Jeff Morris, who owned and operated Wilson’s Book World for nearly 30 years, died in Tallahassee this week. Morris’ family said on social media that the past president of the Florida Antiquarian Booksellers Association, 69, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage.
His mother, Helen Wilson, opened the book emporium in November, 1971, frontloading its inventory of new and used books with 20,000 volumes acquired from an antique dealer – who had purchased them at an estate sale.
Teenaged Jeff Morris was one of the store’s first employees, and he was there when Wilson’s moved to a larger location, an old Chrysler dealership on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., with islands out front where gas pumps once stood.
In 1988, he bought the business, and the building, from his mother upon her retirement.
Although Wilson’s originally sold both new and used books, Morris saw the writing on the retail wall and eventually stopped handing new titles.
“I’d watched my new book business do a three-year death spiral when Barnes and Noble came into town,” he told this reporter in 2017, for a story published in Creative Loafing. “When it’s a new, shiny toy, and people only have X amount of dollars to spend on books that month, that’s where they’re going to go. So I had to make the decision of getting rid of new books. And it turned out it was the smartest decision I could ever have made. You have to have new books to have used books.”
When he was asked in later years why there were no new books at Wilson’s, Morris said, “I tell them ‘There’s nothing I can do that Barnes and Noble can’t do bigger, better, faster and cheaper.’ You’ve got to pick your battles. And, as an extra bonus, there are more books out of print than in print. So my field is bigger.”
During Morris’ heyday as proprietor, the store, like an old-time barbershop, was the center of political, societal and/or literary discourse among neighbors and acquaintances. “The good part about retail, when it’s books, is that to walk through the front door, you’ve got to be able to read,” he said. “That whittles away a lot of the Neanderthals right there.”
Under the name R.W. Marcus, Morris penned a series of “Pulp Fantasy Noir” books called Tales of the Annigan Cycle.
Weary of the day-to-day grind, Morris retired in 2017, selling the strange-looking building on MLK. “I got tired of seeing how many balls I could keep in the air at one time,” he said. “It was a juggling act – and that was the thing that was just soul-sucking.”
He handed the then current inventory (in the neighborhood of 200,000 books) over to his daughter, Michelle Jenquin.
In 2018, Jenquin opened the third iteration of Wilson’s Book World at 535 16th St. N.
When he was about to pass the torch, Morris said the only thing he would miss about the business was book-buying. “It’s my favorite part of the job. Every day’s Christmas.
“I forget who said it, but 80 percent of everything is crap. And that’s true. But it’s that 20 percent …”