(Photo by LWYang)

(Photo by LWYang)

Morton “Jim” Toole has lovingly, grumpily owned Capitol Hill Books for 23 years. A former Navy admiral, Toole is as much a neighborhood staple as his used bookstore, famed for his propensity to lecture patrons about everything from their word choice in the checkout line to their cellphone usage. (I have been berated in line, more than once, for saying the word “totally,” which is an expressly forbidden word according to the official list tacked up near the register).

He’s also turned Capitol Hill Books into a neighborhood treasure, drawing visitors from across the District to scour stacks of teetering paperbacks that, at first glance, look like chaos, but at second glance, are a slightly more organized kind of chaos: non-fiction is downstairs, fiction is upstairs, poetry is in the back, and foreign languages are in the restroom, because, as Toole once told Washingtonian, “foreign language in this country is in the toilet.”

Now, the store is being passed on to a group of longtime patrons and employees, who bought it from Toole in a sale finalized Thursday night.

The store announced the sale on Twitter and via a Medium post on Friday morning. The new owners are Aaron Beckwith, Matt Wixon, Kyle Burk, and Shantanu Malkar.

Beckwith, who has been working at Capitol Hill Books part-time since 2004 according to the post, will be the new store manager. He hopes to acquire some more rare books, expand store hours, and have more author events; otherwise, the new owners plan to keep the store pretty much the way it is.

Burk, a former employee and the store’s social media manager, told DCist that the four new owners are best friends, and they’ve been thinking about buying the store for nearly 10 years.

“Now, we’re all finally able [to buy it], and Jim is finally ready to turn the reins over,” Burk says. He hopes that the four of them will be able to keep the store alive for a long time to come, even in a city where skyrocketing rent has become an obstacle for local businesses.

“Look, we all know that the insidious forces of capital want to come in and turn this store into an Urban Outfitters or whatever, but independent bookstores have an invaluable place in the social fabric of the city. Also, I admit I did get a black t-shirt at Urban Outfitters once and it was soft and fit really well,” Burk said in the release.

Wixon left his job at Capitol Hill Books many years ago to start a moving company—Bookstore Movers—in an effort to earn the money he needed to buy the store. The company has become successful, expanding from two guys in one truck to somewhere around 90 employees. Malkar was never employed by the store, but reportedly has been a patron and devoted fan since 2005, when Wixon first introduced him to it.

For those who fear losing Toole’s presence in the store, fret not. He’ll still be working there, offering Beckwith and the others advice when they ask for it. He says the purchase was not a surprise for him, but a long-planned and much-discussed move.

“These guys have been working for me for 10 years on and off, mostly on, while they created their own moving company in order to buy me out,” he says. “We’ve been expecting them someday to buy me out and send me off into the sunset. I’m getting old.”

Toole says he and the four owners are all buddies, and he’s excited to see what fresh blood can do for the store. “I’m an old stodgy guy. They’re young and bright-eyed,” he says. He also says he will not force the new owners to keep up his long-standing rules about forbidden words, though he appears not to be happy about it.

“That’s Aaron [Beckwith]’s call. But I’ll have to put some earmuffs on if I’m in there as an employee, because the disease is rampant in your generation. You cannot end a sentence without saying ‘like’ or ‘awesome’ or ‘perfect,'” he says.

In an effort to feel better about my own affliction with this disease, I told Burk I’d been yelled at before for using a forbidden word.

“If Jim’s not yelling at you, that means he doesn’t like you,” Burk says.

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