A few years after ABC first opened its doors in Amsterdam in 1972, founders Mitch Crossfield and Sam Boltansky decided to expand operations to The Hague. They got their hands on a cheap place to rent in the city center, and in 1976 ABC The Hague opened in the Spuistraat, in a basement below the building that currently houses Burger King. Those first few years in The Hague were totally different from the present-day situation: stock consisted of whatever was sent over from the US, customer orders were not a thing, and everything happened on paper. No computer in sight!
Time passed, progress progressed, and eventually the store moved to its current location: Lange Poten 23. The building used to house a clothing store, which explains the many mirrors still dotted throughout the sales floor. The building is a bit of a time capsule anyway: there’s a mysterious, Mondriaan-esque mosaic on the first floor ceiling that none of us know the origin of, there’s lots of little doors and wall panels dating back to when the building was heated by big gas tanks (not as long ago as you might think!), and there are now-defunct cables and light switches everywhere.
Of course, we have built our own history over the past 50 years as well. Our bookshelves were sourced more or less by chance from a bookstore in the States that was getting rid of them, different iterations of our logo have graced the storefront (the original one, as seen in our cash desk, was hand-designed by ABC founder Mitch!), and the little door next to the Crime Fiction section is now home to our friendly store gnome, who likes to get involved whenever new store displays are made.
We also can’t talk about our store’s origins without talking about Joe. He’d worked for Sam before, setting up bookstores and running them for a few months until they were sold off, so it made sense to send him to the Netherlands to hold down the fort when Mitch had to go back to the States for a few months. Joe was the first official ABC The Hague staff member – the only one, for a while – and in many ways set the tone of our operations over the next five decades.
These days, we have a team of about 15 staff members in The Hague, who also keep our Leidschendam store (which just turned 5!) running. We cleaned up our act quite a bit over the years, going from a place that sells “whatever books we can get our hands on” to a proper bookstore, well-established in The Hague. Well, almost proper. We still do a lot of things differently from most other bookstores, and we doubt that’ll ever change. There’s a reason we like to call ourselves “stubbornly independent!”
Speaking of – for obvious reasons, ABC is a big proponent of brick-and-mortar stores. That’s why we’re participating in the “Week van de Stenen Winkel” on May 4-10. We’d love to invite everyone to visit us; in general, but specifially in that week. The first few customers of the day throughout that week will receive a special little present!
For more on this and other events at ABC, visit: https://abc.nl/events
Text & images provided by The American Book Center