The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book

by Wendy Welch

  Never missing an opportunity to let others know about our new place, I chatted up sale-holders at almost every venue. They were quick to ask, “Will you carry Westerns/true crime/science fiction and fantasy?” In this way, I got to know the area’s real reading tastes, not just what people wanted to jettison in their driveway for a dime.

  Learning to recognize diamonds among dross became that summer’s lesson. It took a few weeks, but one memorable day I left a garage display of overpriced Anne Rice hardbacks to find a collection of prayer shawl pattern books on the same lawn for a quarter each. Rice wasn’t so popular once Stephenie Meyer sucked the lifeblood from the vampire market, but pattern books command serious cash in secondhand shops. It was a nice little moment, realizing I now knew which were more useful.

  Book valuing is a lot like car pricing: once you drive the new vehicle off the lot, resale plummets. Bestsellers at twenty-seven dollars new flood the used market once the first wave of readers tosses them aside. Classic literature is like a vintage MGB; it proves well worth having years later, but is easy to find and hence not that expensive as rarities go. What enthusiasts really want is an MGA, the model made just before MGBs; far fewer exist; they are older, hence harder to find in good shape; and they are hunted by those who know what they’re doing.

  Taking the car analogy back to the book world, aficionados have for the most part read Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow, but Hunter’s Horn is a lesser-known work by this famous author. That combination of obscurity and renown creates good prospecting territory. I picked up Horn for fifty cents at a thrift store one afternoon and listed it on an Internet bookseller site at nine dollars in “acceptable” condition. It sold the next morning.

  Giddy with success at an 850 percent markup, Jack and I congratulated ourselves for turning a profit before opening day. I had yet to learn this euphoria’s counterbalance, that those “big markups” were few, far between, and—as gas money goes—not that big. We were too green in the business to understand yet that we wouldn’t score “buy low, sell high” hits every day.

  Common sense can be a hard-slog commodity. We tried hard to hang on to ours in the early months. Jack and I had always been adept at calling each other on moments when one of us lost reasoning ability and began to dream too big, but euphoria is as addictive as any drug. We wanted to be happy. We wanted to do good. So we did stupid things—like assuming rare books were just lying around waiting for smart people like us to find them—and never examined the condescending superiority of our assumptions.

  An old joke has two economists walking along a road. One looks down and says to the other, “There’s a one-hundred-dollar bill in the ditch.” The other economist doesn’t even look. “No, there isn’t. If there were, someone would have gotten it by now.”

  That’s rather like book prospecting: a juxtaposition of what seems to be in front of your eyes balanced against everything you know (and have spent nights on the Net researching) about books, authors, current reading trends, classic literature, and physical book conditions. It’s a small wonder some people in the used book business resort to scanners, those handheld devices that read bar codes and spit out their going market value. Still, call me old-fashioned, but I have no respect, professional or otherwise, for those nasty book prospectors found at library sales. With precious few exceptions, they scoop anything promising into a pile and check bar codes like automatons, then leave their discards in unsorted heaps where those who would have liked to find them can’t. My mama didn’t raise me to be a rude machine.

  I have always wanted to walk up to those kids and smack the scanners out of their hands. “It’s a book, son, a book. That means it’s valuable in and of itself, because it’s about ideas. Have you read Light in August? Do you know the difference between Sylvia Plath and Iris Johansen? Now put that thing down and read something!” My secret fantasy, revealed.

  Some dedicated souls do beat the book fields’ bushes for a living, but it parallels prospecting for gold in terms of economic stability; over the long haul, the search costs more than the nuggets garner. As with anyone trolling for treasure, some days turned out lucky for me, others mucky. Mining for books burned a lot of gas, not to mention precious weekends. With little enough time during the week to help Jack prepare the shop, I spent weekends running around to sales, sometimes scoring, sometimes wasting hours that could have been spent on the house. We didn’t even have curtains upstairs yet. I did not want to end up like one of those poor oddball rare book dealers people avoid at parties, who mutters to herself as she loads her plate with free food.

  I often visited sales with Fiona, another member of the Church of Artists and Weirdos up the street. True to type, she is artistic. A transplant from Europe many years ago, Fiona runs a pottery and weaving studio on the town’s main street, and her designs command international respect. Not quite five feet tall, she sports a pixie cut of magnolia-blossom white hair. Her smiling eyes hint at mischief bobbing just beneath the surface. I couldn’t say what it is about her—her pixielike figure, baby face, or charming upper-class British accent—but sellers knock themselves out to throw discounts at this happy-go-lucky grandmother.

  Her daughter, who owns a farm nearby, told us some of the stories. Once Fiona walked up to a Christmas tree lot and, being told the price, said, “Oh, I don’t think so.” As she turned to go, the man said, “Never mind, ma’am, I’ll give you one.” A car salesman followed her across a lot one afternoon, discounting a Mazda down to practically nothing. Fiona hadn’t been shopping for a car, just taking a shortcut. “It’s weird,” her daughter Kirsty concluded, “but I didn’t inherit that gene. So I always take her with me when I buy livestock.”

  Fiona’s powers came into their own at yard sales. “That bureau is five dollars? How annoying, I’ve only three dollars left. What a pity.” And I would find myself loading the dresser into the back of her SUV while the seller gave her fifty cents in change. Going to sales with Fiona reinforced the age-old adage that little white-haired women can get away with anything. And she got me some really good discounts on boxes of books. Although we believed my garage sale summer was time well spent at the time, in reality I was bringing home quite a bit of what we would later learn to identify as “crap sellers.” Still, I was also making friends in the community, chatting up sale-holders, other shoppers, anyone I met on the sidewalk, telling them about our new shop and its October opening.

  Even with Fiona by my side throughout August, stock count reached a mere twenty-two hundred. The back-room door remained closed. Across the front rooms, we now resembled a crowded book morgue; the books still lay end to end, but at least they touched each other.

  To make matters worse, we didn’t just have a dearth of books overall; in one key genre, we had none. Science fiction and fantasy rarely appear at yard sales, for reasons we learned later. With two colleges in the region, that seemed an unwise inventory hole.

  Desperation set in, but not the useful kind that spurs invention—more the dark, debilitating variety so familiar from days of yore. Jack said to me, as I moped through the house one day, picking up dead books and putting them down on a different shelf, “You haven’t acted so listless in a long while. Not since, er, you know where. Giving up so soon?”

  That snapped me out of it, and fast. No more renting the space in our own skins. The book morgue that wanted to be a shop was our problem, waiting for our solution. By hook, crook, or sheer force of will, we would find more books—without going into debt for them.

  Don’t get the wrong idea: Jack and I were not destitute when we moved to Big Stone. But that “let’s make a bookstore” discussion in Little Mexico had not been entirely heart without head. We’d talked at length about how financially insecure running such an enterprise would be. Thumbing our nose at the Snake Pit had been possible only because we had no mortgage or significant debt. That kind of freedom must be carefully guarded, or going into debt “just this once” becomes a lifestyle. So we had sworn, the day we agre
ed to try the bookstore thing, that we would get the necessary mortgage, but would not borrow a single penny more to finance anything, no matter what. That hefty restriction curtailed some of the simpler ways to get a bookshop going.

  Crazy schemes have never been a weak point for us, and blood is thicker than printer’s ink. Time to call my sister.

  Tracy misspent her youth devouring books about Doc Savage and the slave traders of Gor; laying about our shared bedroom, those paperback covers were … interesting. Four years Tracy’s junior, I read behind her in a fog of stubborn precociousness until finally assigning science fiction to the same category as coffee—one of those weird things adults liked.

  Now those unappealing reads had turned into precious commodities, and I needed my big sister’s help. More specifically, I needed her books. Some might consider it a bad sign that I had to call my mother to get Tracy’s phone number, but please don’t misinterpret or misunderstand: my sister and I are friends but tend not to keep close tabs on each other. After all, isn’t that what Thanksgiving is for?

  “Hi, Tracy. How’s it going?”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Sure, sure. Why shouldn’t it be?”

  “You never call me unless you need something. When you moved to that back-of-beyond place you live in now, you didn’t even send me a change of address card.”

  Accurate, she was.

  “Well, you know, we’re there for each other when it counts. Right?”

  Tracy sighed. “How much?”

  Ouch.

  She continued, “The last time you said something like that, you had broken your arm and needed a loan for the emergency room visit.”

  “Hey, I was twenty-two then! I’m older and more financially responsible now.”

  “Hunh. Mom says your latest harebrained scheme is that you talked Jack into buying some drafty old house and you’re trying to start a used book store with no money.”

  “Exactly. I’m now a responsible business owner in the community. So I was just wondering—”

  She interrupted. “When we moved house this spring, I boxed up all our spare books for you and will bring them down at Thanksgiving. Dennis was not all that excited about having to move boxes of books we weren’t going to read again, but I talked him into it. Is that what you were calling about? Mom told you we did that?”

  Ah, family. You can count on them, no matter what.

  “That is so cool! Thanks, and tell Dennis thanks! But actually, do you remember all those schlocky—I mean, that science fiction and fantasy you used to read, the Star Trek novels and whatnot? Are they in the boxes?”

  “Those weren’t mine. I gave them back to the friend I borrowed them from, years ago. Why are you interested in—now what was it you used to call them, let me think—‘those schlocky near-porn not-worth-starting-fires-with wastes of paper and ink’?”

  “Okay, okay. I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things since then! We haven’t got much science fiction in our inventory, and there are two colleges near our store. You just know a bunch of students are gonna be sci-fi and fantasy readers.”

  “Try eBay.”

  “We did. They’re expensive there. It turns out that people don’t sell them at yard sales because they can get more on eBay. So I was hoping you had some, but thanks for the other books.”

  “If fantasy and science fiction are that popular, there must be tons of it around. Offer a better deal than eBay, and people will bring them to you instead.”

  I sighed. “It’s kind of a chicken-and-egg thing. We need them before we open, but we can’t get the swaps going until we actually have the store running.”

  “Why not? Ask people to bring their books now and give them credit against when you’re officially in business. Issue credit slips. It’ll reduce your cash later, but get you books now. And it sounds like you haven’t got any money to buy books now.”

  My sister has always had a way of cutting to the chase.

  “Good idea,” I said.

  “I know. See you at Thanksgiving. By the way, you might want to put this number in your address book.” She hung up.

  We quickly appropriated Tracy’s idea as our own (thanks, Big Sis!), but advertising a prestore swap program still took money. Or ingenuity, and we were short on both at this point. Enter Teri, town chiropractor and another friend from church. Hearing of our plan, she offered unlimited access to her office’s photocopier in exchange for book credit once we opened. If it hadn’t been for Teri, I really don’t know how we would have managed advertising at all.

  I designed a flyer with the oh-so-original header “Calling all bibliophiles: great swap deals!” and traipsed around the nearby towns, hunting down bulletin boards at the Laundromats, drugstores, clinics, and so on. I chatted up bank clerks and dropped in on hairdressers, armed with pushpins, tape, and a smile. By the end of the day, I knew some very important things: the bloke who used to run one of the county’s Laundromats got fed up and moved to Kentucky to become a starving artist; the new grandchild of the receptionist at a nearby ear, nose, and throat clinic didn’t look anything like his daddy; and the annual Christmas parade was a cliquey stitch-up you could get into only if you knew the right people. In a small town, talking for fun hasn’t yet gone out of style.

  Then we sat back and waited. Tracy had been right. About a dozen people showed up with stuff; what they pulled from the bowels of their (fortuitously dry) basements proved astonishing. Jack started a ledger recording each person’s precredit against opening day, and we spent evenings—lots and lots of evenings—shelving the loot.

  A clergyman turned in a puberty-length collection of bikini-clad outer space bimbo paperbacks. He didn’t want trade credit. “Just get rid of these painful reminders of high school for me,” he said. They sold for an astronomical amount within a month of our opening. I called him back, but he reiterated they were a gift to get us started, so long as his name never got linked to them. He’s dead now, God rest his adolescent soul.

  Barbara, a book enthusiast who already made a hobby of trading and selling on the Net, brought her stash of mostly Christian fiction, and we hit instant rapport. She offered to take a list of titles and genres we wanted and scour yard sales on our behalf, a task I was only too grateful to hand over to her. Glenn, the happy-go-lucky white-haired actor in local stage productions, appeared with true crime, seeking classics. Mr. Pettry, who was to become one of our regulars, hauled in about two hundred hardback thrillers, all in excellent condition, and proffered a list of others his wife Sylvia wanted.

  Garth, town council member, donated how-to tomes on electricity, deck-building, and other manly pursuits. Like the pastor, he had an alternate agenda: “to see the floor of my garage again, just once, before I die.” In fact, most people bringing books were donors rather than swappers; they were cleaning house, or just chuffed that a bookstore had come to town and wanted to help it along. Few of that initial ragtag bag team took swap credit.

  At the same time, Jack and I got one of our first lessons in how quickly a used book store can become a junk shop. We didn’t want to say no to any of these nice people, but what could be done with a six-year collection of National Geographic magazines, a selection of 1970s economic textbooks, and yet more Reader’s Digest Condensed Books? We stuck them on the shelves and smiled, perhaps suspecting even then what the future held: furtive midnight runs to Dumpsters about town, tossing in stacks of magazines and old textbooks, and scouring the Internet for patterns to make handbags, birdhouses, planters, and shelf brackets from old books. (Although I no longer had a yarn budget, I would have plenty of other crafts to mess about with.)

  Actually, that’s hindsight talking; at the time we were so relieved that people brought us stuff, refusing anything never really entered our minds. We put every title on the shelf, no matter how old or uninviting. Everybody loved books! Everybody loved all books, all the time! National Geographic magazines were beautiful!

  We didn’t have a clue.<
br />
  People also came with useful genres, including the science fiction and Westerns we lacked. They got generous swap deals written into the big blue ledger, and left happy—to tell others about us. Word of mouth began to circulate, the best advertising one could ask for.

  Many “rural suburbanites” are tucked into the snug hills and hollers that cradle Appalachia’s Coalfields; often growing tobacco on their family farm for extra cash, at least one adult commutes to a job in town. Since they didn’t live nearby as Dave and company did, this group took a little longer to find us, but as word rippled outward, they also brought in books.

  Jack met Larry and Larry’s wife, Teddy—he a gentleman farmer, she retired from an illustrious career in Washington, D.C.—when they drove in from their farm one day “to see what all the fuss is about.” Jack and Larry struck up an instant and comfortable friendship, and it was Larry who gave us an early understanding of how Big Stone might be different from other small towns in which we’d lived.

  While the Gap held the usual collection of doctors, lawyers, and educators, high-powered professionals wielded less real power locally than Old Families. As Larry explained it, “It’s not unlike medieval history; sure, it’s great to be king, but the Old Families put you on the throne, and they can take you off again. So don’t get uppity, because you never know who’s friends with an Old Family.”

  Uppity, we didn’t plan on; busy would be enough, if our idea—okay, my sister’s idea—worked. And it did. Soon enough, our shop held bags, boxes, milk cartons, and plastic tubs full of stock, glorious stock. With each ragged, tatty plastic sack piled into a corner for sorting, Jack stood straighter. I leaned over boxes and sniffed that heady smell of books: dust, glue, and knowledge, all jumbled together. In our shop. Filling our shelves. Life was good.

  Even better, people were talking about us. Friends told friends, and our phone began to ring. We weren’t open yet? When would we be? Did we have such and such books, or were we interested in having them brought in for swapping? Life was very good indeed.