At 900 square feet, there's barely room for owner Tyler Stewart and an employee to sit down. There are no armchairs, and don't bother looking for a coffee bar. What Pandemonium has is books. Tyler's ambition is to have a copy of every science fiction book currently in print, and with more than 12,000 new and used books on the shelves, he's close to that goal.

What's amazing is how comfortably the latest paperbacks, small press books and British imports fit together. Tyler even has room to display many titles face-out, breaking up potentially monotonous strings of book spines with exciting and occasionally garish illustrations.

Despite a couple of tight corners, the aisles are clear and there's plenty of room to browse. Non-readers may feel bored and a bit claustrophobic, but it's the perfect cave for a lover of SF books.

(Tyler also has opinions to spare on topics ranging from space to science fiction, and he's often eager to share them with customers.)

"I'm a fan who became a businessman"
Like many bookstores, Pandemonium began with a daydream.

Tyler became a science fiction fan at the age of nine, when his parents read him J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as bedtime stories.

"In the middle of The Two Towers," he remembers, "they stopped and told me to finish it myself." He was hooked on the story, and by the time he had read the rest of it he was hooked on reading.

However, he never seriously thought of his hobby as a future career. At Tufts University, he studied international relations with the goal of joining the Foreign Service, but his hopes were dashed when he discovered how few Foreign Service careers involved high diplomacy and how many of them involved stamping visas in unpleasant places.

After college, Tyler wasn't sure what he wanted to do. He worked for a bank long enough to learn he hated it, then got his first retail experience with a part-time job at a local video store. He liked this, and began looking for some additional hours at local bookstores.

Bookstore work proved hard to find. After a particularly dispiriting interview at local giant Wordsworth, Tyler found himself at a low point.

As he walked up Brattle Street from Wordsworth to Harvard Square, he found himself wishing he could go to Spike's, a science fiction bookstore that he regularly shopped at during college. The store had closed a few months before, and Tyler could see the empty second-floor window where the store used to be at the head of the street.

That's when a light went on. Suddenly, Tyler's occasional daydream of owning an SF bookstore didn't look so fantastic. Three months later -- or ten years ago -- Pandemonium was open for business.

Tyler started Pandemonium with a $20,000 loan and no real business experience. "I was a fan who became a businessman," he remembers. "I made a lot of mistakes."

Learning by accident
He learned some parts of the book business almost by accident. "My entire knowledge of publishers came from going through my personal collection," he says. He would copy down imprints and contact addresses, then write away for catalogs. Responses were slow, and when Pandemonium opened, most of the books in the store were shopworn volumes bought from Spike MacPhee's defunct bookstore.

Eventually, a representative from book distributor Ingram spotted Pandemonium's sign and left her card under the door. Tyler had never heard of the distributor, but was thrilled by the idea of ordering most of his books with only one phone call a week.

Other surprises were less pleasant. Pandemonium began as "Pandemonium Video Paperback," so Tyler spent a large portion of his initial capital buying science fiction videos for rental. The videos flopped.

Otherwise, progress was slow but steady, and in late 1990 the store had stopped losing money. The next few years had their ups and downs. Pandemonium became much more profitable in 1993, when they moved to their current location and the Magic: the Gathering card game became a national craze. The cards provided cash that could be plowed into the new and larger location, and the new location made Pandemonium visible to new customers.

"Running in place"
The mid-90s found Pandemonium's sales stagnating, however. The Magic craze collapsed in 1995, and Tyler says he was "running in place" for years afterward. He hired his first manager, and found he had to learn how to manage employees himself.

Inventory control was a problem, especially the fine balance of maintaining both wide selection and healthy cash flow. It didn't help that the video store inventory software that "Pandemonium Video Paperback" originally purchased with was hopelessly inadequate for managing book orders.

It was a gawky adolescence for the store that had to be outgrown by installing a proper bookstore inventory program and bookkeeping system. Tyler remodeled the store, adding brighter lighting and lighter-colored bookcases -- a change that, in his opinion, nearly doubled sales.

In retrospect, Tyler sees this as the time he truly became a businessman. He's still a fan, but he now has the skills he needs to make Pandemonium successful instead of just surviving.

Looking forward
Today, Pandemonium is having its best year ever, and Tyler even relaxing a little. He has part-timers running the store in the evenings and a full-time store manager.

The store holds regular author signings, and has become the preferred stopping point for many SF authors visiting Boston. A September book signing for Orson Scott Card's Ender's Shadow drew two hundred people and the event ran exceptionally smoothly considering Pandemonium's limited space.

With everything going so well, Tyler finds he's taking a new role. He's stepping back to more of an ownership position, focusing on future strategy rather than the day-to-day labor of running a bookstore.

"A bookstore is a responsibility"
His first priority is expanding Pandemonium's business on the Internet. The store has had a basic website for several years, but it's been dormant in recent months. He has been more active via e-mail, sending a weekly newsletter to a mailing list of 800 subscribers.

Tyler plans to start selling more than the occasional imported volume online. He is teaching himself HTML, but meanwhile he's likely to be able to get help from his unique fan community in upgrading the site.

"There are some real advantages to being an SF bookstore near MIT," he says. "On occasion I've needed a bit of programming, and when I've asked for help the response has been tremendous. It's been like Tarzan calling the animals of the jungle."

He's still thinking about what his next project will be. "I'm still experimenting with concepts," Tyler says, "and I tend to be driven by improving specific store functions." That doesn't mean sweeping changes -- such as a possible second store -- are out of the question, though.

He's also interested in teaching others about the business. He is planning to give 1`a lecture on SF bookselling at next year's Readercon convention. He sees bookselling as more than just a business, saying that "owning a bookstore is a responsibility" to current and future readers.

Whatever he does next, Tyler is in the book business for the long haul, though he's not sure the industry will be recognizable in 50 years. He thinks physical books will still be around, but he's not sure they'll be what bookselling is about. Even if they're not, he still wants to be a bookseller.