My Bookstore Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2012, 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Cover design by Nicole Caputo

  Cover illustration by Leif Parsons

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10104

  www.hachettebookgroup.com

  www.blackdogandleventhal.com

  Originally published in hardcover in 2012 by Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Inc.

  First trade paperback edition: April 2017

  Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers is an imprint of Hachette Books, a division of Hachette Book Group. The Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  LCCN: 2012287703

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-39507-6 (trade paperback); 978-0-316-36219-1 (ebook)

  E3-20170304-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Martha Ackmann

  The Odyssey Bookshop, South Hadley, MA

  Isabel Allende

  Book Passage, Corte Madera, CA

  Rick Atkinson

  Politics & Prose Bookstore, Washington, D.C.

  Jo Ann Beard

  Oblong Books & Music, Millerton & Rhinebeck, NY

  Wendell Berry

  Carmichael’s Bookstore, Louisville, KY

  Jeanne Birdsall

  Broadside Bookshop, Northampton, MA

  Rick Bragg

  The Alabama Booksmith, Birmingham, AL

  Charles Brandt

  Chapter One Bookstore, Ketchum, ID

  Douglas Brinkley

  BookPeople, Austin, TX

  Liam Callanan

  Boswell Book Company, Milwaukee, WI

  Ron Carlson

  Changing Hands Bookstore, Tempe, AZ

  Kate Christensen

  WORD, Brooklyn, NY

  Carmela Ciuraru

  The Community Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY

  Meg Waite Clayton

  Books Inc., Palo Alto, CA

  Pearl Cleage

  Charis Books & More, Atlanta, GA

  Jon Clinch

  Northshire Bookstore, Manchester, VT

  Mick Cochrane

  Talking Leaves Books, Buffalo, NY

  Ron Currie, Jr.

  Longfellow Books, Portland, ME

  Angela Davis-Gardner

  Quail Ridge Books & Music, Raleigh, NC

  Ivan Doig

  University Book Store, Seattle, WA

  Laurent Dubois

  The Regulator Bookshop, Durham, NC

  Timothy Egan

  The Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA

  Dave Eggers

  Green Apple Books, San Francisco, CA

  Louise Erdrich

  Magers & Quinn Booksellers, Minneapolis, MN

  Jonathan Evison

  Eagle Harbor Book Co., Bainbridge Island, WA

  Kathleen Finneran

  Left Bank Books, St Louis, MO

  Fannie Flagg

  Page & Palette, Fairhope, AL

  Ian Frazier

  Watchung Booksellers, Montclair, NJ

  Mindy Friddle

  Fiction Addiction, Greenville, SC

  David Fulmer

  Eagle Eye Book Shop, Decatur, GA

  Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, MA

  Peter Geye

  Micawber’s, St. Paul, MN

  Albert Goldbarth

  Watermark Books and Café, Wichita, KS

  John Grisham

  That Bookstore in Blytheville, Blytheville, AR

  Pete Hamill

  Strand Book Store, New York, NY

  Daniel Handler and Lisa Brown

  The Booksmith, San Francisco, CA

  Kristin Harmel

  Writer’s Block Bookstore, Winter Park, FL

  Carolyn Hart

  Full Circle Bookstore, Oklahoma City, OK

  John Hart

  Rainy Day Books, Kansas City, KS

  Sheila Heti

  Type Books, Toronto, ON, Canada

  Elin Hilderbrand

  Nantucket Bookworks, Nantucket, MA

  Ann Hood

  Island Books, Middletown, RI

  Pico Iyer

  Chaucer’s Books, Santa Barbara, CA

  Ward Just

  Bunch of Grapes Bookstore, Vineyard Haven, MA

  Lesley Kagen

  *Next Chapter Bookshop, Mequon, WI

  Stephanie Kallos

  Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, WA

  Larry Kane

  *Chester County Book & Music Company, West Chester, PA

  Laurie R. King

  Bookshop Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA

  Katrina Kittle

  Saturn Booksellers, Gaylord, MI

  Scott Lasser

  Explore Booksellers, Aspen, CO

  Ann Haywood Leal

  Bank Square Books, Mystic, CT

  Caroline Leavitt

  McNally Jackson Books, New York, NY

  Mike Leonard

  The Book Stall at Chestnut Court, Winnetka, IL

  Robert N. Macomber

  The Muse Book Shop, DeLand, FL

  Paolo Mancosu

  Moe’s Books, Berkeley, CA

  Jill McCorkle

  Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, NC

  Mameve Medwed

  Porter Square Books, Cambridge, MA

  Wendell and Florence Minor

  The Hickory Stick Bookshop, Washington Depot, CT

  Barry Moser

  Lemuria, Jackson, MS

  Howard Frank Mosher

  Galaxy Bookshop, Hardwick, VT

  Arthur Nersesian

  *St. Mark’s Bookshop, New York, NY

  Kate Niles

  Maria’s Bookshop, Durango, CO

  Ann Packer

  *The Capitola Book Café, Capitola, CA

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Powell’s City of Books, Portland, OR

  Ann Patchett

  McLean & Eakin Booksellers, Petoskey, MI

  Edith Pearlman

  Brookline Booksmith, Brookline, MA

  Jack Pendarvis

  Square Books, Oxford, MS

  Steven Price

  Munro’s Books, Victoria, BC, Canada

  Francine Prose

  Strand Book Store, New York, NY

  Ron Rash

  City Lights Bookstore, Sylva, NC

  Tom Robbins

  Village Books, Bellingham, WA

  Adam Ross

  Parnassus Books, Nashville, TN

  Carrie Ryan

  Park Road Books, Charlotte, NC

  Lisa See

  Vroman’s Bookstore, Pasadena CA

  Brian Selznick

  Warwick’s, La Jolla, CA

  Mahbod Seraji

  Kepler’s Books, Menlo Park, CA

>   Nancy Shaw

  Nicola’s Books, Ann Arbor, MI

  Bob Shea

  R.J. Julia Booksellers, Madison, CT

  Jeff Smith

  The Book Loft of German Village, Columbus, OH

  Lee Smith

  Purple Crow Books, Hillsborough, NC

  Les Standiford

  Books & Books, Coral Gables, FL

  Nancy Thayer

  Mitchell’s Book Corner, Nantucket, MA

  Michael Tisserand

  Octavia Books, New Orleans, LA

  Luis Alberto Urrea

  Anderson’s Bookshops, Naperville, IL

  Abraham Verghese

  Prairie Lights, Iowa City, IA

  Audrey Vernick

  BookTowne, Manasquan, NJ

  Matt Weiland

  Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY

  Stephen White

  Tattered Cover Book Store, Denver, CO

  Joan Wickersham

  The Toadstool Bookshop, Peterborough, NH

  Terry Tempest Williams

  The King’s English Bookshop, Salt Lake City, UT

  Simon Winchester

  The Bookloft, Great Barrington, MA

  Afterword

  Bookstores by Location

  Newsletters

  * These beloved bookstores have closed their doors since the first publication of this book, but we continue to celebrate them through these tributes.

  Introduction

  The first great bookstore in my life wasn’t really even a bookstore. Alvord and Smith was located on North Main Street in Gloversville, New York, and if memory serves, they referred to themselves as stationers. I don’t remember the place being air-conditioned, but it was always dark and cool inside, even on the most sweltering summer days. In addition to a very small selection of books, the store sold boxed stationery, diaries, journals, and high-end fountain and ballpoint-pen sets, as well as drafting and art supplies: brushes, rulers, compasses, slide rules, sketch pads, canvas, and tubes of paint. The shelves went up and up the walls, all the way to the high ceiling, and I remember wondering what was in the cardboard boxes so far beyond my reach. The same things that were on the shelves below? Other, undreamed-of wonders? Alvord and Smith was a store for people who—though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time—had aspirations beyond life in a grungy mill town. It was never busy.

  Because she worked all week, my mother and I ran our weekly errands on Saturday mornings, and Alvord and Smith was usually our first stop. There, I’d plop down on the floor in front of the bottom two shelves where the children’s books were displayed: long, uniform phalanxes of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries as well as the lesser-known but, to my mind, far superior Ken Holt and Rick Brandt series. I can still remember the incomparable thrill of coming upon that elusive number eleven or seventeen in my favorite series, the one I’d been searching for for years, now magically there, where it hadn’t been the week before, filling me with wonder at the way the world worked, how you had to wait to the point of almost unbearable longing for the good stuff in life. (It would take five decades and the emergence of Amazon.com, with its point-and-click, to vanquish that primal wonder.) Just as mysterious as the appearance of the books themselves was where the money to pay for them came from. My mother was forever reminding me that money didn’t grow on trees, at least not on ours, and if I had my eye on some toy gun at Woolworth, she’d say that this was what my allowance, which I saved dutifully, was for. Otherwise, I’d have to wait for my birthday or Christmas. But if I was a dollar short for a book, she’d always find one in her purse (how? where?) so I wouldn’t have to wait the extra week, during which time some other boy might buy it.

  Coming out of Alvord and Smith, blinking in the bright sunlight, you could see all the way down Main Street, past the Four Corners, to South Main, where the gin mills and pool hall were. Outside these stood dusky, shiftless, idle men, flexing at the knees and whistling at the pretty women who passed by. Occasionally my father was among them. Much later, when I turned 18, legal drinking age in New York back then, I would join him in those same dives. Like the stationery store, they were cool and dark and mysterious, and for a while I preferred them, though I never really belonged. That’s what I’d felt as a boy, sitting on the floor at Alvord and Smith, touching, lovingly, the spines of books: Here was a place I belonged.

  Fast-forward twenty years. I’m now an assistant professor of English, married, with two small daughters, living in New Haven, Connecticut, teaching full-time and trying desperately to become a writer. My wife and I are nearly as poor as my mother and I had been back in Gloversville. We live in an apartment in a neighborhood where experience has taught me to put a sign in both the front and rear windows of our old beater, telling the neighborhood thieves the car is unlocked so they won’t smash the windows. There is nothing of value inside, I write, the radio and speakers having been boosted long ago. But of course, that’s a lie. A university professor, I forget books in the car all the time. Sometimes when I come out in the morning, it’s clear that someone’s been in the car, but the books are right where I left them. No takers.

  Once a month or so, on a Saturday night, if we’ve managed to save up, my wife and I go down to Wooster Street and have an inexpensive—though expensive to us—meal in an Italian restaurant. On the way home we always stop at Atticus Bookstore, where, miraculously, the early-morning edition of the Sunday Times awaits us. How can this be? Tomorrow’s newspaper, today. Atticus is a clean, well-lighted place, one of the first bookstores in the country to understand that books and good coffee go together. It’s stretching our budget after splurging on a restaurant meal, but we buy coffees and find a tiny bistro table and take books down off nearby shelves to examine. Books. By this time I’ve published a few short stories, but nothing so grand as a book. From where we sit I can see the R’s, the exact spot where my book will sit if I ever publish one. I may, one day, rub spines with Philip Roth. In a way, it’s almost too much to contemplate. In another, well, I can’t help feeling I belong here, just as I did on the floor of Alvord’s in Gloversville.

  Many people love good bookstores, but writers? We completely lose our heads over them. We tell each other stories about them. We form lifelong, irrational attachments to our favorites. We take every independent bookstore’s failure personally. Surely there’s something we might have done. We do not hate e-books purchased online—well, OK, some of us do—but we owe our careers, at least my generation of writers does, to the great independents, so many of them long gone now. Those that remain gamely continue to fight the good fight, even as customers increasingly use their stores as showrooms, their employees for their expertise, and their sales-tax dollars to fund their schools, but then go home and surrender to the online retailer’s chilly embrace. They point and click, and in this simple act, without meaning to, undermine the future of the next generation of writers and the one after that. Because it’s independent booksellers who always get the word out (as they did for me). With their help, if they’re still around, great young writers you don’t know about yet will take their place on shelves next to their heroes, from Margaret Atwood to Emile Zola, just as I have somehow managed to do. Without them, well, I shudder to think.

  I’m an old fart, of course, more at home with paper and print than touch screens, and yes, I agree with those who argue that in the end it’s more about the message of books than the medium of their delivery. A good book read on an electronic device is better than a bad one between hard covers. But to me, bookstores, like my first one, remain places of genuine wonder. They fill me with both pride and humility when I come upon my own books in them. Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world’s longest, best, most thrilling conversation. The people who work in them will tell you who’s saying what. If you ask, they’ll tell you what Richard Russo’s up to in his new one, but more important, they’ll put in your hand something you just have to read, by someone you’ve never heard of,
someone just now entering the conversation, who wants to talk to you about things that matter.

  If you haven’t been in a good bookstore in a while, the book you now hold in your hand will welcome you, lovingly, home.

  Richard Russo, 2012

  Martha Ackmann

  The Odyssey Bookshop, SOUTH HADLEY, MASSACHUSETTS

  When I moved from Missouri to western Massachusetts in 1979, everyone I met had the same two recommendations: You have to try the carrot cake at Chanticleer’s, and you have to open an account at the Odyssey Bookshop.

  They were right. Chanticleer’s carrot cake was delicious—just the right combination of sweet and spicy. I wish that unpretentious coffee shop was still around, but—like so many things—it dissolved into a procession of dull establishments whose names no one could remember.

  But the Odyssey?

  The Odyssey flourished.

  Thank goodness.

  The two-story white frame building is the heart and soul of South Hadley, Massachusetts, and a survivor to boot. Not only has the bookstore stood the test of time and marketplace, but it also persevered through two catastrophes that nearly killed it.

  I came to western Massachusetts to study Emily Dickinson and attend graduate school in the region’s lovely Pioneer Valley—home to Amherst, Smith, Hampshire, and Mount Holyoke colleges and the University of Massachusetts. I bought books at the Odyssey for my literature classes and found myself spending Saturday afternoons in the shop’s lower level, sitting on the floor next to shelves of Victorian novels. Back then the Odyssey arranged its books by publisher—an eccentric system, but not unlike bookstores in the United Kingdom. Many of the books I was reading were published by Penguin—all in inexpensive editions with distinctive orange spines. As a marketing device, Penguin color-coded its editions: green for mystery, blue for biography, red for drama, orange for fiction. I loved the Odyssey’s oddball organizing scheme. It made me feel like an insider when I cracked the code and descended into the lower level in pursuit of all those orange spines.

  But nothing made a book lover feel more like an Odyssey insider than getting to know Romeo Grenier. Romeo, as everyone called him, was the bookshop’s owner—a formal-looking gentleman who spoke in low, precise tones and wore a cravat. The book-organizing scheme was his idea and perhaps a nod to all things British. Romeo was an Anglophile through and through: He took tea at four o’clock and thought Middlemarch was the best book ever written. Some store patrons even mistakenly thought Romeo was British; he seemed so proper and—well—starched. But nothing could have been further from the truth.