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

by Wendy Welch

  She had a whole box of Nancy Drews with paper dust jackets, and unfortunately for her, she had put masking tape stickers on them specifying a quarter each. Usually we get the yellow spines of the seventies book clubs, or even the sturdy pink ex-library copies that generations of girls recognize and love from school. Those jacketed volumes with the masking tape that couldn’t be removed safely were early—if not first—editions, but the tape would tear that lovely soft old paper the instant we tried to remove it.

  The woman also had the Dana Girls in lavender dust jackets, which suggested they could be first editions as well. Both Dana and Drew were Stratemeyer Syndicate productions. The Syndicate created the pseudonym Carolyn Keene in 1930 and used ghostwriters until the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series closed in 2004. Dana Girls started in 1934, penned by Leslie McFarlane, a man who wrote the first four Danas before stating—as the publishing world’s legend has it—that he preferred starvation to writing another. He then moved on to authoring several Hardy Boys and a film-writing career in Canada.

  The Nancy Drew Lady didn’t know what she had, evidenced by the price stickers adorning those pretty—and valuable—covers. Alas, almost nothing in the book world is valuable with masking tape on it.

  I tried to break it to her gently. “Sell many of these today?”

  “About a dozen,” she responded, plunking the box on the table. “Little girls filling out their collections, mostly.”

  “Mmm.” That seemed sweet and innocent as an observation on her part. She was a nice lady. I had a good idea of what was about to happen—for some reason, the nicer they are, the harder they fall—so I double-checked the price online before taking the plunge. “Well, these Nancy Drews could be worth a bit.”

  Her eyes came alight. Uh-oh. “Really? How much?”

  “Not that this is what they would sell for around here, but one Web site has them at twenty-two dollars per title. But the masking tape—”

  I stopped under the force of her stare. Her mouth flew open as her gaze shifted to the box. I’d seen this Jekyll-Hyde flip many times. My lips formed the words alongside her as she said them aloud. “I sold them for twenty-five cents each.”

  Jack emerged from the mystery room at that moment, and frowned at me. My husband, a gentle soul from the Old World, considers mimicking customers bad form. He is much, much nicer than I am.

  “Well”—I lined the oft-delivered words up on the runway—“you couldn’t guarantee that they’d sell at that price anyway. In fact”—I segued smoothly into the second half of the bad news—“antique books don’t do well in this area. We’d sell these at three dollars each, the going price for Nancy Drews around here. Our clientele would be a lot like yours: little girls and their grandmothers, filling out their collections.” I wouldn’t bother explaining again about the masking tape undermining antique status.

  The lady swiveled to face me. “You mean you wouldn’t give me full value?”

  Sure, twenty-five cents. Aloud I said, “If you mean eleven dollars trade credit, no. That’s what an urban collector would have paid.” Before the masking tape.

  Her look sharpened. “I meant twenty-two dollars.”

  My husband, making tea in the kitchen, chuckled. So much for heart-of-gold Old World gentility.

  “We don’t deal in antique books. You might try taking them to an antique shop or book dealer.” I continued smiling, polite and subservient. The antiques guy could talk to her about masking tape.

  “How much commission would they charge me?” Her voice cracked like a whip.

  “I’m not really up on antique selling. I’d recommend you call someone in the business and ask.” How should I know, lady? Besides, they’ve got masking tape on them!!! My patience ebbed. I made a conscious effort to deepen my smile, but it probably looked like growling.

  She didn’t notice. “Hmm. This doesn’t seem fair. If they’re worth twenty-two dollars each, and I leave them with you, I’d only get eleven dollars in trade credit.” No you wouldn’t, I opened my mouth to say, exasperated beyond diplomacy, but she was in full-throttle steam-propulsion mode. “That’s not realistic. What about a 10 percent commission?”

  “Ma’am, there is no market for antique books in this area. We don’t sell them.” What part of no didn’t you understand?

  Her face clouded darker than a thunderstorm. “Why not?”

  Oy vey. But I gave her the reasons—well, most of them. “We have a limited amount of space. People interested in old books are usually from out of town, not our regular clientele, and we can’t predict their interest with any regularity. We can’t afford to take chances on selling antiques in a store that doesn’t have long-term climate control for them. They’re a specialty market, like on eBay.” MASKING TAPE!!!

  Oops. I spilled the e-word. As her face brightened, I knew what she would ask. Sure enough, behind a bookshelf where she couldn’t see him, my husband lip-synched along with her. “Could you sell them for me on eBay?” He cracked up silently at the perfection of his foreknowledge as she continued, “You can keep”—her eyelids and fingers fluttered as she did rapid math—“three dollars per book.” She gave me a triumphant yet calculating look. “That’s what you would have charged anyway.”

  Oh, she was listening. My husband sipped a mug of tea and raised his eyebrows at me. I stared hard at the mug and sent brain waves for him to pour me one and add a little brandy.

  “Unfortunately, eBay doesn’t always yield prices sellers might expect. We’ve done that in the past and not gotten what people anticipated. Just because AbeBooks—that’s a Web site for antique books [don’t go there, my mind shouted]—says twenty-two dollars doesn’t mean they’d sell for that, and whether they sell or not, there’s still a cost to list them, so we’ve stopped doing commissions. But of course you can list them yourself.” I tried to keep a rising note of hope from my voice. Maybe she’d leave now.

  She turned a face deep in calculation toward me. “I can’t do eBay; my husband won’t let me.”

  No fool, he.

  “Tell me how I could best realize the full value of these books,” she commanded, placing a proprietary hand on her box of masking-taped golden opportunity. A small cloud of dust rose. She snatched the hand away.

  From the kitchen, my spouse muttered, “Open your own bookshop.” I sneezed as the dust reached my nose, so she didn’t hear him. Nobody in town would have believed it anyway. My husband is a saint. I’m the one who loses my cool. Weakly, I repeated that she should visit an antique dealer. Exit the lady, Nancy Drews under one arm. She left a crate of Harlequins for trade credit.

  So it isn’t all sweetness and sympathy. You really have to like people to run a used book shop, or you’ll wind up smacking somebody.

  CHAPTER 13

  Running an Unlicensed Intellectual Pub

  Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.

  —Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack River

  GUERRILLA BARGAINERS WERE SIMPLY ANNOYING, while we’d come to a compassionate understanding of bereavement and book clearance. But we hadn’t yet seen how bookstores connected to house fires and prisons, or understood how often people would want to tell us about family feuds and other personal matters. Had we known about these elements before setting up shop, I might have dashed out to beg my way into a psychology course first. For most things in life, there’s common sense; for everything else, there’s a graduate program.…

  One of our favorite bookshops back in Scotland sat above an Indian restaurant. In addition to the lovely Madras and Vindaloo smells wafting up, Betsy, the proprietor, could have been ordered from a catalog of stock-and-trade colorful local characters. A small round woman with white hair and a posh Edinburgh accent, Betsy often told us, years before we opened our own shop, that browsing was a special pleasure customers looked forward to in a bookstore. She said that “a used book store operator is many things: counselor, literary critic, research guru, manager,
shelf stocker, cleaner, coffeemaker, child protective services agent, custodian, and, oh yes, salesperson. So wait until the customer tells you what’s needed; maybe all they want is a browse. If they want something else, they’ll make it clear to you.”

  We found Betsy’s advice invaluable in later years. One day a new customer entered the store, looked around a few minutes, then walked up to Jack and launched the following conversation:

  PERSON: Wow, cool, a bookstore! How long y’all been here?

  JACK: About two years—

  PERSON: Wow, what kind of accent is that?

  JACK: Scottish. I’m from—

  PERSON: Wow, cool! My family’s from Ireland. I’m gonna visit there someday. Tell me about Ireland.

  JACK: Well, I’m not—

  PERSON: I hear it’s beautiful.

  JACK [giving up]: Yes, lovely. Green hills, rolling landscapes, the coastline is—

  PERSON: Wow, cool! Got any books on turtles?

  JACK [to Wendy]: Do we have books on turtles?

  WENDY: We have books on everything! [a blatant lie; at the time we had about sixteen thousand books] Do you mean fiction, facts on them in the wild, or the Christian children’s book Janette Oke wrote about turtles?

  PERSON [eyes glazing]: Uh, my daughter got a turtle for her birthday. It lives in a tank in her bedroom.

  WENDY [pointing to nonfiction]: We have a couple of books on aquatic animal care. Let me show you.

  PERSON: Wow, great. We got her the turtle after her mom took off. We thought it would help her cope, you know, give her something to look after.

  This kind of information leakage happens all the time. Sometimes it’s funny; sometimes it’s not. Customers tell us about fights with cancer, nasty exes, beautiful grandchildren, despicable bosses, coping with life’s big moments, stupid relatives, stupid relatives, stupid relatives, and how they intend to marry or kill so and so. People need to talk. We’re the bartenders to whom everyone tells their troubles in this intellectual pub. Let them talk. Perhaps it makes the world a better place. At worst, it gets things out of their systems.

  As it stands, when people reveal any form of neediness in the shop, they’re stuck with our more or less benevolent ineptitude. Jack and I have different gifts regarding customers. I’ve got a great memory for faces, so I greet people by name. Jack is crap at remembering names, let alone faces, so he just smiles at everyone and asks, “Been in before?” in that gorgeous Scots burr. Guess which one they like better? Sigh. We ask customers if they want coffee or tea, point out the shortbread, and leave them alone until they start asking questions.

  About four months after we opened, a woman we’d never seen before came in searching for a handful of fairly eclectic titles: Communion by Whitley Strieber, an out-of-print book called Small Holdings, an Ann Rule true crime paperback, and several classics. I stacked these on the table and left her to peruse. By turns quiet and garrulous, she talked over me as I started to answer her questions, ignoring my answers. Truth be told, she seemed … odd.

  The woman sat down to assess her gathered armful, ignoring our offers of tea and queries as to whether she had enough light.

  “Do you have The Tao of Pooh?” she snapped.

  Miffed at her tone, I fetched it. As I handed it over, tears pooled in her eyes.

  Jack looked at me. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

  “Um, everything okay?” I asked, offering a tissue.

  She scrubbed her eyes. “I lost these books. I’m replacing them.”

  “Sure, lost,” I said, clueless.

  She looked up at me; it was almost a glare. “Do I want to tell you this?” she asked, as if no one else were in the room. “Okay, but you asked for it. My house burned down. I lost everything. My dogs, three of them, burned. Everything burned. I’m replacing the books I lost.” She looked back down at her stack.

  Eeep. I sat down at the table and toyed with the sugar-bowl lid. “Well,” I said, “that sucks.”

  The woman gave a half smile. “Yeah. It does.”

  When she’d made her final selections, we gave her The Tao of Pooh free of charge. “Everyone needs a little help rebuilding.”

  “I didn’t tell you the story so you’d give me a discount,” she barked. Jack rolled his eyes and disappeared into his man-cave. Beulah’s not the only one with boltholes.

  “No, we know that,” I said, dropping the books into a bag. “Everybody deserves a break now and then. Look after yourself.”

  She didn’t leave. Instead I made some more tea and we sat in the shop for two hours while she told the story—a horrific story, so you don’t need to know it. Suffice it to say, she lanced the wound that day, letting out pent-up poison.

  And that was that, we thought. We’d given a woman coping with serious trauma a book. But she became the first of many. Due to the rural nature of the mountain bowl surrounding us, fires are a regular hazard. Even though we have a county—nay, region—full of the best volunteer firefighters in the world, if something up on the mountain starts burning, it’s going to finish before anybody can get up one of those narrow switch-backed roads to save it. At least once a quarter, someone comes into our shop seeking replacements for titles lost in a fire.

  Did you know that one of the first things a fire victim replaces is their favorite book from childhood? We didn’t until a man asked for Syd Hoff’s Danny and the Dinosaur, and Jack said something about children loving that classic.

  “For me,” the man said, without a trace of emotion. “Lost it when my house burned. Had it since I was a boy. Want another one.”

  A man told us about his teacher reading the class Beautiful Joe. A woman described climbing her grandparents’ apple tree to devour Heidi; another had grown up pretending to be Sara Crewe in A Little Princess, waiting for her father to find her. Then they described the fires in which they lost each book—and a whole lot more.

  We give fire victims one of their chosen books for free. There isn’t much else anyone can do. And I’ve found the outer edges of my inner strength. Ye gods and little fishhooks, fire stories have horrors that humans shouldn’t hear, let alone live. But they keep coming, so we keep putting the kettle on. Another lesson for bookshop owners: “Learn how to listen yet let it pass through you.” Thanks to some therapist friends, I have finally acquired that tough skill. But it wasn’t part of our anticipated job description.

  The fire victims’ sad recountings were hard to listen to, although loss and pain should be respected. But with the professional shoppers, we reached the limits of our patience. Professional shoppers are akin to guerrilla bargainers, but rather than the people who hold the garage sales (like the Nancy Drew Lady) they are the hagglers and bargain hunters who frequent them—like Fiona and me.

  As word got out about our trade-in policy, professional shoppers who frequented yard sales started bringing in books, intending to sell them for a profit. Since I had bought quite a lot of our opening inventory at such events, I knew by now what worked and what didn’t. Plus I could recognize the signs of items bought on the cheap, including masking-tape damage. Usually people understood if we said a book didn’t suit our shop, and we rarely refused books unless they were just too old or too damaged. But as the years passed and we gathered quite the collection of Cornwalls, Grishams, and Silhouette or Harlequin romances, we stopped taking some of the most common titles and authors. That’s when we found out the word “no” didn’t appear in everyone’s vocabulary.

  A young man we’ll call “Jim” fell in love with an out-of-print book culled from our personal collection, brought over from Britain. He asked us to set it aside for him. Back in the early days of the shop we had no restrictions on our trade policy; you brought us books, a dollar amount got written into the ledger under your name, and you could spend it cross-genre on whatever you wanted. This was a mistake we corrected after Jim.

  Jim began bringing us romances bought for ten cents at sales, price stickers still on them. At that time we stuck to our po
licy and accepted them in trade at twenty-five cents credit value, then later wound up selling them for three for a dollar. Not good math. (Have I mentioned before that we didn’t know what we were doing when we started?)

  The book Jim wanted cost fifty dollars. You guessed it; he brought us two hundred romances over two weeks. We gave him the out-of-print, British-publisher-only antique volume and he walked out happy while we crammed two hundred Harlequins from the 1980s and 1990s onto a shelf.

  Not only had we given away a valuable book, we’d created a monster. He kept bringing books scavenged in yard sales, picked up in thrift stores, even—as he bragged to someone else who told us later—found in the trash. Some of those little paperbacks were in dire condition, and we began to refuse a few of the worst. The pile of paperbacks we told him he couldn’t receive credit for grew with each successive visit. Finally we gave up on the “this is the last time” speech and just point-blank explained that we could not accept the stuff he’d brought.

  To our surprise Jim politely but firmly told us these latest trades were just like what he’d been bringing for weeks, that he expected the same treatment he’d been receiving to date, and that we’d better not mess with him because he knew people.

  Book mobsters? In the Gap? Who knew?

  To be fair to Jim, there was a lot going on in his life. To be fair to ourselves, we didn’t want to be part of it. He continued his slow smolder and we continued stonewalling until he finally stopped bringing in trades. I can’t say that we were sorry.

  It’s not that professional garage salers are a bad lot on the whole—we like Fiona just fine and she never annoyed anyone, weaving her magic on various lawns. But some people will consider a used book store tantamount to their personal cash cow. A small handful of customers have proven resolute about not spending money with us, and likely wouldn’t see this as detrimental to the fact that they enjoy having the store in town in the first place. It’s like people who cruise new book stores for titles, then go home and buy them off Amazon. They want the cheapest price they can get, and don’t see the effects their buying habits have on local stores—or why that should matter to them.