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

by Wendy Welch

  E-readers will mess up that intellectual pub/church, soft-eyed slow breathing phenomenon as they reduce the bookstore population. Where are folks going to get the same space in which to relax? Where will those who need to talk be heard in cyberspace? People need their third spaces, and if e-readers get too uppity, they could reduce the number of such safe houses available.

  I doubt that e-readers could eliminate the whole herd, though, to mix and mutilate a metaphor. Consider that a predator usually takes down some of the weaker creatures around the edges, not the strong ones in the middle. E-readers, in contrast, seem more likely to kill the strong than the weak. Borders went, but not the little independent shop across town. If the strength of a store rests primarily in its ability to get the best deals by buying bulk and passing those savings on to customers, then it has a problem when the online market opens up cheap and easy acquisition without the middleman or -woman. But if the strength of a store rests in the proprietor’s ability to spend time with each customer, to help them find what they want and match disposable income to adequate pricing, or to just listen to them, well, these are enduring qualities. And except for price matching, they are human qualities.

  Store owners—at least until they can be replicated online—are why I think small bookstores will be around even when the last leviathan disappears, harpooned by an e-reader. Physical brick-and-mortar bookshops are watering holes for human intellects and spirits. E-readers and books bought online don’t let you tell the story of why you wanted to buy them. Amazon neither knows nor cares that you want a red-hot romance to distract your friend during chemo; that the book of wedding cake designs you seek is because you’re going to make one for your daughter-in-law-to-be since her parents can’t afford to put on the wedding, but you’ve never made such a thing before and you’re scared to death. Small and independent shop owners care. We’re good listeners. That’s probably because we’re humans, just like the people who shop with us. Perhaps someday computers will be good listeners, too. Hmm; will that make the world more like heaven or hell?

  When customers start conversations, be it about their last relationship, their jerk boss, or their aspirations as artists, they are like the people in Farenheit 451, living books who must tell you their stories or die. And the book they want to discuss is one that’s written on them, inside them, hidden from the rest of humanity. They don’t want to pontificate on the great themes of literature, but to tell you the great themes of their lives. The personalities of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy are not their target; they want you to understand why their family is a mess. It’s not the process of writing but of being human they explore, explain, question. We’re all of us running the gauntlet from articulate to desperate, Quixotes tilting at our particular windmills, Psyches searching for our one and only Cupid. Perhaps the nicest thing bookstore owners do for the world is not sell people stories, but listen to people’s stories.

  When we listen to each other, we validate each other. As near as I can tell, everyone in the world wants and needs validation. Mom-and-pop booksellers are different from the box stores and the computers; because we’re not just selling to be selling; we’re selling to keep the connections between storytellers, storied lives, and story readers active.

  And that connection is why we will be—why we must be—standing small and proud in your children’s future. Do you know the Aesop’s fable about the oak and the reed? The oak offered to protect the reed from a coming storm, but the wind cracked the oak at its roots and blew it over. As it floated past, the oak called out how surprising it was that its mightiness had not withstood the storm, yet that wimpy little reed still stood by the side of the river. The reed called back that being small and flexible sometimes proved wiser than being the biggest.

  Customers love being treated like individuals almost as much as they love good prices—although if you’ve been to a big-box store lately, you may join me in a growing concern that we as a nation have sacrificed the first for the second. Independent bookstores—be their stock preloved or new—may become thinner on the ground, start selling e-books and sandwiches to make ends meet, have to consider carefully what we ask people to pay … but we’re not dying. We’re not even coughing, just doing what mom-and-pops have done for generations: tracking market trends on the big screen and listening to customer needs in the neighborhood, then flexing to meet them while being polite and human and good listeners.

  CHAPTER 18

  Last Cowboy

  When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.

  —Abraham Joshua Heschel

  A PLEASANT BUT RUGGED MAN whose name we didn’t know came in every week or two and browsed the Westerns and war section (what we call Guys with Big Guns). One day he emerged with three torrid romance novels that had been misplaced. Set in the Wild West though they were, their author was one of the great bodice-rippers (buckskin-rippers?) of all time. Yet because they’d been stuck in Westerns, this rather manly man bought them happily—something I feel certain he wouldn’t have done had he seen them in romances.

  Those particular copies were hardbacks missing their dust covers, so the usual picture of an improbably proportioned redhead bent backward over the supporting limb of (pick one) a tall mustached man wearing a leather vest and chaps/a tall, dark, and bronze bare-chested man wearing feathers and fringed buckskin/a horse wasn’t in evidence. That’s probably why Jack put them in the wrong place. (You didn’t think I was going to cop to that, did you?)

  After the customer had gone, we moved more of that author’s books to Westerns, but just those that didn’t have overt romance covers. He bought them all next visit.

  The dude was happy; he liked her writing. We were happy; we’d sold several titles from a fairly prolific older author to someone who genuinely liked them without embarrassing our customer. The rush of happy endorphins from matching the right books with the right people fuels bookshop owners; it provides our natural high.

  Despite temptation, I learned not to make too much fun of Westerns after a customer and his daughter showed me what they could mean to another person’s spirit.

  A diffident, slight man with the improbable nickname of “Wee Willie” shopped regularly with us. His nickname alone should have been enough to arouse sympathy, but Wee Willie could talk the hind leg off a donkey, a pair of horses, and an entire herd of antelope. The guy never stopped. From the moment he entered the shop with his customary “Hey, y’all! How’s life?” until he backed out the door with a week’s supply of reading material, Willie talked.

  “I got me a new computer, gotta figure out how to start it up and then I’m in business! Not business, I mean, not like y’all, but I mean my own business, not a home business, but the stuff I gotta take care of at home, you know, paperwork and all that, gotta get that done. My daughter’s helping me get it set up, the computer. She’s got her own business, she’s a veterinarian. When she was little I’d allus say, ‘Now you be gentle with animals, honey. Never trust anyone’s not good to an animal.’ Boy, I like dogs. Why I’d as soon kick my own mother as kick a dog. Had me a little dog, last year, she died from cancer. I didn’t know dogs got cancer ’til my daughter said. Boy, I was tore up. Not like I cried or nothing but it sure did hurt me. Not hurt like physical, I mean, I was in the war, I got shot and that hurt, but you know what I mean.”

  I’d learned some time ago to let him flow while giving polite, smiling, monosyllabic answers that didn’t offer any foothold into a new subject. The thing that kept his listeners from pushing Wee Willie off a cliff was his good-natured soul. Willie’s innate kindness radiated to everything and everyone around him. Willie always patted our two dogs over the fence before coming into the shop, stroked Beulah and called her a beautiful girl, thanked us for opening the first bookstore ever in his hometown. He just couldn’t talk about one subject for more than a minute, or stop talking longer than ten seconds.

  “I like books, boy, I like books, and I can afford to buy �
��em, you know what I mean, I ain’t bragging or nothing but I had me a good job and now I’m retired and I can buy the books I want, you know. I got the money, not like you, ma’am, with your good education an’ all, but I done all right. Worked forty-two years as a maintenance man and I done all right.”

  Always clean and happy, Wee Willie sported in summer a sleeveless undershirt and a baseball cap with Bermuda shorts. In winter his long gray overcoat never revealed its secrets. An infectious smile remained his biggest accessory. He could grin to rival the moon’s rays.

  If only he would grin without talking, I thought, absolving myself with the Southern get-out-of-jail-free card for uncharitable speech by adding, Bless his heart.

  We planned a party to celebrate the shop’s five-year anniversary, and began inviting favorite customers. Wee Willie never signed up for our e-mail list, so Jack gave him the flyer reserved for those we felt should be honored with attending this special occasion.

  Willie looked at the birthday cake on the invitation. “Whose birthday?” he asked. “Oh gee, never mind, I’ll just read it, silly me, it’ll be great, I’ll see you on the day. I love parties, I’ll make sure to bring the doggies some treats and thanks again for inviting me. I been to lots of parties, of course, but they’re allus fun. It’s so fun to come here. Y’all are some of my favorite people and I ain’t just saying that, I mean it, y’all are so nice and I just love coming here. Well now, I better get on down the road. See you then!” He waved the flyer and backed out the door, talking.

  About a month later, in the season between Thanksgiving and Christmas, a tall woman with black hair to her waist walked into the shop and asked if we took books as donations. I said of course, but we would give book credit if she preferred.

  She shook her head. “The books aren’t mine and I live in Charlottesville,” she said. “My dad didn’t have many books, but there’s maybe two boxes. I don’t know if you can use them or not. They’re old, but hardly touched at all.”

  I recognized a death-in-the-family scenario as I helped her bring in the small stash.

  “There’s not much to Dad’s collection, nothing sentimental or that I’d care to read myself, but I hated to just throw them away, and the VA already got the rest.”

  “Your dad was a veteran,” I remarked, setting down a box and digging inside: a pristine set of Shakespeare’s works, hardbound in cheap red covers. We saw a lot of these; somebody must have been door-to-door selling in the seventies. A King James Bible, a copy of War and Peace, Owen Wister’s The Virginian. An encyclopedia set circa 1960.

  I explained our free book policy and suggested that was the place for the encyclopedias. “A lot of local women like to make book angels for Christmas, so they’ll be glad to pick up hardbacks now.” I smiled with an apologetic little bookseller’s shrug, as if to say, What else can one do with old encyclopedias?

  The woman smiled back with sad eyes. “Dad used them for shelf decoration, too.”

  “Computers have changed a lot of things,” I responded, checking the Shakespeare set for silverfish.

  She shook her head. “He had one, but never really learned to use it. I was always going to come up one day and help him get started.” She shrugged. “Busy time. Too late.” Her voice cracked under suppressed pain.

  I’ll never know if that would have been enough to make me realize who she was, because just then I flipped open the cover of the King James. Spidery script spelled out “Presented to William—.”

  It hit like a Taser jolt.

  My head flew up. “You’re not … is Wee Willie…?”

  She smiled, regaining control. “My daddy. You remember him! He loved this place. Came down almost every week, but I guess you know that. He’d always call and tell me about how nice you two were, how pretty the cat was, Bella, is that her name? He loved visiting. Had a heart attack. Guess you didn’t hear.”

  “We loved having him,” I replied, begging God to understand as I embraced Willie’s bereaved daughter. “I’m so sorry.”

  She nodded, swallowing as professional women do when they don’t want to lose it, so I turned the conversation back to business. “Are there any more books to bring in? Wee—your dad bought a lot of Westerns from us over the years, and those are really popular.”

  Something—pallor, shadow, a cloud of confusion—cast itself over the room. She squinted at me, eyes wrinkled in a way so similar to Willie’s that a lump rose in my throat, catching me off guard. I should have been nicer to the little guy. What else did he have besides reading?

  I babbled on. “Assuming you don’t want to keep his Westerns. Perhaps they’re sentimental. He loved them so. As I’m sure you know. Knew. Know. Sorry.”

  “Daddy loved Westerns,” she said in a measured tone, as if trying to determine whether the words were true.

  “Yes,” I said in assurance, but she shook her head, exasperated.

  “I know he did.” Asperity tinged her voice. “He loved to watch them on TV. But I didn’t realize you didn’t know. He never would have told you. He was so proud of having friends like you. Educated. He was big on education. Look at me. He put me through college.”

  Was that noise she made a laugh or a sob? “Daddy couldn’t read. He’d come here to buy books for the VA. He must have given them a couple hundred.”

  My mouth opened, but my jaw worked without sound. When the power of speech returned, I heard myself say, “Bless his heart. Um, if there’s anything we can do.” The words fell, lame and pathetic, against the wall of her grief.

  She reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “You did it already. You and your husband gave Daddy dignity these last years. He loved coming here. Bless your hearts. Bye now.”

  And that was that. Wee Willie never came talking through the door again. But that Christmas we asked another customer with connections to the VA to take a box of donations there in Wee Willie’s honor. We picked out covers Wee Willie would have liked: men holding guns and snarling, yet looking nobler and gentler than one might expect, and I cried the whole time.

  Maybe the best we can do for each other in our small ways is still better than the big guns ever will. Could a computer have seen in those covers what Wee Willie did? Would a box store have given him dignity?

  CHAPTER 19

  Living Large in a Small-Town Bookstore

  Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books—even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.

  —William Ewart Gladstone

  PEOPLE WHO LIKE TO READ love being in massed assemblages of books: bookstores, libraries, homes where the walls are lined with shelves and spines. Such places are magical. For me, I suppose this knowledge stems back to trips to the library as a kid, which were always celebrated events. Whether I took books home or not, I just loved the smell, the touch, the sight of all those stacks towering to the sky. (I was short.)

  The library I frequented was attached to an old house used as storage and administrative space, connected to the more prosaic cinder-block-and-fluorescent-lights building via a ramp and a rather forbidding industrial door with one small window much too high for a child. From my first visit as a preschooler to my last before moving away as a college student, I wanted to make a mad dash for that ramp, ducking under grasping librarians, rushing up, away into that house where—I just knew—the Mad Hatter held his everlasting tea party, Bilbo Baggins sat in front of a glowing hearth ready to talk of adventure, and Pickles the Fire Cat waited for me to scratch his ears. I just had to get past the librarian guards—something I never managed. On some days, I still fantasize about going back to that library, explaining it all, and asking to pass through the forbidden door.

  But I’m old enough to know that the delicate porcelain figurines of imagination should not be hurled against the walls of reality. Better to keep one’s dreams intact and be happy with the memories of that long-ago real library. I still remember with a little ripple of pleasure ho
w fascinating it was to play games in the stacks. Pick a shelf. How many books with red covers? Divide by the number of books written by women, count that number of spines over from the top left, or middle bottom, and check that book out—unless it looked horrible, in which case I would cheat and take one next to it. (What’s the point of inventing a game if you can’t break the rules?)

  Such a little bookworm was I that searching for a particular book, or the place where certain subjects were corralled, felt almost as rewarding as actually checking one out. The hunt became its own thrill, regardless of whether prey actually got speared. I could read the fairy tales of every land at 398.2, and just up from there were books about exotic festivals I’d never heard of, let alone celebrated. (How did one pronounce “Eid”? my six-year-old self wondered.) Travel writers lurked around 912, but could pop up in other places as well. And in 780, I could even take out sheet music and play it on my piano at home. Plus there were the wild-card turn racks, display cases, and general fiction alphabetized by author. You could look up a favorite novelist, then investigate the people on either side just to see if they were interesting. I don’t think I have ever left a library without feeling a twinge of regret, a vague sense of panic that I’d missed something important, that stories, people, and ideas were still in there waiting for me to find them so they could tell me secrets.