The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap (14 page)

Once a young man in camouflage, sporting a buzz cut, carried in a box of books, mostly Christian and female-oriented.
These have to be his wife or girlfriend’s books,
I thought. Did she know he’d brought them? Where was she? Usually people bring in their own stuff, unless … she was dead?

Something must have registered on my face as I bent over a box, turning a women’s devotional Bible—its pink hardback cover bedecked with flower sprigs—in my hands. Without a word, the guy reached past me and pulled out a book:
Keeping Your Marriage Alive.

“Didn’t work,” he said, setting it on the table and reaching down for another:
10 Rules for a Godly Marriage.
“She left me. I was in Iraq, and when I got home, she’d gone off with a guy she met at work.”

That lad saw a box full of memory grenades, not books. And he wanted to redeem them. I priced the lot—giving him a little extra for mental anguish—and entered his trade credit in our big blue ledger. He got about twenty-eight dollars, and I hope he also got a clean sweep.

That’s the basic difference between price and value: one is calculated in dollars, the other in moments of memory. Bookshop owners contribute order and balance to a crazy, tilting world by dealing from the privileged yet precarious position of knowing the difference between these two things.

Jack likened valuing books from deaths and divorces to cleaning out an old junk drawer, wondering over the history of each object. “
For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn
” Hemingway wrote, simultaneously inventing and perfecting flash fiction as a genre. The untold story is often heartbreaking. One just has to get on with things and learn not to internalize the pain of others—otherwise you’d shut down, like Sue Monk Kidd’s character May in
The Secret Life of Bees.
(If you haven’t read it, you should!)

Fortunately, family losses were not the bulk of our trade-ins, and most books didn’t carry such heavy baggage. Bestsellers, for example, tend to zip in and out of secondhand stores with casual emotional attachments and mercurial price changes. They are the one-night stands of the book-selling world.

Say Stephen King’s newest book hits the market at top retail value; six weeks later (give or take) it reaches preloved stores like ours, where customers have left their names on a waiting list. Once the list is satisfied, King’s latest goes on our current bestsellers shelf marked at half the cover price, later migrating to the horror shelf at one third the price. A few more sell, but by then the bestseller has been out awhile. The day comes when a second copy arrives, then a third, yet no one wants to buy them. The golden window closes.

Used book stores require vigilance in keeping up to date on popular books, but they also need consistently excellent public relations. This presents ye olde bookstore owners with a problem. From the customer’s point of view, she paid close to thirty dollars new but got offered seven dollars credit for the King novel at the height of its secondhand desirability, when we’d sell it for fifteen dollars. It gets worse. Eventually the trade value falls to two dollars, then “Sorry, can’t use it,” because multiple copies line the shelves. Will that request-denied customer return? How could we avoid emptying the shop of more sellable titles while not refusing a customer’s trade-ins, if the trade-ins were has-beens?

On this question, the Internet failed me. I scoured secondhand sales sites to no avail. I asked friends who ran bookshops, and they rolled their eyes. “Hardback fiction? That way lies madness.” But they could afford not to stock it; their bookstores sat in metro areas where every customer didn’t have to be treated as a limited, precious commodity. We courted ours within a small pond, one flyer, one conversation, at a time. Refusing books on a regular basis wasn’t an option.

As Winnie-the-Pooh used to say, “It’s hard for a bear of very little brain,” but after a bit of trial and error I created Quick Trades (QT). Bestsellers in multiple copies went to the Quick Trades, a practically unusable closet space in the back of the house, next to the garage, with deep shelves. It had probably been intended for storing camping equipment and car parts; it was a lousy place for books, but since these were going to be free, we figured people wouldn’t mind so much.

QTs swap one for one; it started as two in for one out, but we had so many in just a few months, it became better to simply recycle them. You can only get a Quick Trade for a Quick Trade. We now have so many that customers who spend more than five dollars get a free book from Quick Trades as well, which makes people practically giddy with glee. There’s just something about freebies that appeals to humans.

Meanwhile, people who only read the big names just swap has-been for has-been, and since what is available in Quick Trades depends on the luck of that day, customers often buy from our shelves as well. If someone becomes unhappy for some reason, we use QT to cheer them up: “And we’d like you to have a free book to show our gratitude for bringing that problem to our attention.” During Big Stone’s annual Customer Appreciation Weekend, everyone who entered Tales got a free book, whether they bought anything or not. That generated an interested load of future customers.

The QT shelf continues to be a self-perpetuating wonder. No matter how many books we offload, we still have a shelf full of Quick Trades. Once again, goodwill proved to be low maintenance.

But, like everything else, a balance needed to be struck. Soon after opening we discovered our town had a small gang of disenfranchised Vietnam vets, guys who never came home in their minds. These men mostly lived in an apartment row within walking distance. They popped in fairly regularly, but never took free books from the porch. Such an act appeared to be beneath their dignity. So we started selling them QT books for a quarter here, fifty cents there—a deal we did not offer other customers. Cut ’em some slack; these men fought the war that keeps on giving. They would plunk down a dollar, have the fun of a good browse, and then head home with comic books, torn-cover classics, and duplicate hardbacks of the latest Michael Connelly or John Connolly. We felt good about that.

One day I took some Bibles from the free bin (they went straight there unless scholarly references) and put them in a box marked
BARGAIN BIN, 25 CENTS EACH
. I set this next to the Quick Trades so the vets would be sure to see it. That afternoon one of our regular customers, a special needs lad, came by. He observed the bargain bin and fixed me with a reproachful eye.

“T’ain’t right to charge for a Bible,” he said, scooping up the lot. Cradling them in his arms, he carried his cargo back outside to the free area, spine straight with righteous indignation. Thus ended my career as an interfering do-gooder.

Well, not quite. I began volunteering one day a month at our local library after we “murdered” Chris, the head librarian, at one of our special events. Budget slashed, staff hiring frozen, Chris needed funding. She knew that I understood how to value books, because I’d told her that some of the items on her library’s “For Sale” trolley were worth much more than the one dollar per hardback, fifty cents per paperback she charged. Once I even went to Chris with a book in my hand and said, “If I buy this and take it home, it will sell for ten dollars by nightfall.” But she didn’t have a mechanism in place to value and sell these titles, and she was concerned that the time needed to set it up wouldn’t pay enough dividends on the investment.

When her budget eventually fell low enough to require layoffs, Chris took me up on the offer of help and we established an online selling account for the library. We began checking her surplus inventory and between us got about one hundred books online within a day. The first week, our new project made enough money to catch the attention of her library board, which expressed unbounded enthusiasm. What’s more, this small branch in a rural system became immediate training leaders because the rest of the district wanted to know how she’d done it. In appreciation, Chris offered to plan our next murder mystery: a helpful library volunteer would get bludgeoned to death with a bookend. I don’t know where she gets her creativity.

Our most important rule about pricing books turned out to be “Don’t guess; check.” One of my favorite quotes is by John Kenneth Galbraith: “If all else fails, immortality can be assured by spectacular error.” Nowhere is this truer than in a used book store’s pricing madness.

A while back, the college where I now teach held a book sale. Afterward they offered us the remains for a very low sum, and we hauled three pickup truckloads of books into our front rooms. In the rush to clear the shop floor of musty academic tomes in boxes, we priced one nondescript textbook with the nonenticing title of
The Gendered Society
at four dollars and stuck it on the shelf.

A few months later, this book got moved during a cleanup and Jack valued it on
Half.com
, a useful Web site for checking what others are asking for a title. We usually valued volumes as they came in, but when we got swamped right after that college sale, pricing moved from “I checked” to “I guessed.”

In this case, I guessed wrong; the tome was selling for sixty-five dollars. We sold ours online within the week, but it had been in our shop for three months, a bargain for anyone who knew better.

All booksellers have spectacular mistake stories. I’m not even going to tell you about the day I consigned an autographed copy of Jesse Stuart’s
The Thread That Runs So True
to the free bin. Every used bookseller can repeat this cautionary tale using a different title. The most expensive one we know about personally belongs to our friends Cuz and Jan, who sold an autographed copy of Douglas Adams’s
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
for six dollars—then spotted it on eBay a few days later, bidding up to six hundred dollars. Anywhere used book aficionados gather, stories about “the one that got away” get wilder and more expensive as post-trade-show drinks flow.

Usually the rise and fall of a book’s price is prosaic and allied more with time than emotion. Still, we never forget that books are more than the words on the page. They mark the important moments in our life journeys. One of the boxes from that college book sale held several great titles on British history, all with the same woman’s name inked inside their front covers. Her name also appeared on a few cards and letters stashed between their pages. A notecard in a nonfiction work on the correspondence of sixteenth-century British monarchs held the following: “Hey girl, you’re gonna beat this! You’re strong, smart, and taking good care of yourself. Let’s go to Hawaii next year. Do you think someday scholars will write books about our e-mails?”

In a Philippa Gregory novel and dated some six months later, a handwritten letter read, “So sorry to hear about your troubles, and we hope your health continues to hold. God bless you in the coming year and call us if you need anything.”

The last note appeared on heavy personalized stationery from a senior college official, tucked inside an Elizabethan romance. “Dear X, as you and I both know, waiting in that chemo room is a royal pain. Here’s something I used to pass the time and change the venue a little bit. Regards, Y.” The book sale had raised funds for a scholarship in Professor X’s memory after she succumbed to cancer.

Yes, they are commodities, but we still handle other people’s books with care. There’s a whole lot of life in them—and not just in the words.

C
HAPTER 12

I Dream About Running a Bookstore Someday …

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

—T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

A
LTHOUGH WE TAKE SATISFACTION IN
being a safe place for people to tell their stories, please don’t get the impression that running a bookshop is all bittersweetness and light. Much of it is dusting and heavy lifting.

About two years passed with us flying by the seat of our pants before we finally felt like we had a clue as to what we should be doing. Finally, we more or less understood what the regular tasks of advertising, shelving, valuing, and cleaning entailed—and how bad we were at that last one. Left to his own devices, Jack would use the same drinking glass until it dissolved. He considers taking a bath in the tub tantamount to cleaning it. I’m cleaner but not tidier; clutter follows me like an errant puppy. My shoes and socks tend to rest in little piles wherever my feet grow tired of them. Customers trip over these markers all the time, regulars sidestepping them with a wry smile and the comment “Wendy’s in today, I see.” Jack swears he could track the day’s weather and my path through the shop by which items of clothing have been left where.

Bad housekeeping skills provide scope for creativity, however. Wearing fuzzy socks, I can just skim my toes along the edges of the bottom shelves to pick up the accumulated dog and cat hair. We concocted a get-rich scheme to sell pillows stuffed with the furry staff’s offcuts, but it came to naught.

The day came when we found to our delight that we could afford to hire a cleaning lady. Becky cleaned for two glorious lemon-scented years before health concerns necessitated her turning us over to our current Wonder Woman, Heather. Hiring a cleaner cost almost as much as the shop averages in a day, but Jack and I are both domestically impaired to the point of being a danger to self and society. Besides, Becky and Heather were and are not so much cleaners as bookstore staff good at cleaning; they offered great ideas and advice, treated the place like their own homes, looked after our animals and the shop if we had to run out to do an errand, and generally deserved triple what we could afford to pay them.

Turning the sanitation department over to professionals left Jack and me free to handle the increasing flow of acquisitions. From our first year of terror that we’d never drum up enough stock to fill the shelves, we had flourished to—as Jack puts it—“the point of regret.” We should have been more careful of what we wished for, we realized as each day we sifted through boxes of books, bags of books, miles and stacks and piles of books! And every last one of those little darlings had to be priced and shelved. Just keeping the shop floor clear of trade-ins became a stress factor, because if the boxes and bags got ahead of us, the place resembled less a used book store than a junkyard.