishing a monthly book review and setting aside space for exhibitions and seminars. This display introduces the philosophy of the Te Chien Institute, a group that advocates a balanced and cultured lifestyle.
In a move that set Eslite even further apart from run-of-the-mill bookstores, Wu set aside a special room for displaying and selling rare and antique books. The collection has now expanded to five thousand volumes from all over the world, covering literature, history, politics, medicine, and the arts. About 80 percent of them are from Wu’s personal collection, and the rest belong to other local collectors and are sold on consignment. The books are divided about equally among Chinese and foreign editions, the latter including English, German, French, and Japanese titles. The oldest Chinese book is from a fourteenth-century series of 294 volumes that offer advice on governing a country, and the oldest foreign title is An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, published in 1704 in London. “Although you might not be able to afford one of our antique books,” Tseng says, “it’s breathtaking just to be able to touch with your own hands, say, a first-edition copy of a book by a writer that you admire.” He recalls a customer from Austria who became just so entranced. The woman, a graphic artist, found an early twentieth-century copy of Shakespeare’s The Tempest that was illustrated and signed by Arthur Rackham, one of the century’s most famous book artists. “She was so thrilled by what she found, she leafed through it over and over,” Tseng says, “She didn’t want to leave without it.”
The company’s interest in dealing in antique books has led to an annual rare book auction, begun in 1993 as the first of its kind in Taiwan. The volumes have included many foreign books on China and Taiwan as well as traditional hand-bound Chinese books. Each year, Tseng says, the event has brought in about NT$1.5 million (US$58,000). The highest-priced volume so far has been an eighteenth century work on calligraphy that went for NT$ 130,000 (US$5,000). But Chen Chien-ming (陳建銘), who is in charge of Eslite’s rare book collection, prefers not to emphasize the monetary value of the items sold at the auction. “I want people to buy old books because they appreciate them,” he says, “not just because they think they’re a good investment.”
Eslite has also made an effort to stock publications in European languages, particularly French and German. These include novels as well as books on art, architecture, design, sociology, and psychology. The management is dedicated to including these publications even though they account for a very small market in Taiwan. “We don’t rely on them for making profits,” Tseng says, “but we must offer them to our customers, no matter how small the population is.”
Eslite is also the only local book seller to begin publishing and selling its own magazine: the eslitebookreview. a monthly publication begun in 1991 that has attracted about two thousand subscribers. It includes reviews on books, CDs and art exhibitions, plus profiles on literary figures and feature stories on social and cultural issues. One recent edition, for example, included an article on the use of the female form in photography.
In the past few years, the store has also begun sponsoring a wide range of seminars, most of them held in the Eslite Arts and Humanities Space, located across the hall from the basement section of the bookstore. Topics include such things as Fujianese architecture, Buddhist magazines, contemporary Taiwan films, and attitudes toward homosexuality. In addition, local dance, drama, and music groups have begun to use the space for small-scale performances or other cultural gatherings.
Novelist Hsiaoyeh, who has given talks on children’s literature at the store, finds that Eslite-sponsored activities at tract a more astute crowd than he has experienced at other locations. “I like giving talks at Eslite because the audience there understands my thinking better,” he says. “Eslite audiences are more open-minded.” The public also seems to appreciate the offerings at the Arts and Humanities Space. From the very beginning, people could often be seen queuing up to attend. “It was not until then that we were firmly convinced that we could make the store into a real business venture,” Tseng says.
The popularity of the first Eslite quickly led to a succession of branch stores opening up throughout the island. Each has kept to the same tradition, offering carefully selected books, about SO per cent of them imported, in a well-designed setting. Most of the branch stores also include high-class boutiques on the same premises and a forum for various cultural activities.
Each of the new Eslite stores has a slightly different focus. The first branch, which opened in 1992 across the street from the Taipei World Trade Center, caters to a more professionally oriented clientele and emphasizes books on business management, design, and architecture. An affiliated gallery focuses primarily on photography exhibitions and displays of high-quality decorative commercial arts such as glasswork and posters. And a neighboring store sells upscale designer furniture.
The Eslite store in Tienmu, a suburban area of northern Taipei with a large population of expatriate families and several foreign schools, offers general interest and fiction plus a good selection of travel, sports, health, and other lifestyle titles to appeal to the more family- and leisure-oriented customers in the neighborhood. The Tienmu store is also part of a trendy new shopping complex, a project initiated and designed by Eslite that includes the fashionable casual wear boutique Esprit, a small entranceway store selling jazzy Swiss-made Swatch time-pieces, and a branch of the U.S. restaurant chain T.G.I. Friday’s. To match the upbeat setting, a funky twist was given to the split-level design of the bookstore. By contrast, another Eslite store in the central-island city of Taichung is located on the premises of the National Museum of Natural Science. There, the stock focuses on books for all ages on the natural sciences and environmental protection.
This year Eslite opened its first department store site in the southern harbor city of Kaohsiung. Located on the sixth floor of the new upscale Hanshen Department Store, it features a broad selection, similar to the original Taipei store, but with a stronger emphasis on children’s literature. On its opening day, the 720 square-foot store attracted five thousand customers, with one thousand of them making purchases. This success has prompted the Eslite management to consider opening more shops in department stores around the island.
The original Taipei store also continues to do well, handling more than one thousand customers a day. In the evening and on weekends, patrons must often wait in line to make their purchases. The store has become so popular that when newspapers reported last December that it would have to move because the landlord had decided to rent the premises to a bank, many customers complained. “Eslite can’t move away,” says computer engineer Chang Hung-shih (張宏實), a frequent patron. “In the past few years it has become a very important cultural landmark for this neighborhood.” Fortunately, the store has found an even bigger space in a building adjacent to its current site and is expected to move there before the end of the year.
While Eslite has earned a respected reputation in Taiwan, there is one big question that many people ask: is the store making money? Deputy manager Tseng admits that the huge investment that has gone into interior decoration and a large stock of expensive, imported books has not translated readily into profits. “We’re still losing money,” he says. Some businesspeople are surprised at Eslite’s decision to continue with its elite approach to bookselling. Tseng recalls a discussion he had with a wealthy uncle who was thinking of opening a bookstore in Hsinchu, a city southwest of Taipei. His relative looked at both the original Taipei Eslite store and at the mainstream-oriented New Schoolmate bookstore located on the same intersection. He found more promise in the latter store, one of fifteen across the island. Reflecting a common business mentality, the uncle declared, “Your bookstore won’t make money but New Schoolmate will.”
Other businesspeople are more optimistic about Eslite’s financial prospects. William Wu (吳惠良), a brand manager for SMH Asia Inc., the company that is importing Swatch products for the store’s Tienmu branch, feels Eslite’s idea of bringing several stores together in an upscale shopping area is proving successful. “It’s true that building up an image for a business takes time,” he says, “but this kind of cooperation is becoming a work able trend. Eslite is not the only one that will profit from the high-class shopping complex it initiated, we as partners also gain. I don’t think Eslite will have problems continuing.”
Eslite founder Wu Ching-yu also remains confident of the store’s future. He had expected from the outset that he would not turn a profit until the company had established a solid group of chain stores that can share the high cost of imported books and increase the company’s overall profit margin. Tseng says Eslite should begin making money two years from now, when it will have opened three more stores, for a total of eight. By that time, Tseng believes the company will not only benefit from economies of scale, but will also have a solid reputation and a sense of tradition to draw on. “A lot of things in Taiwan start out with ideals, but they don’t last long enough to create a history for themselves,” Tseng says. “Only when things have a history can they begin to have an effect and to make profits.”
Now that Eslite is creating a history for itself, the management also believes they have a duty to keep it alive. “If we decided to close down, I wonder if there would ever be a second Eslite?” Tseng says. “It’s unlikely. People will think: If Eslite, after putting in so much money and effort, couldn’t make it, who else can? So we must carry on.”