It is with great sadness that the Seattle Mystery Bookshop announces the death of William D. Farley, founder of the shop.
Bill was born in Battle Creek, MI, in 1931. After college and military service, he met and married his great love, B Jo Bauer in 1962. Living in Michigan, Bill worked at the Upjon Company while B Jo worked in encephalography. Both of them were life-long readers and took a chance to begin selling books when they bought a tiny general bookshop in Kalamazoo. Their idea was that Bill would work to support them while they established themselves as booksellers and B Jo would run the shop. Pretty soon, their rolls changed – Bill couldn’t stay out of the bookselling and B Jo itched to get back into her career.
Soon they found themselves in Philadelphia where Bill continued bookselling at Whodunnit?, one of the older mystery specialty shops in the country. In 1989, while Edgar-winning author Aaron Elkins was in doing a signing, he casually mentioned that Seattle needed its own mystery shop. Having a niece in the area, the Farleys had visited Seattle in the past and Elkins’comment spurred them to move across the country and establish their own specialty shop.
They opened the Seattle Mystery Bookshop in the Summer of 1990. B Jo continued her career in the medical world and Bill ran the shop, though they worked together on numerous outside events. At the beginning of 1999, Bill decided to “retire” and they sold the shop to the long-time manager. While he gave up the day-to-day details of owning the shop, Bill was too great a resource to let go and continued working part-time at the shop into the new century. All-together, Bill was a bookseller for over three decades.
It was his intention that the Seattle Mystery Bookshop be a place where readers and writers could meet, that it be a resource for those with questions or simply looking for a new author to read, that it be a place for someone new to the novels as well as the serious buyers looking to extend their collections. Under his guidance, the shop presented internationally known authors as well as beginning authors who grew into internatinally known authors. It was his dream and it was one he succeeded at brilliantly.
B Jo preceeded Bill in death in 2007. They had been married for 45 years. He’ll be interred with her in Michigan. Bill died on Sunday, June 28, just three days short of the shop’s 25th birthday. He’ll be missed by his colleagues, mystery readers and writers.
-Seattle Mystery Bookshop
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