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

by Wendy Welch

  But Hope lived in that box, too. And although the story never mentioned her, I’m certain that Hope’s little sister, Tenacity, also hung around. She sat on my shoulder that day and together we started on that long-overdue plan to actually run a bookstore.

  What did we have to work with? Unlimited photocopies, the qualified good wishes of a small but growing clientele—even if they were taking bets on whether we’d last—a reliable car, and our energetic selves. What did we need? People. People with at least a little bit of discretionary income, who liked to read. Lots of them.

  A cunning idea formed. When Jack heard it, he put his head in his hands and sighed.

  “Don’t you think it could work?” I asked, voice brittle with anxiety.

  “Aye, it will work. That’s what’s so bloody annoying; there’s no way for me to get out of doing it. I’ll fetch my coat.”

  My devoted spouse spent the slushy gray Saturdays of December standing at the front doors of the Super Walmart two towns over. Serving the three-county population, the big box store shepherded a hefty number of people through its portals each weekend. Two aisles of books bedecked its front central lobe. Anyone buying printed matter in our area did so at Walmart, and those nice readers just needed to know we were here.

  We printed bookmarks, five to the page, on Teri’s copier, giving hours, location, and trade policy. They were small for two reasons: cost-effectiveness and being able to pocket them if anyone reported Jack’s activity. I gambled that people would be curious enough about a bookstore not to turn him in to the Wal-guards. It was probably illegal and Jack nearly froze to death, but a thousand bookmarks went out each weekend, and our sales tripled. The phone started ringing with calls like this one:

  “Good afternoon. This is the bookstore.”

  “Hi, that the new bookstore?”

  “It is. What can I help you with?”

  “I’ve got like a zillion textbooks from my college days. I was an engineering major. I hate to just chuck them out, but my parents need the space. Would you take them?”

  “Sure! What’s your name so I can start a credit slip?”

  “No, I don’t want credit. I live in New Jersey. I’m just down for a funeral; my grandma died.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. She’d been sick for years and hated everybody. So I’ll bring these boxes by? My mom’s so happy to be clearing out my old room.”

  That afternoon Tim, a man in his late forties, dumped four boxes of books on the porch, shook our hands, and wished us well. (Tim became one of what Jack calls our “semiannual regulars,” people who don’t live in town but who always drop in on us when they visit relatives.) Through Tim, we entered the wonderful world of textbook appraisal, a plane of existence akin to the Twilight Zone. What holds value, and why, is a long hard slog of study interspersed with idiosyncrasies, but here’s the cheat sheet version if you’re interested: history books outdate the day after they’re written; math and chemistry hold their value the longest; sociology is a mixed bag; and it doesn’t matter what date is on the English anthology, because nobody wants it except the lady with all the cats who lives at the edge of town. That’s the skinny on textbooks.

  But the gentleman discarding college baggage wasn’t the only caller. One snowy January day I answered the phone and a lady said without preamble, “I met a man at Walmart, I guess he was your husband? He’s from Ireland.”

  “Scotland, yes. He—”

  “Now listen, he gave me a slip of paper that says there’s a bookstore in Big Stone Gap. Is that right?”

  “Yes, ma’am. We’ve just been open a few months. We’re—”

  “Well, whoda thunk it? Big Stone! Listen, do you have any Danielle Steels?”

  “Loads.” (Short answers seemed prudent.)

  “Well, I’ll be right down.”

  Lulu, the owner of that preemptive voice, slammed through our front door twenty minutes later. A salt-of-the-earth character who rarely lets anyone around her finish a sentence, Lulu would become a fixture in our lives, appearing every few weeks with a friend in tow. She must have introduced twenty people to our shop in the first year alone.

  In short, the Walmart caper worked. “Effing experts,” said Jack later, reviewing the month’s sales figures with satisfaction as he sipped a hot toddy.

  So we broke the rules and got away with it, not just via Operation Walmart but by opening a business without capital to keep it going. We got lucky. A couple of years ago, a family started a coffee shop in Wise, a college town near that infamous Walmart. On a main street and near the county courthouse, it looked like a shoo-in, so the family didn’t let heavy rents deter them. Throwing wide the doors with enough operating capital for a month, they scraped by happy as clams with their small but steadily increasing profits—prophetic of the stability to come, we all thought, cheering them on as they hit the three-month mark.

  And then a winter storm shut down the region. Power stayed off four long days as people huddled in their homes. The family lost everything in the freshly stocked freezer. Unable to cobble together enough money to buy new supplies, they couldn’t make their rent and had to give up. Good people, sensible people who might have made it with enough money for another month’s inventory, or if the storm hadn’t ruined their existing stock.

  As Americans, we’re always getting told, “Follow your bliss.” Sure, but not into blind alleys. Jack and I got lucky, and when we figured out it had been luck, we got busy.

  CHAPTER 5

  Holy Grails Full of Frass

  The human heart has hidden treasures,

  In secret kept, in silence sealed;—

  The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures,

  Whose charms were broken if revealed.

  —Charlotte Brontë, “Evening Solace”

  AFTER “THE ADVERTISING PLAN THAT wasn’t,” we assessed quickly what skills we needed to run a bookshop. There’s a British saying, “Start as you mean to go on.” We hadn’t; we’d let the unexamined belief that desire equaled knowledge guide us. Time for a little reality check.

  Many elements of running a shop that sells reading material are common sense; for the rest, there’s the Internet. Jack hopped on and read about valuing first editions and repairing damaged books, choosing those first because many people in the early weeks entered the shop with one or the other clutched beneath one arm, asking us to buy them for cash. We didn’t know how to respond to such requests, other than the commonsense but not entirely friendly speech I gave once: “I’m sorry, sir, but that book has been chewed at the corner by a mouse, so first edition or not, I won’t give you one hundred dollars in trade credit for it.”

  The first time someone brought a rather handsome hardback to where I sat at the computer and asked if it were a first edition, I had no idea how to tell. With a bright smile, I suggested she browse and I would check “as soon as I finish what I’m doing.” Then I googled “first editions” the moment her back was turned.

  The Internet proved to be our new best friend in how to value the “rare” old titles, culled from an attic/basement/barn/toolshed/salvage store/dump. People brought them every week, often believing these “holy grails” would net a fortune big enough to finance a child’s college education. Sometimes a person just wanted to know the value, but sometimes he wanted to sell his find to us. We never charge to value any book. Put bluntly, valuations usually mean bad news, particularly if the volumes have been stored in heat, damp, or places riddled with varmints.

  Among the book lice, molds, mice, household pets, and other living things that devour and damage books, did you know that cockroaches are a top-ten pest? They love print so much that they even poop the written word as “frass.” What a nice word for cockroach crap. A book chewed by bugs will sport little oblong balls of frass in whatever color the spine and cover are. Those are feces, but most people who encounter frass don’t recognize what yon spots and balls mean. I have seen well-coiffed women in high h
eels sweep them off with their hands before opening a book.

  Unfortunately, Jack and I handle a lot of frass. We opened our store just as the economy tanked, so as the recession deepened, an increasing number of people wanted to sell their holy grails to us.

  Thelma and Louise, the aforementioned regular customers and thriller aficionados, showed up one day with a 1940s World Book encyclopedia set, which they hoped to turn into a lifetime supply of Kay Hooper paperbacks. “You know, in the middle of the war, no one knowing who would win, it must be valuable,” Thelma said hopefully.

  We showed them how many people were trying to jettison similar items on eBay. Thelma and Louise were disappointed, but took it with good humor. Since Christmas was just around the corner, I was getting ready to hold a class in how to make angels from old hardbacks, and they graciously donated their World Books for that—first reserving two volumes for their own use in making personalized angels.

  But people came every week bearing encyclopedias, 1890s reprints of classics, and book club editions of just about everything, plus books with mold, dog-chewed corners, bugs in the spine, and dead spiders in the pages. We saw them all, and a few ugly things besides. We valued the offerings via AbeBooks, Half.com, and Alibris, Web sites every bookseller knows intimately. We stayed off Amazon itself as long as we could, although they now own ABEBooks.

  Occasionally some first editions or otherwise expensive tomes do appear; in those rare instances where someone might really be clutching a holy grail, we suggest they seek real appraisal from an antiques dealer, as we choose not to deal in rare volumes. All this experience soon brought Jack a reputation as an honest and fair expert on antique books, and people began bringing more and more in, knowing we would value them for free.

  “That’s irony for you,” Jack said with a laugh. “Say you don’t want to deal in rare books, and people know you won’t cheat them.”

  When I asked if doing so many free consults bothered him, he shook his head. “First, it makes people think we know what we’re doing. And second, I’m delighted that we’ve developed a reputation for honesty. Folks trust us to tell them the truth. Third, it means customers are coming to the shop.”

  I watched him cope patiently when a persistent individual argued that customers in our shop would indeed pay $450 for a first edition of Little Women, even though we had a paperback copy on the shelf for fifty cents. But it grew hard to let people down gently. The holy grail traffickers either evoked sympathy because they were so nice and hopeful and needy, or provoked annoyance because they fought facts. I became expert at melting away if someone carrying a single volume wrapped in plastic started up our steps. Jack’s people skills outstripped mine, I reasoned, hiding upstairs as the familiar refrain began: “I found this in my dad’s shed when we were cleaning it out…”

  One day the door banged opened and Lulu entered, lugging a box. She set it down on the floor with a thump. Bits of dust and straw flew into the air as barnyard ordure wafted.

  “Got some real valuable books here,” she said with satisfaction. Since Jack was away recording his monthly run of radio programs, I was stuck, and peered into the box. Mouse droppings adorned the top. The corner of one paperback showed teeth marks. Mentally, I armed for combat.

  “Great! I’ll have a look if you like, but—”

  Displaying the largesse of a duchess Lulu gestured that this would be acceptable. Some of the loot looked like it might have once been good stuff: a Langston Hughes children’s picture book; a first-edition Hemingway, dust jacket in bad shape. Their barn sojourn had taken its toll. (Let me take this moment to beseech you to store your books well; they want to live in the same climate you do, not too hot or cold, neither too wet nor dry. Treat them as though they are relatives you like, and they will reward you by holding their value and resisting silverfish.)

  Lulu wandered the shop speaking loudly to no one in particular as I checked over her books. The Hughes was worth twenty dollars on Half.com, while the Hemingway—which I left in the box because it looked so mangy—was selling for two dollars on AbeBooks. I gave her the good news about Hughes first, intending to soften the blow.

  Her face fell. “That all?”

  Oh well.

  She held out the Hemingway, picking off a piece of mouse poop and dropping it to the floor. From the corner of my eye I saw Beulah trotting over at a brisk pace. “This’ll be worth a couple hundred, at least.”

  Saints preserve us.

  I took the book between finger and thumb, laid it on newspaper (not a good idea for a truly valuable hardback, but I hate touching mouse poop) and began to rifle its pages. Beulah jumped into the box of barn offal and started purring. At least one of us was happy.

  As I launched into an inane explanation I knew Lulu wouldn’t listen to about how book club editions were never worth much, my eyes fell on an unexpected object. Worked so deep into the spine it was almost invisible, an unused stamp showed Ben Franklin’s profile facing left on a blue background, surrounded by scrollwork. It had been a long time since my grade-school stamp club days, but adrenaline shot through me, cold and prickly beneath my flesh.

  “Gimme a sec, Lulu,” I said, sitting back down at the computer.

  “Whad’ya find?” she asked.

  I pointed to the stamp. She reached to pull it out.

  “Don’t touch it!” I shrieked, and Beulah leapt from her box and shot into the back room. Lulu yanked her hand back in fright, then skewered me with a reproachful look.

  “No need to yell,” she muttered, sitting down at the table with her back to me.

  Many interesting details about stamps were to come my way that day, including when they were first dated, received glue on their backs, and other fun trivia. Lulu had a stamp inside her mouse-pooped, disgusting book that philately Web sites called a Scott #134. They assigned it a value considerably higher than its 1870s price of one penny; one site suggested two thousand dollars.

  Lulu went home a happy camper. I have no idea what she did with that stamp. I just hope she didn’t use it on a letter.

  From that day forward, I tried to remember to rifle a book’s pages before selling it. We have found numerous photos and letters, some dull, some poignant (one from an adoptive mom telling the birth mother she could no longer see her biological son); ancient movie tickets and library notices and raffle sale stubs; funeral prayer cards we gave back to family members, sometimes tracking them across state lines; social security cards for (usually) deceased people; voter registrations for the living; traffic citations; old medical bills; programs for bygone plays, which we gave to local theaters; and money. Two dollars here, one dollar there, and once, to my husband’s joy, an English five-pound note. (We find money biannually, so don’t get excited.) Probably the oddest thing we’ve found in a book was a braided lock of hair, wrapped in an advertisement for a woman’s wig.

  Lulu’s stamp became an anomaly—and a cautionary tale—in the usual litany of “Sorry, it isn’t worth much,” but another important rule about running a bookstore was coming our way. Right after “learn to advertise” and “learn how to discern old books from beat-up ones,” was “learn that comeuppances never take long.”

  Jack’s knowledge about first edition and antique book valuing had been acquired on the fly, and of course fast expertise-building gives rise to overconfidence. (To test this theory, ask a college freshman about any historic period of Western civilization on which he’s just written a term paper.) Just as we were edging into condescension about all those grubby, falling-apart “rare” books, one special customer taught us to never take anything for granted.

  Dubbed Bob the Mad Irishman the minute we met him, he became one of our favorite customers, a fortysomething sweetheart of a guy without the sense God invested in geese. Bob moved here from further south, looking for handyman work. He considered himself the poet laureate of Ireland. The fact that he was neither a published poet nor from Ireland interfered not one iota with this confident self-knowl
edge.

  Jack and I admire those who don’t let reality get in their way, so we had a lot of time for Bob. This proved fortunate, because his poems were long and he read us one each time he stopped in. Every visit, Bob brought me a plastic rose from the dollar store. Black hair flopping into crystalline blue eyes, he smiled a crooked smile that showed the dimples in his rugged jawline as he tried to entice my husband to partake from the vodka flask he carried in his pickup. They often sat on the porch together, smoking. It became a ritual: the rose, the flask refusal by me and acceptance by Jack, the poem.

  Bob arrived once with a lady in tow, a nice woman I enjoyed meeting. On first glance, she was not a person one expected someone as pretty as Bob to be with. Round and gray, she looked as if she’d experienced a lot of life. She had a cheerful, lined face and discerning eyes. He introduced her as his “assistant.” She let that go until he went out on the porch for a cigarette, then set the record straight.

  “I let him stay in my spare room. He showed up at the library where I work, looking to get a card, and he couldn’t answer any of the questions. No fixed address. No employer. He looked like his dog died. So sad, like a little boy. What the hey, I took him home. Gotta live a little.”

  She’d gotten the story off him: the girl he adored had taken his diamond and his heart, but the rest of what Bob’s lady love needed, she acquired through snorting stuff up her nose. Apparently she inhaled most of his fortune before Bob gave up and left her—and the state.

  “I know what he is,” the free-spirited librarian said, “but I feel sorry for him and I like the company.” So Bob was a kept man.

  Besides the roses, sometimes he brought books, but never for credit. Bob wasn’t that kind of guy. He said they were gifts for us, given to him by places where he worked on repairs. My personal favorite was the 1890s illustrated book club edition of The Three Musketeers: worthless but beautiful, if you catch my drift. But when Bob wanted to own anything from our bookstore, he’d throw fifty-dollar bills on the counter and say, “Let me know when that’s used up.” It was his way.