The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap (15 page)

Jack once commented, “It is the sole thing about running this shop that I have come to dislike, pricing the same old genres of romances and thrillers every day.” While sorting boxes can be poignant, or even fun if they have surprises in them—say, a beautiful hardback of Asian love poetry, a collection of essays on the Harlem Renaissance, even the occasional cult classic novel—battered lots of old thrillers are by far the most common trade-in.

The trade books arrive in unpredictable clumps, some days none, other days literally hundreds. Sometimes Jack and I wake to a front porch brimming with books left as donations, no name or number on a slip of paper anywhere, just boxes and bags stacked along the railing. We joke, when yet another set of 1970s World Book Encyclopedias blocks our front door, that a desperate mother could no longer feed them. “Please look after these books; thank you.” (If you didn’t read
Paddington Bear
growing up, that’s not going to mean anything to you, but it’s not too late; the beloved little guy’s antics are still in print.)

A sign to the left of our porch door indicates anything on that side is free for the taking. That’s where we put those in bad shape, dated in their appeal, or otherwise past prime. One rain-spattered dull morning, Jack opened the door, used his toes to nudge around inside a plastic sack someone had slung there in the night, discerned it full of Danielle Steel and Mary Higgins Clark hardbacks, and pushed the whole bag across to the free side with his foot before shutting the door again.

In bookselling, as in life, some days are better than others.

The Luv Shack, as we call the outbuilding that houses romances, provided some fun days, although it came to us under difficult circumstances. About three years after we opened, a friend who shall remain nameless got the left foot of fellowship from her church. (Sometimes personality just overrides community in a tiny congregation.) Complicating the situation was that our friend ran a part-time business in the church hall, complete with a large and sturdy storage shack—wooden beams six inches thick—at the back of the property.

“Move it or lose it,” ordered a letter, which hinted that the church might retain the building should it still be there after a certain period of time. Dander was up, anger flying, and righteous indignation flamed as only small-town churches can provoke. Our friend offered us the shed if we would haul it off.

Free shed, assembly required, sounded good to me, but Jack had to do the work of disassembling and rebuilding it. Plus, we weren’t sure how the church members—many of whom we knew as shop regulars—felt about the whole thing. Jack looked at me. I looked at the overflowing romance shelves, paperbacks dribbling in piles across the shop floor. Jack sighed, and prepared his toolkit.

A pickup truck, two guy pals, three days, and four large pizzas later, we christened The Luv Shack. Three thousand romance novels graced its interior the next day. We put up a sign,
LUV SHACK: ROMANCE(S) LIES WITHIN, 3 FOR $1
, and toasted this shrine to the failings and foibles of earthly love. As soon as I find a good one, I’m going to put a lifesize cardboard cutout of Elvis Presley in there and hang paper doves from the ceiling.

Bad beginnings can turn redeemable. The Luv Shack soon reinforced our faith in the innate well-meaning-ness of humanity. The shed doesn’t lock. Sometimes we came home from a Monday ramble (the shop’s closed day) to find a dollar bill clipped to our mailbox. Checking the phone messages after an evening out, I heard a female voice say, “Look under the little mouse statue on your front porch. Y’all weren’t open, but I shopped in your shed.” Three dollars nestled ’neath the mouse’s bum. That sort of thing happens all the time. We told the friend who donated the Luv Shack, and she laughed, then struck a pose, one finger in the air. “The Lord worketh in mysterious ways, belief in humanity to re-establish-eth,” she intoned.

We’re just glad she’s feeling better about the whole thing. Like most small-town dustups, the squabble blew over, and the Luv Shack still graces our front yard, enticing romantics from every walk of life, testimony to the power of redemption.

Most people are polite, honest, and kind. Raised right, they’re just happy to have a place to trade in books they’ve read for ones they haven’t. Unfortunately, even the simplest precepts of human decency can get a little muddled after a garage sale. Not often, just once or twice per summer, a savvy sale-holder brings in his or her unsold stuff—still bearing homemade price tags in the fifty-cent range—and turns into a guerrilla bargainer before our eyes, demanding three dollars in trade credit per dog-eared paperback.

Every secondhand shop encounters its odd handful of price warriors, but the poster child for the book clan has to be the Nancy Drew Lady. On a summer afternoon, a woman in her mid-fifties, sporting bottle-red hair in a short curly perm, pink framed glasses, and a pleasant smile, brought in her yard sale leftovers. One glance, and my heart sank. By this time I knew enough about the book business to understand where we were headed.

She had a whole box of Nancy Drews with paper dust jackets, and unfortunately for her, she had put masking tape stickers on them specifying a quarter each. Usually we get the yellow spines of the seventies book clubs, or even the sturdy pink ex-library copies that generations of girls recognize and love from school. Those jacketed volumes with the masking tape that couldn’t be removed safely were early—if not first—editions, but the tape would tear that lovely soft old paper the instant we tried to remove it.

The woman also had the Dana Girls in lavender dust jackets, which suggested they could be first editions as well. Both Dana and Drew were Stratemeyer Syndicate productions. The Syndicate created the pseudonym Carolyn Keene in 1930 and used ghostwriters until the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series closed in 2004. Dana Girls started in 1934, penned by Leslie McFarlane, a man who wrote the first four Danas before stating—as the publishing world’s legend has it—that he preferred starvation to writing another. He then moved on to authoring several Hardy Boys and a film-writing career in Canada.

The Nancy Drew Lady didn’t know what she had, evidenced by the price stickers adorning those pretty—and valuable—covers. Alas, almost nothing in the book world is valuable with masking tape on it.

I tried to break it to her gently. “Sell many of these today?”

“About a dozen,” she responded, plunking the box on the table. “Little girls filling out their collections, mostly.”

“Mmm.” That seemed sweet and innocent as an observation on her part. She was a nice lady. I had a good idea of what was about to happen—for some reason, the nicer they are, the harder they fall—so I double-checked the price online before taking the plunge. “Well, these Nancy Drews could be worth a bit.”

Her eyes came alight.
Uh-oh.
“Really? How much?”

“Not that this is what they would sell for around here, but one Web site has them at twenty-two dollars per title. But the masking tape—”

I stopped under the force of her stare. Her mouth flew open as her gaze shifted to the box. I’d seen this Jekyll-Hyde flip many times. My lips formed the words alongside her as she said them aloud. “I sold them for twenty-five cents each.”

Jack emerged from the mystery room at that moment, and frowned at me. My husband, a gentle soul from the Old World, considers mimicking customers bad form. He is much, much nicer than I am.

“Well”—I lined the oft-delivered words up on the runway—“you couldn’t guarantee that they’d sell at that price anyway. In fact”—I segued smoothly into the second half of the bad news—“antique books don’t do well in this area. We’d sell these at three dollars each, the going price for Nancy Drews around here. Our clientele would be a lot like yours: little girls and their grandmothers, filling out their collections.” I wouldn’t bother explaining again about the masking tape undermining antique status.

The lady swiveled to face me. “You mean you wouldn’t give me full value?”

Sure, twenty-five cents.
Aloud I said, “If you mean eleven dollars trade credit, no. That’s what an urban collector would have paid.”
Before the masking tape.

Her look sharpened. “I meant twenty-two dollars.”

My husband, making tea in the kitchen, chuckled. So much for heart-of-gold Old World gentility.

“We don’t deal in antique books. You might try taking them to an antique shop or book dealer.” I continued smiling, polite and subservient. The antiques guy could talk to her about masking tape.

“How much commission would they charge me?” Her voice cracked like a whip.

“I’m not really up on antique selling. I’d recommend you call someone in the business and ask.”
How should I know, lady? Besides, they’ve got masking tape on them!!!
My patience ebbed. I made a conscious effort to deepen my smile, but it probably looked like growling.

She didn’t notice. “Hmm. This doesn’t seem fair. If they’re worth twenty-two dollars each, and I leave them with you, I’d only get eleven dollars in trade credit.”
No you wouldn’t,
I opened my mouth to say, exasperated beyond diplomacy, but she was in full-throttle steam-propulsion mode. “That’s not realistic. What about a 10 percent commission?”

“Ma’am, there is no market for antique books in this area. We don’t sell them.”
What part of no didn’t you understand?

Her face clouded darker than a thunderstorm. “Why not?”

Oy vey. But I gave her the reasons—well, most of them. “We have a limited amount of space. People interested in old books are usually from out of town, not our regular clientele, and we can’t predict their interest with any regularity. We can’t afford to take chances on selling antiques in a store that doesn’t have long-term climate control for them. They’re a specialty market, like on eBay.”
MASKING TAPE!!!

Oops. I spilled the e-word. As her face brightened, I knew what she would ask. Sure enough, behind a bookshelf where she couldn’t see him, my husband lip-synched along with her. “Could you sell them for me on eBay?” He cracked up silently at the perfection of his foreknowledge as she continued, “You can keep”—her eyelids and fingers fluttered as she did rapid math—“three dollars per book.” She gave me a triumphant yet calculating look. “That’s what you would have charged anyway.”

Oh, she
was
listening. My husband sipped a mug of tea and raised his eyebrows at me. I stared hard at the mug and sent brain waves for him to pour me one and add a little brandy.

“Unfortunately, eBay doesn’t always yield prices sellers might expect. We’ve done that in the past and not gotten what people anticipated. Just because AbeBooks—that’s a Web site for antique books
[don’t go there, my mind shouted]
—says twenty-two dollars doesn’t mean they’d sell for that, and whether they sell or not, there’s still a cost to list them, so we’ve stopped doing commissions. But of course you can list them yourself.” I tried to keep a rising note of hope from my voice. Maybe she’d leave now.

She turned a face deep in calculation toward me. “I can’t do eBay; my husband won’t let me.”

No fool, he.

“Tell me how I could best realize the full value of these books,” she commanded, placing a proprietary hand on her box of masking-taped golden opportunity. A small cloud of dust rose. She snatched the hand away.

From the kitchen, my spouse muttered, “Open your own bookshop.” I sneezed as the dust reached my nose, so she didn’t hear him. Nobody in town would have believed it anyway. My husband is a saint. I’m the one who loses my cool. Weakly, I repeated that she should visit an antique dealer. Exit the lady, Nancy Drews under one arm. She left a crate of Harlequins for trade credit.

So it isn’t all sweetness and sympathy. You really have to like people to run a used book shop, or you’ll wind up smacking somebody.

C
HAPTER 13

Running an Unlicensed Intellectual Pub

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.

—Henry David Thoreau,
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack River

G
UERRILLA BARGAINERS WERE SIMPLY ANNOYING
, while we’d come to a compassionate understanding of bereavement and book clearance. But we hadn’t yet seen how bookstores connected to house fires and prisons, or understood how often people would want to tell us about family feuds and other personal matters. Had we known about these elements before setting up shop, I might have dashed out to beg my way into a psychology course first. For most things in life, there’s common sense; for everything else, there’s a graduate program.…

One of our favorite bookshops back in Scotland sat above an Indian restaurant. In addition to the lovely Madras and Vindaloo smells wafting up, Betsy, the proprietor, could have been ordered from a catalog of stock-and-trade colorful local characters. A small round woman with white hair and a posh Edinburgh accent, Betsy often told us, years before we opened our own shop, that browsing was a special pleasure customers looked forward to in a bookstore. She said that “a used book store operator is many things: counselor, literary critic, research guru, manager, shelf stocker, cleaner, coffeemaker, child protective services agent, custodian, and, oh yes, salesperson. So wait until the customer tells you what’s needed; maybe all they want is a browse. If they want something else, they’ll make it clear to you.”

We found Betsy’s advice invaluable in later years. One day a new customer entered the store, looked around a few minutes, then walked up to Jack and launched the following conversation:

PERSON:
Wow, cool, a bookstore! How long y’all been here?

JACK:
About two years—

PERSON:
Wow, what kind of accent is that?

JACK:
Scottish. I’m from—

PERSON:
Wow, cool! My family’s from Ireland. I’m gonna visit there someday. Tell me about Ireland.

JACK:
Well, I’m not—

PERSON:
I hear it’s beautiful.