Title wave! Used bookstore owners were named the Small Businesspersons of the Year by the Alaska Small Business Administration.

• Author: Campbell, Melissa
• Position: Celebrating Small-Business Month

When they started Title Wave Books in 1991, owners Julie Drake and Steve Lloyd knew they didn't want the typical dark, stuffy atmosphere usually found in bookstores. They wanted to build a place where everyone felt welcome-young or old, preppy or pierced.

The couple, both avid readers, liked the idea of recycling books. Why read them then stick them on a shelf never to be cracked open again, after all? So they opened a small used bookstore on Northern Lights Boulevard, stocking their new business mostly with books from their own library.

"We really scrimped and saved," Drake said. "We worked several jobs then and none at our own store. We didn't have the luxury of working in our own business."

They later bought a four-story building on Fireweed Lane, where they got a lot of exercise lugging books up and down steps. They added to the book collection and soon outgrew the place.

Then, less than a year ago, Title Wave got a loan from the Small Business Administration and moved from that cramped confine into a spacious 33,000-square-foot spot-four times the size of the old building-in midtown Anchorage.

Today, Drake and Lloyd indulge in working in their new store among their 40 employees.

But throughout their years in retail, Drake and Lloyd have worked to keep the atmosphere light. One way is through their homemade signs. One hanging by the literature section of the new store asks the question, "What in the Dickens should I get Aunt Sue?" Another, found tacked onto the side of a bookshelf, displays a drawing of a pair of skinny, wavery calves with clothing bunched up around his feet next to a note to customers, "We'll drop everything to help you find a book."

They've also decorated this enlightening establishment with plastic pink flamingos, purple mannequins and a big 8-foot (at least) swordfish that hangs on a back wall.

"Julie gets all the credit for the mannequins," Lloyd said. "But we both agreed that we didn't want the stuffy, gentlemen's atmosphere here."

The new place features wide aisles and stylish shelves that house nearly a half-million books of every subject and title imaginable. Titles range from adventure novelist David Aaron's "State Scarlet" to Zolar's "Book of Spirits," found in the parapsychology section (which is located across from a surprising selection of books on astral projection and palmistry, and beside a collection on unidentified flying objects).

Title Wave also offers new and discounted titles, a variety of...