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 and whenever else he felt like it - 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. Then, like most successful businesses, someone got jealous. We were attacked by Blue Meanies who tried to put us out of business with tricks like spray-painting our signs and paying youngsters to destroy our advertising and lies like putting up big notices claiming that all their profits went to charity and so on. Luckily for us, these chaps did not know that to have a decent bookstore, you actually have to know something about books and do some hard work and they were not up to it.

They ended up squabbling amongst themselves, were quickly rendered impotent and are not really worth mentioning except to point out that John Lennon was right: Bad karma really does get you in the end.

Chiang Mai now has 3 good, clean well-lit bookstores with almost every kind of book that you can think of, that are open 12 hours per day almost every day of the year: The Gecko Books Group.

Our original store -The main branch - has more than doubled in size and shelf-space in six years and has the largest selection of used books in Southeast Asia. We also have two other branches around town that are as big and well-stocked as our original store was when it was 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!