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• Literary Finding with Mike Vaillancourt and Bill Thornhill

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Bill Thornhill, one of the owners of Priceless Books in downtown Urbana, works behind the counter of his store on Monday afternoon.

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On the corner of Main and Broadway streets in downtown Urbana stands Priceless Books, a little bookstore that's easily missed if you aren't paying attention. Ironically, this little bookstore is very much like a book itself, in that it can't be judged by its cover.

What draws people into the shop is not the outside faáade but rather the warm and inviting atmosphere inside the store. The tall, wooden shelves that fill the small store are stacked with countless colorful, old books. The sounds of classical music resonate against the shelves and rocking chairs are situated between the aisles, inviting people to come in, relax and lose themselves in a good book. Offering literature on subjects ranging from fashion design to technical science, the invitation to get comfortable seems to be extended to almost everyone.

The owners of this small, used bookstore are Mike Vaillancourt, 48, and Bill Thornhill, 53. Since opening 14 years ago, Priceless Books has become a popular place among people in the Champaign-Urbana area.

"What we are trying to do here is create a place where intellect can be refreshed," said Vaillancourt. "We want it to be a place where people can come to talk to other people who are interested in books."

"I hope," Thornhill added. "It's a place where people can come in and find things that they couldn't find in other bookstores."

Vaillancourt and Thornhill were born in Connecticut and Rhode Island, respectively. The two met while attending graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the early 1980s. While there they discovered a shared passion for the literary word and decided to devote their futures to owning a book store together.

"It's something that both of us had a very strong interest in," said Vaillancourt. "We'd always planned on doing something like this someday. We just really liked books."

That dream came true in 1993, when Thornhill moved to Champaign-Urbana to join Vaillancourt in opening up Priceless Books.

"We knew we wanted to do something in a town like Champaign-Urbana," said Vaillancourt. "You have to be in a college town to survive as a used bookstore, and [Urbana] was just the right size. It has a nice feel for a used bookstore."

Over the years, the store has become popular among the people of CU. Business is fairly balanced between students and residents of the city. University students are attracted by the abundance of cheap scholarly and academic books. At the same time, the stacks of unusual and out of print books have made this bookstore a place of interest among the locals.

"There is a lot of contact between people who like to buy books," said Vaillancourt. "People who buy books tend to talk about them to one another, and I think that is primarily responsible for us keeping in the public eye around here."

That same contact between readers is responsible for keeping Priceless Books in business. The majority of the books that line the shelves are sold or donated to the bookstore by the people of Champaign-Urbana.

Yet for a store that deals with the old and used, Priceless Books is attune to the future of book sales. Almost half the business the store gets is from online purchases.

"[Online sales] are almost necessary to survive as a used bookstore these days because so many people don't even leave their homes when they want to buy books," said Vaillancourt. "You don't get as much in-store traffic as you did four or five years ago."

Despite this, Vaillancourt and Thornhill still enjoy seeing people come into the store, for the joy in their work comes from being able provide people with just the book they need.

"Ideally [a book] could change people's lives," said Thornhill. "It can teach them something of which they don't know, or teach them more about something they would like to know more about."

"A good book can suggest possibilities that the person who is reading it has never imagined before," said Vaillancourt. "It opens up one's horizons, an important thing that one can get out of reading."