Toole is the owner of Capitol Hill Books near Eastern Market. The used book store is a local novelty, with books stacked to the ceiling and clamoring for space in the bathroom.
Why organize the bookstore like this?
Well, I had two rents. This rent here for this place and I wasn’t living upstairs, so what am I going to do? I gotta expand to cover the two rents and I did that by putting books everywhere I could.
Yeah, I even saw books in the bathroom.
Foreign language in this country is in the toilet. So that’s why books are in the toilet. I use that room for the foreign language room. People don’t believe that and then they go back and they see shelving with more language books in it.
Is it difficult to help customers find the right book?
Listen, when you pay money for the book and you’ve determined whether it’s worth anything and what its value is, and then you clean people’s boogers off the book and you price the book and you shelve the book, you know where everything is.
Where do the books come from?
Dead people. I have found out that dead people don’t take books with them. I have days in which I will buy other live people’s books, but they bring their junk that they wanna dump before they move or what they don’t have a use for or are full of their little notes from college.
Any political leaders shop here?
There’s been two senators who looked, but only one congressman bought anything — Tim Roemer, the current ambassador of India who was then congressman of Indiana.
If President Obama walked in, what would you recommend?
I’d ask him first to initial this [“The Audacity of Hope”] and then I would recommend “Capitol Hill History, Architecture and Walking Tours” so he knows something about the Hill.
– Kaitlin Schluter
