The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap (28 page)

“When you think about it, we’ve visited more than thirty bookstores, so one of them had to be a duffer,” Jack said as we sped away from Fulton Avenue Books to Bookmart.

Which was also a porn shop.

“No way,” Jack said, staring at the sign.

Please note: my beloved is usually far more articulate than “urk” and “no way.” His speechlessness is a sure sign of how deeply startled we were.

“Let’s get out of this town,” I said, and we floored it, leaving behind two more shops that shall never be explored by the Beck-Welch team. Probably at least one was run by a sweet little old lady with a resident cat, who would have been knitting a sweater (the lady, not the cat). We left Pornsville at 70 mph, passing some incredibly large and beautiful newly built houses. In any economy, they would have stood out, but in recession times?

“This will be the porn king and his children,” Jack said, and at that precise moment, an ornate sign overhead announced
FUQUAY AVENUE
.

Jack laughed so hard I thought he would asphyxiate.

The Booking Down the Road Tour ended back at our own dear little bookstore in Big Stone Gap, where we rested up and thought about what we’d seen, learned, and enjoyed. We covered 2,690 miles (on just four tanks of gas, thank you!) saw four old friends, made several new ones, and bought forty-two books. We ate at two restaurants that were chains and shopped in Walmart once, because we had no other choices. (Which is kind of chilling, when you think about it.)

What did we learn? That people who follow their own dreams and do what’s in front of them—build, paint, renovate, stock, defy, buy, sell, and smile—are still standing, while those who wait for permission, or guarantees, or help from someone else, disappear fairly quietly into that good night. One small town we visited in Tennessee stands out as an example; not only was the bookstore we went there to visit closed down, but the pottery painting place that had replaced it was also shut for good. Meanwhile, the town’s planners are pinning their hopes on reopening the old theater as an entertainment center. All the eggs, as it were, are in one grant-funded basket. What if some of that funding had been channeled to local businesses, as the now-rather-embittered merchants had asked? Likewise, the owners of a general store in a town not so far away had self-published a book about their area’s infamous Scopes Trial, believing they would be supported by the local tourism industry. Instead they found themselves pretty much on their own in moving the stock.

Several of the booksellers we met had stories about their town’s business associations proving to be what George Orwell might have called “doubleplusdishelpful.” (If you haven’t read his dystopian
1984
yet, that’s the language of Big Brother’s government—and what many of us found when we tried to turn our dreams into permit applications.)

On the road trip, Jack and I learned that a lot of very capable people who are comfortable in their own skins live in these United States, doing their day-to-day deeds while enjoying what life brings. And we learned that east or west, home looks much better than we thought. Settling back into the store, we implemented some of the cool things we had seen in various shops—hanging signs from the ceiling saying which books were where, putting wheels on shelves so they could be moved to create more floor space for events, and other practical touches.

We also started a network with many of the people we met, connecting on social media and via e-mails. And we thought about what we’d seen. Is small-town America closing? Well, in large measure, yes. But when it’s not closing, it’s because someone with a vision and a brain got busy. Often it was just an individual who did what seemed best—whether that was investing his life’s savings into a beautiful downtown building and anchoring a shopping block, as Larry did; or Debbie’s buying an aluminum dormer to put atop a concrete slab so her daughter could have a job in Buffalo; or Ron’s reopening his employer’s store as his own, with a new name and a new vision; or Joe’s plastering flyers on all the cars in the Barnes & Noble parking lot. People followed their bliss, but they also worked hard, learned fast, and didn’t take no for an answer. Perhaps that, more than anything else, is what keeps small towns open in America: the tenacity of people who believe in their own abilities.

C
HAPTER 24

Bibliophiliacs Versus Book Snobs

We read books and tell stories to find each other.

—Wendy Welch

O
NE DAY A LADY CAME
in with an older woman in tow. The older woman clutched a baby doll. That should have been a clue, but apparently my brain had the day off. The lady, perhaps in her sixties, pointed to an easy chair near the Christian books. “Sit there and mind your baby and I’ll be ready in a minute.” The older woman perched on the chair and with a vacant smile began crooning to the doll.

Jack approached the younger woman as she browsed Christian nonfiction. “Can I help you find anything?”

“I’m looking for a book about—”

The older woman shot from her chair. “What are you looking for, dear? I’ll help!” she shouted, dropping the doll and lurching forward.

“No, Mama, it’s okay, sit back down.” Her daughter grasped the older woman’s elbows and moved her backward—gently, as if in a waltz—until she reached the chair. “You might fall. Sit with your baby and I’ll be ready in a minute.”

Jack figured it out first. He turned to the mother. “That’s a lovely child you have there. Would you like a cup of tea while you’re waiting?”

“Not too hot,” the browsing woman said, even as her eyes scanned the shelf in rapid strokes.

“Help you find something?” I asked
sotto voce
as Jack and the mom began a conversation with no meaning but lots of volume.

“I’m looking for the latest in that Amish series,” she said, referencing a popular topic for Christian romance writers.

“Wrong section.” I led her to the other side of the shelf. “Where you were was nonfiction. Are you looking for Beverly Lewis or Wanda Brunstetter?” Both write bestsellers in this genre.

Just then her eyes lit up, her hand swooped down, and she snatched a paperback to her chest. “This one!” she exclaimed in triumph, and her mother dropped her conversation with Jack and came loping over.

“Did you hurt yourself?” the older woman half asked, half scolded. “I told you not to run inside the school!”

“Okay, Mommy, please, sit down,” the woman said. Mommy subsided into her chair and began undressing the doll.

“Do you have any Dean Koontz?” the woman turned to me, whispering.

“Yes,” I said, and didn’t move. My brain could not connect someone who read Christian romances set among the Amish with a request for horror; it seemed more like an odd rhetorical question.

The woman stared at me. “Um, miss, I’m kind of in a hurry. Mama won’t wait long.”

“Oh! Of course.” I led the way, embarrassed, to the horror section, and stood there as she ran her finger down the row of titles stacked on the counter. Watching customers browse is a no-no—leave them to it and wait until they ask a question—but shopkeeper etiquette had flown out the window. Behind me, I heard Jack saying, “And here is your tea, madam.”

The browsing woman’s head flew up and she started to say something, but Jack’s voice floated through the doorway in reassurance. “It’s tap water in a paper cup. No worries.”

The daughter gave a smile of radiant sunshine and bent to the Koontz titles again. She selected two as I continued to stare, unabashed. “These three, please,” she said, holding out the romance and the horrors.

“Yes, ma’am.” I shook myself and hurried to the other side of the room where the cash box and receipt book waited. The woman followed.

As I tallied and added tax, she said suddenly, “I guess you know Mama has dementia.”

“I figured it was something like that,” I said.

“Normally I get time to myself once a week when my daughter comes and sits with her, but her daughter’s sick and stayed home from school so she couldn’t come, and I’d been wanting to check this place out—” She indicated the bookstore with a furtive sweep of her hand. “Reading is such a refuge for me. When Mama naps I can lose myself.” She giggled. “I go into another world, like Mama. So I figured I would just run out with her this once. She’s not real steady on her feet, falls a lot.” She glanced to where Jack stood next to her mother, chatting like a professional talk-show host as Mom sipped “tea” from the cup and simpered beneath his flirting.

The woman’s eyes filled with sudden tears, but none fell.

“We’re glad you came in,” I said, meaning two different things, but not knowing how to say the second one. I tried again. “Come back anytime.”

The woman picked up her titles and change, then gave me a conspiratorial smile. “Oh, I’ll be back. I just love Dean Koontz. He takes my mind off things. After everything that happens to the people in his books, maybe my life’s not so bad.” She said that last sentence so fast and low, it was almost as if she hadn’t said it at all. “Okay, Mama,” she said in a louder voice. “Time to go. Got your baby?”

Out the door they went, Mama clutching her daughter’s arm and her doll as they descended our porch stairs in a rhythmic, slow step-shuffle-pause, step-shuffle-pause.

Jack looked at me. I looked at Jack. “I’ll put the kettle on,” he said.

We have learned that it doesn’t do for a bookseller to make assumptions about who reads what. People read for information, for entertainment, for distraction, for status, for a plethora of other reasons. Whatever readers want, books—and the people who sell them—should be able to give it to them.

Honestly, the sense of perspective that a bookstore imposes is life-altering. Try moving a presidential biography ten years later, or the tell-all confessional of a Hollywood madam once her fifteen minutes of fame are up. The people writing for all of us, describing things in a timeless way, endure. The rest are quick flashes of burning-out stars. Their light can indeed burn bright and beautiful, but it’s mercifully brief. Timeless writers endure because, in Alan Bennett’s words from the play
The History Boys,
“The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.”

Or, as Mr. Antolini told Holden Caulfield in
The Catcher in the Rye,
“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”

In the words of Helene Hanff (who wrote
84, Charing Cross Road
) we cry, “Comrade!” when we meet someone we recognize in the pages of a book. Leading storytelling workshops, I often compared the well-told story—written or spoken—to a coloring book; there are guidelines, but you create the details for yourself. A television does most of the work for you; one need not even think, only watch. Some writers are like TVs, but the best ones offer you sovereignty.

Jack says watching a customer meet the right book is like seeing a child who thinks she’s lost on the playground spot her mother. Every book, from the most serious to the weirdest, has a buyer. We once had some tome about the British royal family secretly being a group of reptilians masquerading as humans. (Do
not
get my Scottish husband started on this theme.) I don’t know how it got in the shop, but it sat in—where else—science for a couple of years. Either we missed culling it, or Jack considered it too funny to give up.

In walked Tim (the man who launched our textbook-valuing career). A really nice guy who lives in New England, he’s one of our semiannual regulars. The semiannuals come by mostly during summers and holidays, but also whenever they visit family in the area. Tim trolled the science section, gave a cry of delight, and held up the reptilian royalty book. “I’ve heard about this!” he exclaimed. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d yelled, “Eureka!”

“Oh?” It was the most polite thing that came to mind, and probably beat my first impulse:
Then should I stop thinking of you as a nice guy and be afraid?

“Yeah. My college roommate dated the geek who wrote its girlfriend.” (It took me a minute to decipher that syntax.) “He was a loony bird, but she was nice. So how much is this?”

A book for everyone, and everyone will find the right book. Eventually. Tim had probably been in our shop twice a year for four years before he “reunited” with that creepy tome. The Scots have a saying: “What’s fer ye ’l no gang by ye.” (What’s for you will not pass you by.) After five years in the business, I can say that this includes books.

C
HAPTER 25

On Recommending Books

Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.

—Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure”

B
OOKS ARE NOT JUST THINGS
, but dynamic artifacts, milestones showing where the road took a sudden turn on our individual journeys—our very individual journeys, since a book that changed one person’s life is another person’s dreaded English assignment. There’s no rhyme or reason to what impacts whom except the alchemy of timing, temperament, and title.

The first shelf someone sees when entering our bookstore is local fiction. Gracing its top, tall and silent, stand two marble bookends in the shape of human noses. Between these lies the section we call “Staff Picks.”