The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap (19 page)

First, they wondered if a used book store could hold its own against those giant (one could say Amazonian) Internet book retailers.

Yes, we answered—firmly—and secondhanders will stand strong for years to come, because physically entering a used bookshop is charming. Fantasy authors Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman created L-space to explain libraries. These magical buildings house more than the sum of their parts while time warps, bends, and refracts heedless of nature’s laws. Bookstores have that and more. In B-space, book-lined walls buffer against the world’s bustling while browsing calms the soul and satisfies the mind.

People pop into our store daily, saying, “A few minutes to kill, so thought I’d look around.” They’re not going to buy anything; they just want to pull some peaceful, book-scented air through their lungs. We’re glad people think of us that way. Human beings breathe slower in a bookstore. Secondhand book stores are full of enticing displays, polished brass, and fresh-brewed coffee smells. Bookshops assault the senses in a happy way.

Big chain booksellers often do cute and clever things like set tiny overstuffed wing chairs in the children’s area, or outline bodies in the mystery section. Small shops don’t always have room for such displays, although I have seen many a Halloween jack-o’-lantern reading on a mom-and-pop’s front step. In our shop, we put a wine bottle on top of the theology shelf—ha-ha—and my aunt’s silver tea service over literature. And at Christmas, a lighted reindeer with his head down graces the front lawn, a pair of large cardboard glasses perched on his snout, his nose literally buried in a giant picture book. People look for him every year, pointing Rudolphus (as he is known in the neighborhood) out to relatives and visitors.

Reindeer continuity aside, used book stores have the distinct advantage of being unknown quantities. Consumers eat at McDonald’s because, in Istanbul or Iowa, they know what they’re going to get. People investigate preloved book shops because they
don’t
know. How often do we have the chance to go treasure hunting in today’s world? I like to think of B-space as the slow-food movement for bibliophiles. We like lives replete with ideas and time to think about them. Don’t serve us fast-food, bread-padded, watered-down versions of reading material. We want the good stuff and we will take our time to get it.

Bill Peace visits us like clockwork every two weeks, as he has done since our opening day. Bill is the inventor of the “military shuffle.” He enters the store and starts at shop right, working his way title by title up and down the shelves around to the next room’s door, until the entire perimeter is secured. Then he examines the middle shelves from right to left. Finishing one room, he crosses to the next and repeats the pattern, eventually covering the whole store with his slow, deliberate steps. In his time, Monsieur Peace has bought Christian fiction, books on educational theories, World War II history, a seafood cookbook, several Westerns and war thrillers, a paranormal romance, and some science fiction. He’s the kind of guy who would drive Amazon crazy, because their software can’t pinpoint his profile well enough to suggest things he might buy. The cookies crumble when trying to pigeonhole a reader like Bill.

One day while ringing up his books, Jack said something about Bill’s eclectic tastes. Bill shrugged. “I like what I like, and what I like is to like what I read,” he said.

Jack laughed, and Bill clapped him on the shoulder. “’Sides, at my age, I don’t really care what other people think. I ain’t reachin’ for no big brass ring in the middle. I’ve done my time, I’ve done my duty, and now I’m gonna sit in my house with my wife and read what I want, when I want.” Exit Bill Peace, carrying his bag of miscellaneous supplies for a retirement well lived.

Truth be told, Bill is the kind of reader we dreamed about, back when we started. He is a reader’s reader and a delight to watch, going ’round the corners at precise angles with that bearlike gait, bending and straightening as he runs his eyes up and down the shelves, spine by spine. He’s so thorough that he takes hours. One winter’s night we actually closed the shop at 6
P.M.
as usual, thinking everyone was gone—only to have him appear as I was setting the table for supper.

“I’ll take these,” he said, materializing suddenly from our mystery and thrillers room, holding out a couple of medieval whodunnits. I choked on a little “whoop” of surprise and nearly dropped the plates, but Bill didn’t even notice. Jack rang up his purchases, opened the door for him, and turned on the porch light. To this day, I’m not certain he knows we locked him in.

Bill is not the only customer whose tastes vary, or whose enjoyment of the shop has as much to do with ritual and relaxation as with finding a book. My friend Jenny, from the bookstore’s writing group, comes in now and then for a cuppa, and after we’ve talked a while, she goes into “the routine.”

Casting her eyes over the shelves in a slow arc, she asks, “Got anything I might like?” in her movie-star languid voice, and I’ll haul down a couple of novels or memoirs. Completely unlike Bill in her approach to book shopping, Jenny also has fairly eclectic tastes; she loves not only most of Joan Didion’s books, but also Tom Perrotta’s
Little Children—
which I hurled across the room around the third chapter. In fact, we joke that if I hate it, Jenny will like it—unless it’s a memoir. We both adored
The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
and
The Geography of Love,
and laughed our way through
Mennonite in a Little Black Dress.
But we stay off each other’s fiction lists. We want to remain friends.

From Jenny’s casual eye sweep to Bill’s deliberate steps, people cruise our shop expecting the unexpected. They know that bookshops are magic, and books are the road maps by which misfits find each other.

As former residents of Edinburgh, we once took friends from Spain on an all-day ramble through every used book store in the city (nine at the time), returning exhausted but happy with four bags to lug on the train. Not even speaking the same language, we trundled up Edinburgh’s medieval closes and down its back alleys, handling volumes musty and fresh, our Spanish friends communicating by gesture with the shopkeepers who guarded these treasure troves. Years later, looking back on that trip, I know we couldn’t have had any deeply meaningful conversations because we shared no common language. Yet I remember vividly what we talked about: literary themes from European folktales common to Spain and the British Isles. We compared heroes and villains and motifs, discussed why witches show themselves in daytime England but nighttime Spain, pitted the Irish giant Cuchulain against the Spanish Caravinaigre.

Bookshops are magic.

Big-name box bookstores have installed cafés and armchairs precisely because people like to hang out around books. Next time you’re in one of those cavernous megasellers, see for yourself how they’ve worked to create ambiance. Look at the shelf placement, how they’ve been arranged to mark off cozy little reading nooks. Somebody’s tried very hard to make you forget you’re in a warehouse.

Fine, said our killjoy friends who stop in from time to time to explain why we’re doomed. So a bricks-and-mortar store still works. Now what about iPads and Kindles and Nooks?

Shut up, we responded. And pass the wine.

Actually, that’s not how we feel about e-books. What’s so horrible about e-readers, anyway—either the devices or the humans who use them? I’m a big fan of literacy in any form, digital pulse or printed pulp. Why should e-books spark an either-or division among readers? Couldn’t there be room in our futures for both paper pulp and electronic pulse?

I first had an e-reader in my hand about eight years before they hit the American market, when I lived in Britain and worked with recovering addicts. About a third of the guys in the “rehab-instead-of-jail” program were dyslexic. (Did you know that dyslexia affects one out of ten people in the United States and Europe, but that one in four convicts is dyslexic? Think about it a sec.)

E-readers offered a “cool” way to engage these lads on the topic of reading in the first place; while Dick and Jane were neither hip nor happening, having one’s hands on any electronic device was. Add to that the promise of a laptop loaner if they read an entire e-book, and those boys had big incentives to write some of the most interesting reviews I ever read. My favorite remains a young man who compared Captain Ahab to his former drug supplier: “They both just concentrated on what they wanted and didn’t care who got hurt.”

So, e-readers, eye readers, what’s the difference? Reading is good for us, and if gleaning words from a computer screen is a little harder on the eyes and softer on the brain (as studies are beginning to suggest—something about screens not stimulating the correct eye muscles to make us think, so instead we remain passively observant; the same disconnect happens when watching television), at least it’s still words, not pictures.

Here’s the thing Jack and I have observed from our perch above the electronic fray: books aren’t just words. They’re objects with specific, physical, desirable properties. I asked a friend with two daughters what books meant to her family, and she waxed eloquent for a full two minutes on their properties: “literal sponges for our tears and muffles for our guffaws; conveyors of knowledge; the hard evidence of our studies; sharing in an adventure or an illness; and companionship with as many other people as there are copies sold.”

We let that rest for a moment, sipping our coffee, then Tonia laughed. “And I don’t know if you want to hear this, but my daughters built a castle out of books for their dolls. They made the walls and the roof and the steps up to it, all from books. And they made a book garage at the back for the princess to park her pony and her sports car.”

Try that with a Kindle. The pony would do unspeakable things to the interface circuitry.

When we started our shop, we couldn’t bear to think a single physical volume should ever be thrown away; that reticence birthed the free book section on our front porch. Surrounded by a bunch of old Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and
The Guinness Book of World Records
from the 1980s, we stuck them out there hoping someone would want them. Yet as time went on, and we saw just how many geriatric tomes lumbered into Tales of the Lonesome Pine, their information, ideologies, or inspirational power corroded by time, we pitched a box here or there into a Dumpster—never without a wee twinge. They deserved respect for their contribution, after all; we would never treat people or pets that way in their old age.

But they kept coming, the books no one wanted. Even though we flat-out told people we didn’t deal in rare or old books, our shop still attracted a lot of older volumes in poor shape, scribbled in with ink or otherwise too damaged to be considered true antiques. We never have figured out what to do with these “old dears,” as Jack calls them. We displayed a couple of 1900s textbooks on raising children just because people found them so charming. One depicted (complete with illustrations) how to build a “baby cager,” a device like a playpen that hung from a window so Baby could safely get fresh air. (The book highly recommended these cages for those in walk-up tenements: “economical and efficient for the busy mother who must do her own housework.”) Another tallied the cost of raising a boy against raising a girl. Believe it not, gentle readers, boys were more expensive, because parents had to factor in college. The beautifully embossed, leather-covered
Light at Eventide: A Book of Poetic Comfort for the Aged
went to Isabel for a birthday ending in a zero. The poems ran heavily to sunsets and angels folding their snow-white wings. (Isabel didn’t speak to me for three days, but I think she secretly liked it. It was a very pretty book…)

Although it may be borderline apostasy to treat these linen-and-leather tomes with less dignity so late in their great and far-reaching lives, I must admit that they make great gag gifts. When our photocopier godmother Teri gave birth to a boy after three girls, we sent her
The Boy and His Daily Living,
published in 1908 (the one with the “boys go to college, girls do not” costs list). Olivia, our writing group coordinator’s daughter, received a copy of
Light on Dark Corners - A Complete Sexual Science and a Guide to Purity and Physical Manhood - Advice to Maiden, Wife, and Mother, Love, Courtship, and Marriage
on the occasion of her seventeenth birthday. (Her parents were not so very amused, and you really don’t want to know what this 1897 book suggested about the morals of girls who went to co-ed colleges.)

But by the time we’d been running a few years, books that had seen their fifteen minutes of fame rise and fade were turning into craft projects: angels for Christmas trees, flying mobiles of birds, crudely fashioned twisted-paper statues of literary scenes, even experiments with making our own pop-up books. I made a couple dozen purses, and still carry mine, crafted from a 1935 book called
Earning and Spending the Family Income
(a helpful tome that explained what I should do with my husband’s paycheck when he brought it home and turned it over to me). Support columns for end tables. Shelves. Planters. Jewelry boxes. It’s amazing how superglue and nails can transform a useless object (and there it is, folks, spelled out in black and white) into a piece of art.

Bibliophiles recognize that books are not just ideas trapped between covers, but artifacts, mile markers on our life journey. “I think of my bookshelf as a trophy of accomplishment,” said an academic friend of mine. “I look at their spines and remember where I was when I read them, and what I got out of them. And I have a side of the room for books I’m going to read, and a side for books I’ve read. So I can revisit old friends, or try something new.”

My friend John shared a house, a dog, and a cat with me when we lived in Newfoundland during our graduate studies. He laughed at the idea that “the book is dead and only the information is important. So say people who like digital media. I still organize my life according to a microgeographic model wherein I know what I know based upon what the piles I’ve made contain. Plus my cats like to sleep on certain books, which is how I know they’re important. Cats have historically been hoarders of useful information.”