Get your change from muffin tin

Originally published Saturday, September 26, 1998

By NEIL MODIE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Vicki and Mike Elledge moved to Duvall in 1970 from North Seattle, where Mike had been a boat builder and Vicki a nurse.

The Elledges built a 35-foot trimaran and intended to sail around the world. But every time they went to sea, they got seasick. So they sold the boat, spent six months buying up books at garage sales with the proceeds, and in 1976 opened Duvall Books.

They now stock about 40,000 books -- "good books, a little bit of everything," says Vicki Elledge. The browser's paradise and town hangout is resolutely low-tech: It has no phone and no cash register. The cash box is a muffin tin.

Elledge has mixed feelings about Duvall's growth, which she says "is out of control" and has turned her town into an increasingly expensive bedroom community.

She acknowledged, though, that the laid-back, locally owned, small-town downtown seems to coexist peaceably with the new, suburbanite population oriented toward Eastside job centers and shopping malls.

Elledge suggests it's because town officials and the local chamber of commerce "found the monetary value of having an Old Town . . . . Traffic is pretty impossible these days. Parking is pretty impossible. But (the growth) has probably increased business."