Owner fondly recalls being both 'bookstore on the road' and a 'listening ear' for customers

DEARBORN — “People came to us when they needed a book,” remembers Dennis Klotz Sr., owner of the Catholic Book Store in Dearborn.

Klotz recently announced the 77-year-old bookstore, which was formerly located in downtown Detroit, will close May 23.

“(A) specialty of ours was finding hard-to-get things for people,” Klotz said of the store that opened in 1937, “especially with our knowledge,” which is increasingly rare in the culture of Internet searches and less personal book suppliers, he said.

Despite its accessibility to the community, the brick-and-mortar Catholic Book Store struggled to compete with the online sales of many items it sold.

“The primary reason of the closure is because of the Internet sales,” Klotz told The Michigan Catholic. “Amazon, e-books; and we just couldn’t continue. We just could not match those discounts.”

The closure is bittersweet as Klotz and his bookstore team members Neal Kotlarek and Dennis Klotz Jr. plan to close their doors for good because of the wonderful experiences with the local Catholic community over the years.

“All of us here would like to thank the many folks — both archdiocesan employees and departments, and the people of the archdiocese — for their continued support for many, many years,” Klotz said.

Longtime dedication

Klotz studied culinary arts in college, but had gained three years of book knowledge from working at Alba House in Dearborn. He applied to work for the Catholic Book Store in 1978, “and they hired me immediately.”

Combined, he has had 38 years of book experience. “You don’t find too many people that have been in the book business that have stayed that long,” he said, adding the majority of his knowledge was gained on the job.

“It was really exposure to people and getting to know what their needs are, and kind of filling those gaps,” he said.

Klotz, who purchased and became owner of the Catholic Book Store in 1992, credited the earlier work of the Sisters, Home Visitors of Mary, a religious order in Detroit that ran the store from 1963-73.
“The sisters really did a beautiful job,” he said.

For a number of years the store was the textbook supplier for Sacred Heart Major Seminary, and also shipped textbooks to several overseas seminaries in South Africa, Central America and South America.

Besides simply books, the store offered many other religious items for the community.

“We were the only bookstore that sold sacramental wine,” Klotz said. “I started that 25 years ago, and that’s something that you’d normally get from a church goods place. It was a nice little staple item to have for a pastor to come in, a religious order to come in.”

His son, Dennis Klotz Jr., who works in the store’s sales department, said from the specialty rosaries to the olive wood crucifixes from the Holy Land, “that’s not the kind of quality you can find just any place.”

The bookstore was also the sole distributor of “Make Straight the Path: A 300-Year Pilgrimage, Archdiocese of Detroit” coffee table-sized book celebrating the archdiocese’s 300th anniversary in 2001.

Bookstore on the road

Anyone who has brought the Catholic Book Store to a parish, speaking engagement or archdiocesan event has probably encountered the legendary boxes.

“We were very well known for those boxes; it’s just part of what we packed on a weekly basis,” said Klotz. “We would average six parishes a weekend; we would take a sampling of our books and religious articles.”
Kotlarek said they would “travel all over the place with those boxes.” “We really put a high value on customer service,” he said. “If people called and needed something, we would run it out that instant. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to customers’ homes with books or religious articles, or a church that needed something immediately.”

Klotz said they were “the bookstore on the road” and would joke that they lived out of boxes, but that it was “a real treat and a real service to the thousands of people that we saw in a weekend.”

Fr. James Bilot, pastor of Divine Child Parish in Dearborn, said the Catholic Book Store visited their parish for many years.

“Dennis has always been so gracious to come here,” Fr. Bilot said. “I know he loves the Church. He put his heart into his business and was always accommodating and caring.”

“It’s sad that the business is closing,” he added.

For Klotz Jr., traveling all over the archdiocese gave him the opportunity to see numerous churches and many terrific speakers: “It had a very profound effect on me in my faith, and it was a real blessing to be a part of that.”

“Most times, depending on where you are, you may only see one or two churches,” he said. “But we’ve seen pretty much all of them.”

But frequently, the community came to the bookstore as well. At both the Detroit and Dearborn locations, Klotz said people would often visit the store “just to want to talk to us.”

Sometimes, someone would come in after a troubling life event, “and we were here to listen and try to maybe help them with a book.”

“I would say that we were a listening ear for many people on a daily basis,” Klotz said.