My Bookstore Read online

  I feel at home here, and I am honored that my books are on these shelves, but as I sat down to describe why I liked the place, I found myself not with a list of things it is but things that it is not. It does not have comfy chairs, or cozy reading areas, but nor do I have to try and think over the roar of construction of a double-chocolate frappacin… frabucin… oh, to hell with it. There are, as near I can tell, no charging stations or other portals for laptops, though I am sure there is a drop or two somewhere around. I am pretty sure there is no Wifi… Wyfy… you know what I mean. You do not bring a laptop to Jake’s, though you can read a newspaper, standing up.

  Nor is he working hard to be quaint. There is not a single rocker here, unless he has one in the back for naps. But then I do not think the man even sleeps. There are just books, in a store where you are more likely to find Henry Louis Gates, Jr., than a pop-up book about some monkeys jumping on a bed (though, for the record, I have that one).

  But what you do not see, at least at first glance, is the secret to its survival. “We’ve pretty much converted this joint to all signed copies,” Jake told me, “and every year has been bigger than the last for twenty-two years. Our Signed First Editions Club is one of the largest, if not the largest in America, and we’ve been fortunate enough to have Philip Roth, John Updike, Richard Russo, Salman Rushdie, Geraldine Brooks, and so forth sign for our members… customers in all fifty states and fourteen foreign countries. We’ve hosted President Jimmy Carter, David Sedaris, Anne Rice, Christopher Hitchens, Ken Burns, Wendell Berry, and hundreds of others.” He does not mean to sound like a salesman, like a man working it, he just can’t really help it. When he made pants, he wanted to make good pants and sell them for as much as he could get and then sell some more. He sees no reason why the book business cannot be conducted in a similar fashion, without apology. I do not know where he finds the energy. When I am his age, I will look for a soft place to lie down.

  He is so enthusiastic about his new business, he gets carried away. Introducing me, once, at a book event, he described in passionate detail how I bodily carried an elderly woman and her wheelchair into a crowded auditorium. I remembered it as a lovely young woman in one of those inflatable ankle casts. There was, however, carrying involved.

  The people who make the money decisions in this craft recognize that enthusiasm and send people down here on more than just promises. They sell books at his store—lots of books. “When we request that big-time writers visit and New York publicists are a little reluctant about sending their superstars here, we remind them that Alabama not only produces the magnificent Mercedes and rockets that go to the moon, but author events that are out of this world, also. We usually partner with one of the city’s nonprofits like Children’s of Alabama, The Literacy Council, local NPR and public television.… We regularly produce sales that are tops on each author’s tour.”

  I do not have the heart to tell Jake that we here in Alabama have not actually helped heave anyone to the moon in quite some time, but he is just so damn happy about it I hate to smudge up another good lie.

  I think he is good for this craft, and his store is good for it. There are plenty of other places to sit in an old chair and sip some designer coffee and peruse the Oxford American or recharge your I-Whatever or check your email or pet a damn cat.

  RICK BRAGG is the best-selling author of works of nonfiction, including All Over But The Shoutin’ and Ava’s Man and Prince of Frogtown, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He is a Harvard University Nieman Fellow, and Professor of Writing at the University of Alabama. He is also a winner of the James Beard Award and many other national writing awards.

  Charles Brandt

  Chapter One Bookstore, KETCHUM, IDAHO

  Ernest Hemingway returned to live in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1959 with an unsettled heart. His beloved home in Cuba, his private paradise where he lived when he won the 1954 Nobel Prize, was soon to be confiscated by Castro.

  So here he was, compelled to live in his second-favorite paradise on earth, compelled to live in a house on a hill on a bench above the Big Wood River in the high desert mountains, endless mountains with near-constant blue skies, invisible healing air, and world-class skiing in the adjacent celebrity magnet of the Sun Valley resort. It was in that resort’s Lodge twenty years earlier in suite 206 that he had worked on For Whom the Bell Tolls, with his Silver Creek fishing buddy Gary Cooper in mind to play the hero. And it was in that house on the bench above the river where, in rapidly failing health, he felt compelled to live no longer and took his life with a shotgun in July 1961.

  The Hemingway tradition flourishes in Ketchum with suite 206 still for rent in the Lodge, with the famous photo of Hemingway sitting in suite 206 at his typewriter blown up and hanging in the tourist office, with his marked grave alongside his wife Mary’s at the Ketchum Cemetery, with a memorial bust in Trail Creek and an annual Hemingway conference, and with locals who knew him, like Rob the computer guy, who, at 4, was hoisted up by the great man for a hug.

  Hemingway’s granddaughter, the actress Mariel, isn’t the only celebrity to make a home in Ketchum. If you know what you’re looking for you can spot a celebrity pumping gas, shopping for groceries, or dining out. But the celebrities who live here value their privacy, and locals and tourists alike obey an off-limits energy field.

  There is one special place, however, where you’re likely to encounter a relaxed celebrity chatting amiably, with that off-limits energy field temporarily shut down. It is in Ketchum’s oldest bookstore, Chapter One. As local architect Dale Bates puts it: “There is no community without a common resource.”

  I’ve hung out in lots of bookstores in my 70 years, including the unique Chartwell Booksellers off Madison Avenue in New York City, dedicated to Winston Churchill, jazz, and baseball; and the well-mourned Madison Avenue Bookshop, where one was apt to see Sam Shepherd getting advice from Gary the manager, and Barbara Walters on the cashier’s line loaded with volumes of pleasure and enlightenment, asking if John Updike is really any good. But until I first set foot in Ketchum in 1985 I had never seen a bookstore so crucial to the well-being of a community as Chapter One. And our community itself knows that its “common resource,” more than the store itself, is the store’s owner and manager, Cheryl Thomas, a spiritual icon for decades in our valley.

  Cheryl and her right hand, Meg, who both read voraciously, can help you find the perfect book, including a first edition of A Farewell to Arms, even if all you want to do is hold it in your hands. At the same time, Cheryl can help you find the perfect dog from one of her sweet causes, the Animal Shelter. She not only fund-raises for the Hunger Coalition, but she tries to see to it that those in need have money for dog and cat food. She can help you locate a ticket to the usually sold-out Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, where visiting writers like David McCullough will stop by the store for a chat. Cheryl works tirelessly on the Hemingway Elementary School Used Book Fair and at the annual Sun Valley Wellness Festival. Her collection of cutting-edge healing and energy books is unrivaled. Cheryl promotes and encourages local authors, whether self-published or well published. And yes, local authors are part of the celebrity world of Ketchum, a town of 2,700 residents.

  One winter evening a few years past I came in the back door and headed to the front, where I could see in an aisle the back of a large man chatting amiably about Kosovo. I hung back and listened. He seemed to know what he was talking about. When his chat ended I could see it was ambassador and author Richard Holbrooke, who definitely knew a thing or two about the Balkans. On any Sunday a local such as singer-songwriter Carole King might be doing a signing of her memoir. The next Sunday it just might be a local ski legend.

  Cheryl has got me delivering inscriptions like Domino’s delivers pizza. If she has a customer who wants to buy one of my books, she’ll call and ask me to stroll over and do a personal signing and chat a spell. Once, on call, I arrived to chat with a married couple. Kathleen Chamales had seen me speak at the Sun Valley Writers
’ Conference and wanted a book for their son. Her husband, Jerry, is an Entrepreneur of the Year recipient who had sold his business and was looking for something new to do. They owned the old Steve McQueen property. As we chatted I learned they were friends of Hollywood power lawyer Jake Bloom, who also has a home in our valley. We hit it off right there at Chapter One, and soon they bought an option on my book I Heard You Paint Houses (mafia-speak for murder), which is now in development at Paramount in a deal handled by Jake Bloom for a movie to be called The Irishman, to be directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Robert DeNiro, produced by their production companies and with a cast including Al Pacino and Joe Pesci. Oh, did I mention Cheryl is a matchmaker?

  In his acceptance of the Nobel Prize, Hemingway famously observed that “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.” If Hemingway were alive, Cheryl would make sure that he came by the store, if only to chat a spell. It would be good for him.

  CHARLES BRANDT is the author of the true crime bestseller, I Heard You Paint Houses and a novel based on major crimes he solved through interrogation, The Right to Remain Silent. He lives in Lewes, Delaware and Sun Valley, Idaho, with his wife, Nancy, and has three grown children.

  Douglas Brinkley

  BookPeople, AUSTIN, TEXAS

  The summer sun pounded mercilessly down without a single layer of cloud to snuff out the UV radiation. In the scorching streets of Austin, it was dry and hot, with no gusts of wind to make the 104° Fahrenheit temperature any less suffocating. The heat was starting to make me irritable. Why wasn’t I in some nirvana like the Hamptons or the Upper Peninsula of Michigan? That’s when I directed my little Volvo to the only true oasis in this cowtown-cum-hipville: BookPeople.

  Toward the back of BookPeople, near the bright-blue neon sign that advertises “Coffee Shop,” is a gallery wall showcasing the wares of local artists. While the paintings rotate periodically, a blown-up, twelve-block comic strip by G.C. Johnson titled “An Illustrated History of BookPeople” is permanent. The installation—created in a style that could be called Early Keith Haring—documents the backstory of Texas’s largest independent bookseller from its modest beginnings in 1970 as Grok Books, in a small house near the Original Oat Willie’s, to the current 24,000-square-foot store conveniently located across the street from Whole Foods headquarters. Peace Corps veteran Philip Sansone bought Grok Books in 1978. Today, high-momentum bibliophile and aesthetician Steve Bercu, the CEO, continues to offer an avalanche of book titles, available both in the shop and online.

  It seems to me the BookPeople is the hub of everything good and wise in progressive-minded Austin. It’s the ideal escape zone in a city growing too fast. I’ve roamed far and wide visiting America’s independent bookstores as both a consumer and an author on tour. I consider myself of expert caliber in judging bookstores, and so an eminently reliable character witness for BookPeople’s excellence.

  The store’s name emanates from Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451. At a crucial moment in Bradbury’s story, the “Book People” take the banned books into the hills, determined to memorize them before the books are destroyed. I also like the store’s name because it is egalitarian in spirit, like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Carl Sandburg’s The People, Yes. What Bercu envisioned—and achieved—was a community meeting place where no matter what you were seeking, from politics to philosophy to poetry and beyond, that it would be stocked on the shelves. At any given time you’ll find over 300,000 titles, instantly available. This isn’t a strip-mall box store or Amazon warehouse, but the Town Hall of Weird Austin, bursting with personality, from Moby-Dick T-shirts to embroidered dish towels to offbeat candies at the cashier’s desk.

  The marvel is that nothing is ever rushed at BookPeople. Consumers purhasing products is not necessarily paramount to Bercu. Many visitors enter and fall into a browsing zone like none other in Texas. If Austin is the town that made the term slacker popular (due to local filmmaker Richard Linklater’s 1991 movie, Dazed and Confused), then let it be said that BookPeople is where browsing earned its golden spurs as an American pastime. I often loiter in the store for hours, flipping through merchandise, scribbling down notes from a book I don’t want to buy. Never has one of the store’s 125 employees reprimanded me. Loitering is part of the atmosphere. Clerks encourage me to graze both book-filled floors. Loitering is part of the flavor. Whenever I get blue, I take a drive to Lamar Boulevard, park my convertible, and seize the universe of knowledge on its shelves.

  When I was a graduate student at Georgetown University, I used to visit Social Safeway. Like a scene from Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California,” twenty-somethings would meet each other while pushing their shopping carts down the aisles, poking the pork chops and bananas while people-watching. Likewise, there are so many mating rituals taking place in BookPeople that it should be designated a National Wildlife Refuge.

  Not that I’m part of such a dance anymore. My wife, Anne, and I regularly visit BookPeople to shop for our three children. And what an extravaganza of choices it is for little people. There is a huge tunnel house for the kids to play in as we shop. There is a children’s reading area, complete with purple chairs. A blue stage is set up for performers. Storyteller events are a regular feature. Painted in huge yellow box letters on a backdrop next to a drawing of a friendly book-reading bat (a favorite mammal in Austin because the bats have a massive colony in town) is a sign that reads “What happens in Storytime… Stays in Storytime.” Some happy employee actually set up displays of children’s books in an imaginative fashion; for example, “things that go…” offers every flight of both fancy and reality imaginable on trains, boats, trucks, tractors, et al. If elementary school libraries were half this fun, America’s literacy rate could be higher than those of Norway and Denmark.

  We hear a lot of noise about independent bookstores dying in America. It’s a sign of the hard times. But BookPeople—cosmic as a Willie Nelson concert at the Backyard followed by a breakfast burrito at Magnolia Café at midnight—remains the heart and soul of Austin. It’s achieved institutional status.

  DOUGLAS BRINKLEY is a professor of history at Rice University and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. The Chicago Tribune has dubbed him “America’s new past master.” Six of his books have been selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. His book The Great Deluge won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He lives in Texas with his wife and three children.

  Liam Callanan

  Boswell Book Company, MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN

  This is not a story about my friend, raised by a single mom, who got himself into an Ivy League School and then Teach for America after, only to discover that what he really wanted to do was medicine and only to realize there was no money for medical school. So he went to the overnight shift at UPS, which paid for him to go back and take all the undergraduate pre-med courses he needed, and then the Air Force, which paid for medical school. But no service, delivery or armed, was going to pay for his wedding, so he went back to his mom, and she figured it out, and no one who was there will forget the day: a beautiful ceremony, and an elaborate, raucous reception right downstairs in the church basement. “I always say,” my friend proudly, if apocalyptically, explained that day, “that if the universe came to an end, and civilization needed restarting, my mom could do it, just her and a couple of friends, they could remake the entire world.”

  I feel the same way about Daniel Goldin, proprietor of my bookstore, Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee. And the apocalyptic reference seems entirely warranted: Not a day goes by that someone doesn’t declare as nigh the end of publishing, much less bookstores. What this avenue of American industry needs, then, is not so much someone interested in selling a few books, but rather someone interested in selling a few books (and maybe a few gift items from a carefully curated stock) as a means of saving civilization.

  Let the word go forth, then: The world has a future, and it starts in Milwaukee on an avenue named Do
wner.

  I first met Daniel, and Boswell Book Company, when they were both something else. At that time, Boswell Books was part of a small, beloved local chain with a national reputation, Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops, and Daniel was its buyer. But not long after its legendary leader, David Schwartz, passed away, the store found itself facing its own demise. (Again: to write about bookstores is an inescapably eschatological activity.) Daniel stepped in, though the better verb is stepped up, pouring his own savings, and that of his extended family, into a little brickfront store on Downer Avenue a few blocks south of the teeming campus of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and a few blocks west of my house.

  For the nonnative Milwaukeean, it’s a sign of assimilation when you no longer find the name “Downer” ironic or funny or ominous, and a sign of true civic pride (not to mention literary engagement) when you start to refer to the bookstore no longer as “Boswell’s” but “Daniel’s.”

  As in: “Can we go into Daniel’s, Dad?” As in: This is my daughter, just 3 at the time, whom I have brought to the Starbucks that neighbors Daniel’s store just after dawn one Saturday morning. As anyone who frequents a weekend-dawn Starbucks knows, there are four categories of people there at that hour: doctors heading in to the hospital, hipsters who never went to bed the night before, people prepping for LSATs who wish they’d been out with the hipsters, and 3-year-olds and their fathers.