Gecko Book's History
About US
Gecko Books was a dream born from desperation!
When I first came to Chiang Mai in 1989, there were no decent English language book stores. There was one small, used book shop run by a Thai woman who knew nothing about books other than John Grisham, Tom Clancy and Patricia Cornwell were well known authors, and they were almost the only writers on her shelves.
I don't mind reading these people for entertainment, but really longed for the kind of used bookstores that we had in San Francisco - bookstores with science and great literature and history - bookstores that have something for everybody - so an English friend and I started thinking about opening our own place.
Before we could find a place, along came a foreigner with a severe substance abuse problem who cheated the Thai women out of most of her books and started Chiang Mai's second bookstore. The selection was a little better than hers, but the shop was closed most of the day - every day - so Chiang Mai still needed a bookshop that was open once in a while.
My English friend loves books, and was getting more and more frustrated without a decent supply of reading material, so he volunteered to lend me the money to start a new store, so he would have somewhere to buy books. I rented a shop and that was the beginning of Gecko Books.
Things started out slowly, but within a few months we figured out where to get supplies and the store really started to take off!
Our original store -The main branch - has doubled in size two times in nine years and we have the largest selection of used books in Southeast Asia. We also have five branches around town that are as big and well-stocked as our original store was when it was first called, "The best used bookshop in Southeast Asia" by The Bangkok Post and Farang Magazine and thousands of customers as well.
Our business philosophy is to constantly grow and constantly get better and I think that we have proved that is just what we will do. Even now, we are working on a bunch of projects to improve our stores considerably. That is where Gecko Books stands at the moment, but as far as we are concerned we are just getting started!
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