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

by Wendy Welch

  Ultimately, we approached the Grand Opening with more than three thousand volumes we hadn’t gone into debt for, and a lot of friends we wouldn’t have made without the early swaps. Even better, nobody but Jack and I knew how close we’d come to looking like idiots who’d decided on a whim to start a bookstore and made it up as they went along.

  CHAPTER 4

  Follow Your Ignorance Is Bliss

  All you need is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.

  —Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens) in a letter to his friend, Mrs. Foote, December 2, 1887

  OPENING OUR DOORS JUST THREE months after buying the Edwardian presented many challenges, but also kept us from worrying about stuff; too busy hurling ourselves at an idyllic future to contemplate some very realistic potential pitfalls, we just kept smiling and didn’t look down.

  Yet as the Grand Opening loomed, we got less sleep and more butterflies in our stomachs as all those words we weren’t saying hatched into living, fluttering fears. The night before we opened, lying sleepless and silent in bed, I rehearsed a litany of things that could go wrong: no one would come, no one would come, no one would come. Finally I said into the darkness: “What if no one comes?”

  My husband reached down, picked up Bert (our terrier, asleep on my feet), and placed him in my arms like a teddy bear. Bert blinked, startled and bleary-eyed, as Jack said, “Go to sleep,” rolled over, and buried his good ear in the pillow.

  I lay there, clutching the bemused Bert until morning.

  Opening Day had been chosen to coincide with the annual Home Craft Days held at a nearby college. One of their shuttles stopped across the street from our store. We sneaked out in the wee hours and taped a flyer to the back of the shuttle stop sign: “Waiting for the bus? Why not spend a few minutes with us?” We got extra customers that way, and since we took the sign down as soon as Craft Days ended, the town manager only mentioned casually, a few days later when he happened to be passing by and just popped in for a cup of tea, that not everyone knew posting personal notices on public property was illegal within town limits.

  The Grand Opening had that surreal quality of a wedding when it’s yours. Is this really happening? Did we actually pull it off? And is that kid sitting in the parked car out front using an e-reader? (We decided we didn’t believe in omens. A firm sense of denial can be a dreamer-turned-business-owner’s greatest asset.)

  The mayor read a proclamation welcoming us to town and establishing our business. Adriana Trigiani, hometown girl and author of the bestselling Big Stone Gap series of novels, cut the ribbon. A shop full of ceremony attendees clapped; sure, they’d come to see Adri, but still filled our store to standing room only. They looked around. They bought things. We sold so many books that one shelf went bare again—but people were bringing books, too!

  Throughout Opening Day we met more of those who would become regulars. Bill Peace is a Korean War veteran; that first morning he entered our shop, turned right with a military click of his heel, and worked his way around the room title by title. It took him an hour and a half. We thought his thoroughness was due to our low inventory, but as the months have rolled into years, Bill keeps that same pattern.

  Thelma and Louise showed up as well; to this day, we don’t know what their real names are. Cheerful, laugh-a-minute addicts of gruesome crime novels, they made a beeline for our puny little stack of Tess Gerritsen thrillers and bought them all. Like Bill, they would repeat this pattern over the years, moving on to Lisa Jackson and Tami Hoag. I tried to get them started on Sandra Brown, but they had grossness limits.

  Michael, a Lutheran lay minister, Eastern European history buff, adjunct college professor, and writer of horror stories—he’s a complicated man—planted the seed for a writing group on our opening day, and to our delight agreed to coordinate its monthly meetings when we approached him a few weeks later. This attracted Jenny—born and raised in Big Stone, a sweet-tempered actress in the local theater and the eldest daughter in a family full of characters—who balanced Mike’s horror with her romantic stories and insightful poetry. The group quickly collected then forementioned James, who in addition to poetry wrote guy stuff about trucks, space aliens, and why women were impossible to understand. The four of us would become fast friends—something I didn’t know on Opening Day, when Jenny handed over a batch of homemade bran muffins and began browsing.

  Jenny wasn’t the only one to bring food; Melissa, who owned a shop selling Native American paraphernalia the next town over, brought cookies to wish us well, as did others on subsequent days. Appalachians bring food the way people from other cultures send flowers: to show appreciation, affection, sympathy and solidarity. Mike told me several years later that he went home from Opening Day and told his wife, “Yeah, it’s a nice place. I give ’em a year before they close.” (He thought there weren’t enough readers in town to keep a bookstore in business. He was not the only one: Jenny, James, even Teddy and Larry later admitted that they’d all thought either small-town politics or the small number of readers they thought were in the area would kill us within the year.)

  We smiled, poured coffee, smiled, transacted sales, smiled, and bagged books until closing time. That night, in the fading ecstasy of the Grand Opening, Jack and I hid from street view in our upstairs front room, looked out over the main road of our new hometown, and poured ourselves a glass of wine. Jack, who had taught painting and decorating for fifteen years at a Scottish community college, had managed to find time and money to repaper our cozy hideaway in a soft mauve with small flowers sprigged throughout; furnished with our own ancient chest of drawers and a couple of scratchy wing chairs from the thrift store, covered in my crocheted antimacassars, it felt like the Victorian parlor it resembled. We curled into the yarn-softened seats and recounted the day, savoring each moment in detail. The customers’ enthusiasm for the shop’s woodwork. The food people had brought, unasked, to welcome us to town. My bright purple house shoes. I’d forgotten to change them before the mayor arrived, and had gone through the ceremony wearing fuzzy slippers—one of the first hints about how easily private and public space could slide into each other. I’d watched Adri notice my shoes and smile before turning away to greet a fan. She was too nice to comment.

  When the day’s events finally had the flavor sucked out of them, we prepared for bed. As we brushed our teeth, Jack mused aloud over a comment from the mayor’s speech, “something about ‘not many people wanting to come here, and we hope you do well.’ Hardly the most ringing endorsement for a new business.” He spit.

  Accustomed to Jack’s Scots dourness, I refused to allow him to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. “She was just welcoming us. C’mon, it was a wonderful day!”

  And it had been. We turned off the lamp on the cardboard-box end table, snuggled up with Zora and Bert on our icy feet, and counted blessings: (1) enough savings to get a mortgage on this great location; (2) enough books to at least look like we were serious; (3) a bunch of first-day customers who’d promised to tell all their friends that a bookstore had moved in; (4) the goodwill of a town happy to have said bookstore; and (5) the handyman and crafter woman skills between us to make repairs, rugs, and furniture from scratch, rags, and plywood off-cuts well enough to live upstairs in a cheap-yet-cheerful manner, if not a gracious one.

  Not bad for Day One, we thought. It felt like the perfect Hollywood ending. That’s the problem with Hollywood. It teaches us to revel in the end of a happy beginning without thinking realistically about what comes next. Cue the timpani and glorious sunset; love conquers all.

  Ha.

  We should have paid more attention to that odd little phrase stuck in the middle of the mayor’s welcoming speech. We should have revisited our fears, spoken that day in Little Mexico, that a population of five thousand was minuscule for a customer pool. But Day One had been a rousing success, and deep in our hearts Jack and I simply could not imagine a life without books and words and the smell of paper, so we resolutel
y rejected the possibility that our bookstore could flop in short order. Big Stone’s enthusiastic welcome gave us hope and a sense of belonging. We believed in our new friends—the swooning Isabel and her sensible, math-teaching husband, William; pragmatic and kindhearted Teri and Gary; Fiona the Garage Sale Queen; writers James, Michael, and Jenny; and Elissa, insurance adjuster by day, and a brilliant freelance photographer who’d shown up to our opening. They were the first of many artists the bookstore would attract, along with informally educated intellectuals looking for serious conversation unleavened by accent assumptions, and all those rural suburbanites out there in the valleys, who just wanted a little light reading at the end of a hard workweek. We basked in the camaraderie and support shown by the region’s bibliophiles, and felt well on the way toward a quieter, saner, happier life.

  Quiet. Yes, that it would be, in spades.

  We opened in October; by Thanksgiving, up to four customers a day trickled through our shop. Our understocked, underadvertised, overstaffed shop. Bill, Thelma and Louise, the writing group, and a few new customers drifted through: just the usual suspects plus just a handful of others.

  The dogs Zora and Bert, the cats Val-Kyttie and Beulah, and Jack himself waited to greet the readers we just knew were out there. We had Christmas presents they could buy! Pity they didn’t know we were in here. The few who came mostly had credit from before we opened. They used their swap slips immediately, on pretty much the same principle as not buying green bananas after your eightieth birthday. (Why invest in what you might not benefit from?) Without saying anything to us, pretty much everyone in town was assuming we’d close within the year.

  Jack and I had figured, based on how much people knew about our church hunt and our opening plans, that everybody showing so much interest in the new kids on the block meant that they’d shop with us, and bring their friends. That, plus the preopening swap buzz, the Opening Day crowd returning with others, good word of mouth from our regulars, and of course the single ad we’d taken out in the local paper, would be enough.

  It wasn’t.

  New customers did appear, saying “James sent me,” or “Bill’s my uncle,” but they came in dribbles rather than droves. It’s a wonder we didn’t scare them away, since by now we were chasing newcomers out the shop door with our flyers, begging them to put these up at their places of work and to talk about us to their friends.

  Meanwhile, everywhere we went—the grocery store, church, out for a walk along the Greenbelt in the blustery wind—people stopped us to ask, “How’s the bookstore doing?”

  “Great!” we’d smile, teeth gritted. “You should come by and see for yourself!”

  They’d give us knowing looks. “Sure, after Christmas. Can’t give used books for Christmas, can you? Y’all have a merry one, and we’ll come see you in the New Year.” Off they’d saunter, the unspoken subtext hanging in the air: if you’re still open.

  After three or four similar encounters, Jack turned to me. “Think they know something we don’t?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered, “but don’t you suspect that someone has set up a betting pool on how long we’ll last? Let’s find them and bet against ourselves.”

  When Fiona’s four-and-a-half-year-old grandson walked up to me at church one day, pulled my trouser leg, and said, “So, how’s the bookstore doing?” I went straight to Fiona and demanded to know what people were saying. Softhearted Fiona hemmed and hawed, but finally she admitted that, yes, people were talking about us, all right. Community consensus to bookshop owners: You won’t last six months, but bless your hearts for trying, you dear sweet fools.

  I confronted Teddy, a woman whose intuitions and insights I trusted. “Why is everybody assuming we’re not gonna make it? It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy; they won’t shop here because they think we won’t be here in a year, and we won’t be if they don’t shop here.”

  Teddy smiled but deflected the question. “Why do you think that’s what they think?”

  I pondered a moment, then began to lay out points. “One, a lot of people probably don’t know we’re here because we’ve only advertised in the local paper, and that only circulates in Big Stone. Two, avid readers will be used to buying their books online, so why should they support some new store run by people they don’t know? Because as near as I can tell, you’re not a Big Stoner unless your grandfather was born here. Three, there’s this sort of weirdness in the region; people disparage it even if they’re from here. Everyone keeps telling us there aren’t enough people who can read to support a bookstore, and that something like half the population graduates from high school. Is that even true?”

  Teddy’s mouth made a little moue. “More like 60 percent. Graduating, that is. Go on.”

  “Four, even if everybody in town who likes to read did shop with us, that’s still a maximum of five thousand people, and not everybody buys a book every day. So if we get half the customers for books in Big Stone, that’s just not that many people. And five, if you’re not from Big Stone, people seem to think you’ve come here to do some unspecified evil rather than just, oh, say, open a bookshop? How am I doing so far?”

  She smiled. “I think you’ve hit the low points.”

  “Okay, so in essence we’ve got locals who won’t shop with us because we’re not locals, and we’ve got the rest who won’t shop with us because they think shopping local is beneath them. Now how do we get past any of that?” I asked her, counting on her years of accumulated wisdom in the nation’s capital.

  Teddy’s smile lingered as she leaned across the table and drummed her perfectly manicured fingernails lightly in front of me. “You know what, honey? Most people make a business plan before they start.”

  She had a point.

  Teddy was too diplomatic to add that most people also didn’t waltz into an area known for being insular and just assume everybody would love and trust them from day one. The shop did have a handful of regular customers, plus a slowly growing list of people discovering us for the first time. Once people found us, they tended to return, and their telling others had been what we’d counted on to grow our customer pool. It wasn’t so much that people weren’t talking us up, just that this buzz hadn’t generated enough volume to keep up with our grocery bill. We needed more customers, faster than public opinion was dragging them in. Well, that, or we needed to eat a lot less. Our word-of-mouth advertising “plan”—more wishful thinking, really—had half succeeded (Jack’s take) and half failed (mine; I’m not certain optimist/pessimist couples should be granted marriage licenses).

  Of course, among those that did hear about us from local buzz, some would see no reason to change their current routine—which could have been anything from not reading to ordering their books online to driving to Kingsport (a town about forty-five minutes away) to the Books-A-Million. The natural suspicion of a new store before it catches on is somewhat enhanced in a small town, where the “are you from here?” factor adds to reticence. How could we entice readers away from online or out-of-town shopping, and also let interested customers know we were here?

  Firing up the computer, I googled “publicize with no money, how to” and soon found a site offering advice to small retailers. What I read chilled my blood. To this day, I am grateful that Jack had no idea that a rule-of-thumb formula existed to compute retail success by population and geography. Had that magic calculation been known that cork-popping day in Little Mexico, we might have drifted downstream a little longer.

  My hubby was in the bathroom when I knocked on its heavy wooden door with the news: a bookstore in its inaugural year should expect in dollars about one-fifth the number of the population in its advertising region. A pause followed, and then Jack’s voice came, taut as a fiddle string. “Big Stone Gap is a town of five thousand people.”

  “So the expert opinion is that we’ll make a thousand dollars this year, unless we can advertise more widely than town.”

  Running water muffled his response, but it s
ounded like “eff the effing experts” and a suggestion of “spit for brains.” The door flew open. “Start thinking,” Jack ordered.

  It’s part of our couplehood mojo that I’m the eccentric thinker who creates harebrained schemes, Jack the sensible partner who evaluates their workability. I sat down at the table, stared at “$1,000” written across the top of my notepad, and thought hard.

  Although the town housed five thousand, the within-sensible-driving-distance-of-the-store population reached sixty-five thousand across three conjoining counties. They had never heard of us out there and, short of a bullhorn from the car window on some back roads, they weren’t likely to. We couldn’t afford to drive through every county looking for the Laundromat and clinics that had corkboards to pin up flyers, even if they let us. I had learned the hard way—namely, someone chasing me down, yelling, “You can’t post that here!”—that Wise County businesses couldn’t post flyers on Lee County bulletin boards. I think it has something to do with the rivalry between high school football teams.

  We’d bought one ad in the Post, the weekly newspaper covering Big Stone Gap, before opening. And after we opened, one of our most common conversations with people discovering the shop—usually by seeing Jack’s sign in our yard or hearing about us from a friend—was:

  Them: We had no idea you were here!

  Us: Did you see the ad in the paper?

  Them: The Times? No.

  A major newspaper in the region published in nearby Kingsport and covered the rural counties of Southwest Virginia. But we learned this after we had drained our advertising budget with the Post ad. Teri and Gary’s credit-for-copies swap remained all we could afford for a while.

  It is far too tempting for a new business to count on overachieving. Jack and I had done just that, opening on a bloody whim with no idea how little we would make or how long it takes to build clientele. Advice centers around the country warn that 75 percent of small businesses fail in their first three years. All this data swarmed through my head like the horrid beasties from Pandora’s mythical box.