by Wendy Welch
So why take the chance on putting my whiny, neo-bitchy, self-centered prose about living the bibliophilic dream out there? I think writers write because it’s a device to make sense of what’s happening around us, to order and calm and clarify our thoughts. We scribble down flashes of insight, observations, ideas because we believe other people will identify with us, understand what we think, feel the same way about something, or even—oh great arrogance—benefit from what we have to relate.
Because it’s fun.
I wrote about the bookstore for all those reasons. In the beginning my pages didn’t feel important to anyone else, just to Jack and me, but that was enough. I needed something to turn in at the monthly writer’s group meetings, after all.
Then my friend Margie got saddled with the early draft.
Margie and I have almost nothing in common, except a wicked dry sense of humor and the belief that students are the ultimate reason for everything professors should do. She heads the natural sciences department at the college where I am on the teaching staff, and is a scientist’s scientist. I hate math almost as much as chemistry, but we wound up having coffee once a month because we started a CABs club together. (Cynical Altruist Bitches. So now you know.) Membership is limited to people who do the right thing with martyred sighs and eye rolls, easily identified by their dashing about making stuff happen while complaining loudly that “it won’t make a blind bit of difference.” You know the type.
Quick but necessary sideline: I have Margie to thank for introducing me to those microscopic “water bears” that live in moss. She picked up a National Geographic on the library’s coffee table and showed me an article on Tardigrades, complete with colored pictures. Tardigrades, aka water bears, are adorable cuddly looking creatures, complete with little claws and ears and everything.
Writers shouldn’t be friends with scientists; it leads to fistfights. Margie rolled her eyes as I waxed eloquent about tardigrades, inventing on the spot a marital structure and kinship system. To her they were organisms; to me, a wee forest society waiting to be written about. We practically got thrown out of the library when Margie shouted me down as I began to verbally imagine how working tardigrade mothers might organize child care on snow days, “when their schools would be closed, of course. It snows inside moss, right? Heck, one flake could wipe out an entire village.”
See, writers create because we have to. We’d explode otherwise.
Anyway, one day over coffee I told poor Margie one of the stories I’d jotted down about something that happened in the store, and she howled with laughter (earning us yet another dirty look from the library staff).
“That is really funny; you should write a book.” She sighed, wiping her eyes.
“Funny you should say that,” I said with a grin.
Margie read the whole draft, then encouraged me to send it off “to someone, you know, out there in publishing.” So did my friend Cami, author of a running memoir called Second Wind. We’d been friends since high school, and she knew just who “out there” I needed to talk to. A supersonic flash of e-mail exchanges later, this nice New York woman I’d never met wanted to give other people the opportunity to read about what we did in the bookshop. Gratifying, yes. Most gratifying, and I’m grateful. And of course, turning out text is a full-time job for some. For most of us, though, writing is like singing in the shower; we don’t do it believing someone will hear us.
So we write because we write. Fine. But how do we get paid for it? Well, most of us don’t. And then there’s the reality that neither Picasso nor his family received any of the massive fortunes now following his paintings, not to mention the legend of his beach drawings.
One day a man crested a seaside cliff and looked down on another man drawing with a stick in the sand—incredible swirls and lines he recognized as the work of Picasso. Without a camera, before cell phones, he simply sat and watched as the artist drew and drew until the tide came in and washed it all away. Then Pablo went whistling away with his stick over one shoulder.
Do you sing in the shower? Draw in the sand because it’s there?
Elizabeth and I were deep in this discussion as we headed downstairs for a glass of something. Mike Ward, a friend of Jack’s visiting from Scotland, was cooking evening tea—we love it when Mike visits—and added his thoughts.
“Lots of sales don’t benefit the person who made the product, it’s not just artistes,” Mike said after hearing the gist of our conversation. His voice tinged “artistes” with an edge of something disrespectable. “Handcrafted furniture gets sold and resold, or even passed down in families as priceless. Houses, if they’re actually built by one person, don’t give the builder anything after the first sale. Speaking of, I think it’s unusual in America nowadays—and for that matter in Britain as well—that any given object is made by a single person. Houses are kits, furniture is factory-produced, we buy computers and cars and household appliances that we can’t fix ourselves and replace them when they break because there’s no one person who created and hooked together all those fiddly bits inside them. No one can fix them, or at least the company tells you that.
“So it’s two things that make up this idea. One, we’re hard pressed to buy something that just one person made. That being the case, how can we give a living wage to a company and be sure any of it gets to those assembly-line people? Two, when you do get a handcrafted item, be it a house or a harp, it’s only the first sale that benefits the creator. And one more thing, so three: books aren’t handcrafted. They’re a hybrid of original thought and production values. Isn’t that the whole e-book question you were wrestling with last week? E-books eliminate production costs, thereby sharing new literature with the masses.
“There’s no shame in a secondhand book sale not benefitting the author—although I think if you dig deeper, you’ll find it does in the same way checking it out of a library does. It puts the word out—literally! People discover new authors in libraries. So even a bookstore run by an author, Wendy, is doing no harm by selling secondhand. The world has worked like that since the beginning of human trade; you make it, you sell it, and it’s not yours anymore. Why should artists get hung up on that when everyone else lets go? It’s that first bit that bothers me more, that we don’t have much contact with the makers anymore, or the makers with their own items. That’s only changed these last fifty years or so, the way I see it.”
I always did like Mike.
Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft, wrote something very similar.
Both as workers and as consumers, we feel we move in channels that have been projected from afar by vast impersonal forces.… Some people respond by learning to grow their own vegetables.… These agrarians say they get a deep satisfaction from recovering a more direct relationship to the food they eat. Others take up knitting, and find pride in wearing clothes they have made themselves. The home economics of our grandmothers is suddenly cutting-edge chic—why should this be?
Frugality may be only a thin economic rationalization for a movement that really answers to a deeper need: We want to feel that our world is intelligible, so we can be responsible for it.… Many people are trying to recover a field of vision that is basically human in scale, and extricate themselves from dependence on the obscure forces of a global economy.
When Elizabeth and I bought goats, people joked that we were turning into conspiracy theorists, survivalists, weirdos. Goat cheese at the supermarket could be had cheaper and more simply than looking after its source all year, feeding, midwifing, housing, caring. Yes, but the cheese tastes better, and I have fondled the ears and looked into the eyes of the goat responsible. Her milk has been in my hands start to finish. It brings satisfaction, even relaxation, to come home from a hard day’s intellectualizing at the college, or to head upstairs from time with the customers and curdle milk. Crawford is on to something with his comment that frugality is just a thin veil for the denied satisfaction of something else we crave.
&nbs
p; Being an ethnographer, I have to point out the caveat that Jack and I live well as midrange middle-classers. We may not have a lot of ready cash, but we own a house outright, are dangerously overeducated, have confidence that the police and ambulance will come to our neighborhood if called, and know that family and friends could toss us a credit line if for some reason the bank would not.
Not everybody has these luxuries. In my poststudent years, I lived much closer to the lines of poverty and fear, yet even then the fear was of being “poor,” not homeless. Some of my friends couch-surfed their way through graduate school, while others had to drop out of college for lack of that omnipresent-yet-never-enough green stuff we run our society on. Other people aren’t in the same lifeboat as I am. Some are even in the water.
Would people in the water pay more to produce their own stuff—clothes, food, furniture, or houses—or are such activities the privilege (responsibility?) of those with enough money and time and leftover energy to do them? People working minimum-wage jobs at box stores may want to own a goat and make their own cheese, but where will the goat live, and when will they have time to milk? Not to mention, does eight hours plus overtime of keeping your retail zone clean and organized, zipping from rack to rack on your feet all day, leave you with enough energy to herd goats?
Jack sings a song by the famous Scottish poet Mary Brooksbank, a mill worker who became a union organizer: “Oh dear me, the world’s ill-divided. Them that work the hardest are aye the least provided.” That line, said the late Norman Buchan, a ballad singer who represented Glasgow in the United Kingdom parliament, is why he went into politics.
It’s also the line that makes me think the way we sell books is honorable and right, and that when my book becomes a commodity traded on the secondhand market, that will be a happy and good thing to point to as an accomplishment in life. Then I can rest on the laurels of my own caned-chair bottoms.
CHAPTER 23
Booking Down the Road Trip
Suck every drop of living out of this life … Sieve out every grain of happiness, grief, excitement, stillness, or anger that a fully lived life [can] offer.
—Cami Ostman, Second Wind
IT WAS PARTLY THE CONVERSATION on “the way we buy now,” partly the selling of the book you are reading, that made Jack and me decide to visit other secondhand book stores in a whirlwind tour, heading across Tennessee to Mississippi and Alabama, then back up to Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, across to Indiana and Illinois, and down through Kentucky to home sweet home again.
I think we wondered how many like-minded souls were out there being independent booksellers in the face of big-box stores and e-readers. We wanted to hear their stories and tell them ours. So we set off in our 52 mpg electric hybrid to look for America. And in the interest of being as local-friendly as possible, we agreed to eat only at non-chain restaurants for the duration of the trip, and to not allow ourselves to shop in any box stores.
Twelve days, forty-two bookstores, and ten states later, we returned wiser and—given that only eighteen of the forty downtowns we visited were healthy—oddly cheered. In a radio interview after the trip, I said that we went to look for America and found it closed. Of the forty-nine booksellers we’d found via Internet sites or recommendations among friends and other bookshop owners, seven had packed it in.
In fact, the inaugural bookstore we visited in Athens, Tennessee, sported a giant GOING OUT OF BUSINESS banner. We benefited from their half-price closing sale and shared commiserations. As we drove away, I said to Jack, “First bookstore out of the gate, and it’s going out of business? Do you believe in omens?”
Jack settled back in the passenger’s seat and pulled his flat cap’s brim down over his eyes. “No.”
About half the bookstores on this excursion were located in strip malls, named things like Book Rack/Nook/Corner/Palace/Exchange, and offered something between ten thousand and twenty-five thousand paperbacks tucked onto homemade shelving. They were usually staffed by the owner. It’s part of a bookshop’s charm that owners tend to be colorful local characters, or sweethearts who just missed getting a social-work degree. We never met two alike, from Joe in Tupelo, Mississippi, to Joyce in Franklin, Tennessee. Greatest Hits Music & Books is a bookstore-cum-outlet for used movies, CDs, and games. Joe opened the place three and a half years before our visit, and his store is upbeat and messy, like himself. Frankly, if Joe doesn’t drive a VW bus, he should. Joe also pulled off one of the best “getting started” capers since our own Walmart bookmark escapade. The third month he was in business, he sneaked out to the Barnes & Noble on the highway bypass and put a flyer for his shop on the windshield of each car in their parking lot. (Go, Joe!)
By contrast, the Book Den, owned by Joyce, is as neatly executed as a cross-stitch pattern. It took only a few minutes of chatting to see how proud Joyce is of her shop, and rightly so. She radiated confidence and vitality as she explained how she’d bought it in 1995 from its previous owner, hired one of her best friends to help her, and settled in for a second career.
Joyce was the first shop owner to mention e-readers; she feared them. “I used to have people come in every two weeks, now they come in once every three months or so, and they tell me they’re reading on their Kindles now, so they’re just coming in for things they can’t get that way.” She shook her head. “I hope they leave me standing.”
I’ve often said that, if you turn a bookshop owner’s heart inside out, what you get is their shop; it’s a perfect display of who and what the person is. Joe and Joyce were on opposite ends of the organization continuum, but both embodied the kind of store we saw most often: a pleasantly unpretentious gathering of various types of titles, mostly paperbacks, stacked sideways on shelves by genre or author. The Wise Old Owl in Mississippi, the Book Barn in Tennessee, Book Traders in Missouri, and Chop Suey Books in Virginia fit this model.
But there are people who sell books because they’re books, and then there are people who sell books because that’s what they ended up selling. This second group is by far the smallest category, and they feel oddly out of place. Jack and I saw only three such shops on our road trip, all denoted by high prices and low lighting. I suppose that combination is meant to connote elegance, but to us it looked more like thievery. At one such store we spotted Bill Frist’s Healing America on a shelf (signed first edition). Back in 2007, the Christian Appalachian Project brought cartons full of this book into Wise County and handed them out for free. And I suppose that, if a title never gets a second printing, then technically, yes, the first round is the first edition. But it felt creepy to us, who had made purses, birdhouses, planters, and other less useful things from a book flung for free into our region, to be staring at it for thirty-eight dollars in a shop two states over.
In another such store a few states later, the owner proudly showed us his one-thousand-dollar signed first edition of S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. Jack voiced my thoughts as we left: “What does owning a thousand-dollar book have to do with people reading?” Not much, but it must be fun for the collector. We don’t begrudge anyone that thrill; we just don’t get the allure ourselves, and certainly no one in our economic pool would dive that deep.
We also encountered bookstores that seemed like anchors in their community, not only serving the region but encouraging it to grow. In Oxford, Mississippi, Square Books, with its two offshoot stores Off Square Books and Square Books, Jr., are all run by Richard Howorth, a tall, thin man who also happens to be town mayor. Square Books sells new titles and is a bibliophile’s dream, boasting sweet little corners with armchairs tucked into them, a coffee bar upstairs, recessed shelves along stair landings, books signed by the great and good topping every display. Jack and I were impressed, bordering on cowed. Richard and his wife opened their first store in 1979, after each working in other bookshops.
We wandered into a coffee shop before leaving Oxford, a chain masquerading as independent, deep and comfy leather couches carefully coordinated t
o match its wooden tables and chairs. So earnestly ersatz was the place, I had the feeling the lad at the window, wearing an Ole Miss sweatshirt and typing away at his laptop, had conjured us all as characters in his novel. When anyone left the shop—the elderly men with the Dickensian Christmas scarves ’round their necks; the cute twentysomething couple, she wearing the white puffy ski jacket and alpine hat, he sporting school sweats and a pom-pom beanie; the woman with twin babies in the pram, one in pink, one in blue—we would all flatten back onto the pages the student generated. I told Jack to enjoy his coffee, because like Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie, we would have to escape our destiny as literary pawns in the student’s brain. Jack suggested we might need to take a break from driving, as I had clearly become overtired, but I still think Oxford, Mississippi, doesn’t exist; it’s the perfect projection from someone’s mind of how a town should work to be utterly charming.
Similar to Square Books in function but certainly not in style was Burke’s Books in Memphis, Tennessee. Owned by Cheryl and her husband, Burke’s is twenty years strong and decorated in urban funk. Cheryl sells used books via several online sites as well as her bricks-and-mortar store. As she said, “We’re not getting rich, but we’re not getting killed by the Kindle, either.” I told her my theory that e-readers took down the strong while letting smaller shops slip through the Net. She pondered a moment, then laughed. “I think that’s exactly right. We’ll still be here.” She gave me a chin nod and tossed her jaw-length brown hair in defiance, the proud flash in her eyes as they met mine suggesting sisterhood.
Memphis is large enough to support five used book stores, and one new. We entered Booksellers at Laurelwood at high noon on December 24. The place was packed with shoppers. As we took in the sight of more than a hundred people buying up new, physical books, Jack said, “Just look at this. It’s still possible.”