The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap (20 page)

Books are physical objects that cause responses to their tactile dimensions. Sara Nelson, in her memoir
So Many Books, So Little Time,
talked about remembering where she was when she read a book, being transported back to that time and place when she held it in her hands. Even a book’s smell will evoke memories. “A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog’s ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins,” said Charles Lamb (yes, that guy who redid the Shakespeare stories for kids back in the 1800s).

And books can become, when their shelf life truly has ended, objects of art. Perhaps you read about the mysterious and exquisite little sculptures, most crafted from Ian Rankin novels, which graced several book festivals and shops in Britain in 2011? These creations spawned a fashion for similar objects around the world, and one now finds altered books in many artistic poses. I like to think those sculptures gave their host books dignity at the end of their lives, a kind of final promise: when you can no longer be read as an objet d’art a scalpel and some glue will turn you physically into one, and people will continue to admire, appreciate, and enjoy you, oh lovely little book. It seems right and proper. God grant us all such a dignified end.

Books, be they physical objects or electronic pulses, are way cool. They are idea houses. So let those who want to read from machines. Those who love the feel, the smell, the gilt edging and the pretty covers and the soft paper, and the kinetic memories will enjoy the physical objects. Either form can be an artifact. So long as we’re all reading, and gaining joy from it, does it really matter so much?

And yet … it might. E-readers have taken down the big bricks-and-mortar booksellers. Think about it; although this can’t be laid solely at the feet of e-readers, Borders is gone. Waldenbooks is past history, along with Crown and B. Dalton. That pretty much leaves us Barnes & Noble (now the only place where one can buy Nook e-books), Powell’s if you’re lucky enough to live near one, and a few big independent stores, including, in our part of the world, Joseph-Beth in Lexington and Malaprop’s in Asheville.

The demise of larger retails lets a whole bunch of mom-and-pop bookshops stand out in bas-relief against the starker landscape. The more things fall apart when the center cannot hold, the more small-business owners are picking up the pieces and planting them in their own home soil. Amazing though it may seem, the broken bits tend to take ready root and grow.

Estimates from the book industry suggest that one in four U.S. bookstores is secondhand, and that there are more preloved book shops now than ten years ago, perhaps by as much as 10 percent. Some futurists believe that only secondhand book shops will still exist in the next century, the new retailers made redundant by e-readers. That may be true if we turn to reading e-books so totally that print runs stop, and while I hate to see the new-only team so threatened, I’m willing to accept that future bookselling establishments may focus on used, or be amalgams of used and new. Can you imagine a world without bookstores? These aren’t just places where shoppers buy books; they are community hubs, people’s third places. Who will listen to the fire stories, the novel plots, if not booksellers? Will the computer make you a cup of tea?

Jack and I sat down one night and made a list of all the functions our shop served in our region, and realized that, while books anchor our purpose, some of the things we do have only a tenuous connection to them. Four years earlier, Witold had been the first to name us a community center, and he was right. People meet at our place to share activities they like, such as needlework, art films, international infotainments, gourmet meals, lectures on everything from science to politics, game nights, and house concerts.

We’re one of just a couple of places where you can buy a green salad or vegetarian soup in our whole county. And we’re the only place where you can have honest-to-goodness Scottish tea and shortbread. We can afford to serve food that other, bigger restaurants can’t because we don’t rely on food sales for money; it’s supplemental.

Newcomers come by and say, “We just moved here and saw your sign” or, more often, “and so-and-so told me to come down and meet you.” They ask questions, tell us how they’re feeling, talk about what they’re looking for in their new home or job, describe where they came from, and get a cup of tea. We’re an unofficial welcome wagon cum support group for bookish people.

We’re where people can talk. You don’t have to know us, or be known by us, to sit down at the table and tell the story of your mom’s going to the nursing home, recite the poem you’re writing, or disgorge any other story lying heavy within you. We tend to call this being an intellectual pub, but Jack’s pastor friend Tony has another name for it.

Tony drops by at least twice a week for a cuppa and a quiet chat with Jack, but one day he ambled in when the place was a madhouse. We have a customer who has fixated on Jack’s guitar playing; Chuck was following him around like a puppy asking about chords as Jack briskly sorted books that a rather impatient woman we’d never seen before had brought in to trade. One of the Vietnam vets idled his way through a pile of value paperbacks while keeping up a running monologue to which Jack occasionally answered, “Mhmm.” Meanwhile, “Nikki,” a regular customer whose dying sister was married to a schmuck who wouldn’t let anyone visit her, cried softly into her cup of tea as I handed over Kleenex and shortbread, calling the creep husband names all the while. (Nikki and I knew each other well by this point, so she didn’t mind my comments.)

Instead of leaving, Tony poured himself a mug of tea and ambled over to the vet, engaging him in conversation. When the last of this crew had gone and we sat down to the now-stone-cold teapot with Tony, he started laughing. “Y’all are the luckiest people on Earth,” he said. “And this place is a church. No, think about it.” His waving hands negated our exhausted murmurs of dissent. “Churches are where people get fed. That guy [the vet] didn’t have any money and you gave him five books for a dollar. Churches are where people talk about their sadness. That woman cried and you gave her Kleenex and a hug. Churches are places where we connect with God. You’re his hands and feet on Earth. Jack, you let that kid follow you and talk nonstop, and never once lost patience. Y’all are running a church!”

Sure, Tony, whatever. It doesn’t feel like a church, more like a dusty, dog-hairy, 38K-strong collection of objects that have to stay more or less within certain spaces, including a children’s room that gets hit by cyclones at least twice a day. If anyone wants to call it by a nicer name, go for it; we’re just dancing as fast as we can while smiling.

But Tony was right about one thing: even on days when it all seems to be going pear-shaped (that’s Scottish for everything going wrong) we still know we’re blessed beyond reason to be doing what we’re doing.

And, despite the moments of madness like the one above, we are a quiet place to change pace for a few moments. I can’t tell you the number of customers who come in and say they’re waiting for their wife/husband to pick up something at the pharmacy, their daughter/son to get a haircut down the block, their friend who is exercising at the gym next door. Waiting, they stroll around our shelves. They’re not going to buy anything; they just want to be in a cool (or warm) place with quiet music and friendly people. They know they’re welcome. Sometimes people sit at the tea table, not checking e-mails, not using their cell phone, just sitting, legs stretched out in front of them, letting their eyes flick over the shelves, little half smiles on their faces. They’ll point to a book and say, “I read that in college/the army/the year I got married. It changed my life/was the stupidest thing I’d ever read.” And I swear to you—Jack and I have watched this often enough to document it—their breathing changes. It slows down. Their shoulders relax. Their eyes get soft.

E-readers will mess up that intellectual pub/church, soft-eyed slow breathing phenomenon as they reduce the bookstore population. Where are folks going to get the same space in which to relax? Where will those who need to talk be heard in cyberspace? People need their third spaces, and if e-readers get too uppity, they could reduce the number of such safe houses available.

I doubt that e-readers could eliminate the whole herd, though, to mix and mutilate a metaphor. Consider that a predator usually takes down some of the weaker creatures around the edges, not the strong ones in the middle. E-readers, in contrast, seem more likely to kill the strong than the weak. Borders went, but not the little independent shop across town. If the strength of a store rests primarily in its ability to get the best deals by buying bulk and passing those savings on to customers, then it has a problem when the online market opens up cheap and easy acquisition without the middleman or -woman. But if the strength of a store rests in the proprietor’s ability to spend time with each customer, to help them find what they want and match disposable income to adequate pricing, or to just listen to them, well, these are enduring qualities. And except for price matching, they are human qualities.

Store owners—at least until they can be replicated online—are why I think small bookstores will be around even when the last leviathan disappears, harpooned by an e-reader. Physical brick-and-mortar bookshops are watering holes for human intellects and spirits. E-readers and books bought online don’t let you tell the story of why you wanted to buy them. Amazon neither knows nor cares that you want a red-hot romance to distract your friend during chemo; that the book of wedding cake designs you seek is because you’re going to make one for your daughter-in-law-to-be since her parents can’t afford to put on the wedding, but you’ve never made such a thing before and you’re scared to death. Small and independent shop owners care. We’re good listeners. That’s probably because we’re humans, just like the people who shop with us. Perhaps someday computers will be good listeners, too. Hmm; will that make the world more like heaven or hell?

When customers start conversations, be it about their last relationship, their jerk boss, or their aspirations as artists, they are like the people in
Farenheit 451,
living books who must tell you their stories or die. And the book they want to discuss is one that’s written on them, inside them, hidden from the rest of humanity. They don’t want to pontificate on the great themes of literature, but to tell you the great themes of their lives. The personalities of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy are not their target; they want you to understand why their family is a mess. It’s not the process of writing but of being human they explore, explain, question. We’re all of us running the gauntlet from articulate to desperate, Quixotes tilting at our particular windmills, Psyches searching for our one and only Cupid. Perhaps the nicest thing bookstore owners do for the world is not sell people stories, but listen to people’s stories.

When we listen to each other, we validate each other. As near as I can tell, everyone in the world wants and needs validation. Mom-and-pop booksellers are different from the box stores and the computers; because we’re not just selling to be selling; we’re selling to keep the connections between storytellers, storied lives, and story readers active.

And that connection is why we will be—why we must be—standing small and proud in your children’s future. Do you know the Aesop’s fable about the oak and the reed? The oak offered to protect the reed from a coming storm, but the wind cracked the oak at its roots and blew it over. As it floated past, the oak called out how surprising it was that its mightiness had not withstood the storm, yet that wimpy little reed still stood by the side of the river. The reed called back that being small and flexible sometimes proved wiser than being the biggest.

Customers love being treated like individuals almost as much as they love good prices—although if you’ve been to a big-box store lately, you may join me in a growing concern that we as a nation have sacrificed the first for the second. Independent bookstores—be their stock preloved or new—may become thinner on the ground, start selling e-books and sandwiches to make ends meet, have to consider carefully what we ask people to pay … but we’re not dying. We’re not even coughing, just doing what mom-and-pops have done for generations: tracking market trends on the big screen and listening to customer needs in the neighborhood, then flexing to meet them while being polite and human and good listeners.

C
HAPTER 18

Last Cowboy

When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.

—Abraham Joshua Heschel

A
PLEASANT BUT RUGGED MAN
whose name we didn’t know came in every week or two and browsed the Westerns and war section (what we call Guys with Big Guns). One day he emerged with three torrid romance novels that had been misplaced. Set in the Wild West though they were, their author was one of the great bodice-rippers (buckskin-rippers?) of all time. Yet because they’d been stuck in Westerns, this rather manly man bought them happily—something I feel certain he wouldn’t have done had he seen them in romances.

Those particular copies were hardbacks missing their dust covers, so the usual picture of an improbably proportioned redhead bent backward over the supporting limb of (pick one) a tall mustached man wearing a leather vest and chaps/a tall, dark, and bronze bare-chested man wearing feathers and fringed buckskin/a horse wasn’t in evidence. That’s probably why Jack put them in the wrong place. (You didn’t think I was going to cop to that, did you?)

After the customer had gone, we moved more of that author’s books to Westerns, but just those that didn’t have overt romance covers. He bought them all next visit.

The dude was happy; he liked her writing. We were happy; we’d sold several titles from a fairly prolific older author to someone who genuinely liked them without embarrassing our customer. The rush of happy endorphins from matching the right books with the right people fuels bookshop owners; it provides our natural high.