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

by Wendy Welch

  I think there was a tear in his voice.

  We stood in line with a couple of volumes, waiting fifteen minutes to reach the man at the register—who kept ringing his bell for help, more in hope than expectation. The poor guy was sweating by the time we reached him, his arms a blur of motion.

  Jack smiled. “We run a used book store,” he said. “If it’s any consolation, we dream about having this many customers.”

  The man’s tired eyes held a smile as he said, “I’ll come work for you, then.” Then he surprised us. As he rang up the books he said, “What’s the name of your store in Virginia?” (He had seen Jack’s ID for his debit card.)

  “Tales of the Lonesome Pine Used Books, but people call it the Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap,” Jack said. “My wife has a book coming out about it.”

  “Really?” he asked, and Jack gave him a five-second spiel. The man held out our bag and made eye contact with me, giving one of those between-booksellers chin nods. “Good for you,” he said. “And good luck with your bookstore.”

  As we left Booksellers at Laurelwood, I mentioned my surprise that such a busy person would take the time to actually listen to a customer’s casual remarks and ask questions. “That doesn’t often happen at big stores like that.” (Huge, it was. Cavernous, yet stuffed to coziness with books.)

  Jack responded, “But it was owned by one person, not a corporation with a set of rules, so the employees get to be themselves instead of having the card-reading machine ask ‘Was your server friendly today?’ It all goes back to the idea that people who get to think for themselves at work are happier. Plus people who work in bookstores usually love books, so he was interested, and even with that string of traffic, he was able to be himself.”

  In fact, when we had to visit Walmart earlier that day because we needed a piece of electronic equipment and didn’t know what small shop might sell it, we experienced culture shock. I forgot where we were and spoke to the cashier as though she and I were humans with something in common. She stared at me, answered politely, and rang us up faster, as if in fear. We were out of there in two minutes, our purchase in a plastic bag bearing a corporate logo.

  “Was that … weird?” I asked Jack as we walked through the crowded Walmart parking lot.

  “Not for Walmart; we’re just not used to it anymore. If you stay away a while, what it really is shows up again.”

  Our trip even unearthed one clandestine bookseller—plus a few others that should have been. In the Ozarks, we caught up with my graduate school pal Rachel, now teaching in the region. She took us around several bookstores, and at a strip-mall place we met an unfriendly shop owner. One of his shelves sported a sign reading, PUT IT BACK WHERE YOU FOUND IT. IF YOU CAN’T ALPHABETIZE, WHY ARE YOU IN A BOOKSTORE IN THE FIRST PLACE?

  Since he was the first curmudgeon of our trip, we found him utterly adorable, like zoo visitors gathered around the cage going “Oh, look! He’s doing it again!” when a gorilla flings poo. But this innocent bemusement paid off. Warming to my husband, Mr. Personality told us about “the secret store.” Apparently, if you are a good little customer and read all your classics, someone will let you in on an unmarked shop known to those in the know as the Book Jungle. Rachel had heard of the store before, but not where to find it, so she was fairly excited. We visited, and found some of the lowest prices the book world will ever see in that plywood shack lit by bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Likely they keep it a secret so the fire marshal doesn’t inspect.

  A couple of hours after the Book Jungle we stumbled onto Redeemed, the first Christian secondhand book store we’d seen. Our big question was, how would a Christian used book store decide what non-Christian books to accept in trade? They had a small classics section, in which Madame Bovary appeared, but not Dracula, Brideshead Revisited, or Tom Jones. Was this happenstance? Sarah Palin’s books had pride of place in Politics, but Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope rested on the shelf as well. I was impressed that they didn’t lean toward the “God is a white, English-speaking male” theological camp, but Rachel and I agreed that a Christian bookstore in that part of the country might be hard to defend from its own clientele; how would one know what to stock?

  Rachel had to head out that evening, but another ethnographic friend, Julie, came by for a few tunes back at the hotel lobby; the clerk said later it was one of her more fun nights on duty. The next day we headed across Missouri. For some reason the hotel breakfast had not stuck, so when we turned right at the tiny dot called Buffalo, I was hungry enough to concede to a fast-food breakfast. Fortunately, at that moment there hove into view a small café. Over eggs and hash browns, we asked Brandy, our server, if there were any bookstores in town, and she pointed the way we’d come.

  “One block over.”

  We’d driven right past a place selling books and not seen it? I thought our eyes had attuned to ten-point type by now, but we backtracked—and realized why we hadn’t noticed. An aluminum-and-plywood shack sat next to a desultory thrift store. Aimee’s Books and More looked … cheap and cheerful from the outside, and we walked into your basic dormer on a concrete slab. One good prairie wind, and the whole house of books would collapse. I took a quick look around and found a cheap book that would do, planning to beat a hasty retreat.

  At the register, the owner introduced herself as Debbie and asked where we were from. Jack told her, adding that we owned a bookstore.

  Her face lit up. “I’m friends with about three hundred booksellers on Facebook,” she said, and launched into her story. Debbie took her life savings and birthed a bookstore to give her grown daughter a job in town. When her daughter later found work at the local hotel, Mom stepped in to keep it going, since by then people were regularly coming by with trades, and so happy to have her there. You can’t judge a bookstore by its cover. Debbie was absolutely lovely, and her store fit that community like a hand in a glove, reaching out to everyone who crossed her path. And like us, she had a list of pinch hitters who considered the bookshop a cooperative effort. If Debbie needed to leave town, she got by with a little help from her friends.

  Right after Debbie’s little dormer we drove into Rolla, Missouri, and found a vibrant downtown complete with renovated sidewalks and the most beautiful bookstore we had visited to that point. Large windows with intricate brick-and-wood molding were accented by old-fashioned hand lettering above them, spelling out READER’S CORNER. Inside, dark wood shelves of neatly aligned books were decorated with unusual statuary, old typewriters, and suitcases, stretching to the high ceiling. At the back, two castle turrets stood straight and true above the children’s section, teddy bears storming their towers while a rag doll with braids looked down, smiling embroidered smiles.

  I couldn’t speak. Jack took one look and headed straight for the guy behind the counter.

  About an hour and a half later, we tore ourselves away from Larry Bowen, who probably had gotten embarrassed by our repeated assertions that he ran the prettiest used book store we’d ever seen, while Brittany, his shop assistant, photographed us chatting away. Larry related several funny stories about his adventures as a shop owner. One covered the ever-present push me/pull me of shop-local-versus-get-it-cheaper competition with online sellers. Larry had instituted a policy that anything Amazon sold, he would match at two dollars higher. This took into account his bricks-and-mortar expenses and the low budgets of a downturned economy’s customers. It seemed a good compromise.

  Not so fast. A customer who’d come in a few weeks earlier to get a donation for her church went away with fifty dollars in gift certificates. She reappeared and showed him a book on Amazon for $13.57. “Can you beat that price? I want to shop local,” she said, smiling.

  Larry sighed, swallowed, and pushed up his metaphorical shirt sleeves. “I can do $15.57.”

  Her face fell. “But you can’t beat it? I need ten copies. The church board wants these for our next Bible study.”

  Larry smiled, and repeated, “I can do $15.57.�
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  She frowned. “I don’t think our board would authorize that extra expense. It would be twenty dollars more than Amazon, all told. No, I’m sorry, I just don’t think that will do.”

  “What about the fifty-dollar donation I gave you last month?”

  She looked suddenly sheepish. “Well … I mean, we do want to shop local. It’s just that we need to be good money stewards.”

  Larry smiled again. “So do I. I need to keep my business viable in the community I want to continue serving.”

  Larry 10 × $15.57, Amazon 0.

  One of the things we learned on this trip was that bookshops are networking, making alliances and allies. Larry told us that the four independent bookshops in St. Louis, Missouri, had hooked themselves together into the Independent Bookstore Alliance. Our first stop was one of these, Pudd’nhead Books. The children’s manager was working the shop, and told me something interesting about when Amazon put out its now-infamous campaign over the holiday shopping season. In a nutshell, anyone who found a print ad from local retailers selling an item for less than the Big A could get the product for five dollars below that price if they purchased it from Amazon. And the ad sparked quite a reaction. People brought lists of books they wanted to local bookshops and said, in essence, “We were going to buy these on Amazon but after what they tried to do to local shops with that campaign, we’ll shop with you instead.” Backlash is America’s greatest asset, and much of our history is actually built on it, for good or ill. Up the locavores!

  Jack and I watched the lady at Pudd’nhead spend considerable time advising a family on a book purchase for a young child, again something that doesn’t happen in the big-box stores. And she drew us a map to the other Alliance members.

  At Left Bank Books, our spirits soared. They had a resident cat! Spike sat in an office at a laptop, presumably working on his novel. Staff member Danielle kindly left her desk (where she was clearly pretty busy) and spent fifteen minutes telling us about Spike and Left Bank, and hearing about our cats and shop. Left Bank has been in business forty-two years, and has used books downstairs, new upstairs.

  I mentioned Amazon and Danielle gave a disdainful sniff. “We’re not worried.”

  They didn’t have reason to be; even in the Dead Days between Christmas and New Year, the place thrummed with people (many of whom were happy to greet Spike when he sauntered up the stairs after leaving us). Left Bank had the comfortable feeling of an overstuffed armchair, books everywhere, people everywhere, cat ambling among them all.

  The second partnership we encountered came in Kentucky, where we stayed with old friends. Mary Hamilton is the author of Kentucky Folktales and is well known in her community for her storytelling and scholarship on the subject. She and her husband Charles Wright are the kind of people who live simply but not slightly. They took us to Poor Richard’s Books, hooked in partnership but not ownership with a coffeehouse called Kentucky Coffeetree Café and an artisan shop called Completely Kentucky. Now this is cooperation; the businesses on either end (Richard’s and Kentucky) bought the shop between them and put in the coffeehouse, then sold it as a going concern some six years later. The three shops also knocked door holes in their shared walls so you could walk between them. Since each has different opening hours, they have signs that announce: IF THIS DOOR IS CLOSED, THE SHOP YOU’RE TRYING TO GET TO THROUGH IT IS NOT OPEN. So simple. So elegant. So cooperative.

  Lexington is large enough to support several bookstores, each specializing in slightly different subject matter. An all-new retailer called the Morris Book Shop had one of the nicest art deco schemes we’d seen, and yet another form of cooperation. The owner of Morris is good friends with the manager of Parnassus Books in Nashville, the shop that author Ann Patchett co-owns. Networks are wonderful things—and perhaps necessities for small bookstores. From Morris we ambled to Glover’s Bookery, a rare and used book dealership with a resident Irish setter. Thea was the size of a small pony and gentler than a sleepy Quaker. She shared her toys with me—repeatedly—as the owner, John, and I chatted.

  We met our first African-American bookseller in Lexington. Ron Davis bought the shop from its previous owner, for whom he had worked, and renamed it the Wild Fig Bookstore, “after a metaphor Gayl Jones, an author here in town, uses a lot. My wife, Crystal Wilkinson, is a writer, and she really admires Gail, so that’s how the store got its name.”

  Crystal’s name was familiar to Charles and me as a founding Afrilachian poet, along with Nikki Finney and Frank X Walker. Wild Fig, as Ron explained, stocked new books but was primarily a shop for used, and he’d only brought in the new books because most of the best books had left the shop in the closing-out sale. He had a cracking art history section; when I commented on it, he grinned. “Yep. All my beautiful art books, the things that really mattered to me, that I’d bought with my discount while working here, they all went back in. It hurt, but I did what had to be done.” We shared the smile of Those Who Sacrifice to Make It Happen before saying good-bye.

  Ron wasn’t the only owner to throw his life’s blood into inventory. In Washington, D.C., I visited Idle Time Books, owned by a man named Jacques and his wife (and staffed by an affably talkative man named Paul the day I visited). It turns out the couple bought their building and lived upstairs while turning the downstairs into a bookstore. And they stocked their shop by selling his lifelong comic collection for cash to turn into inventory. Jacques/Jack? They say everyone has a doppelgänger.…

  The funniest moment of the whole trip came in Indiana. We had some trouble locating a shop called Fulton Avenue Books, and when we pulled in, a man getting out of a large pickup gave us a funny—okay, unfriendly—look.

  “What’s his problem?” I asked, slipping my wallet into a shoulder bag as we walked toward the door.

  “Urk,” said Jack.

  “Urk” is a not a sound I associate with Jack, so I looked up to see him pointing, wordless, at a sign: GENTLEMEN ONLY. MUST BE 18 TO ENTER. Well, who knew? This bookstore was actually a porn shop. Wow! That hadn’t happened the whole trip. We got back in the car (quickly!) and drove toward the next address.

  “When you think about it, we’ve visited more than thirty bookstores, so one of them had to be a duffer,” Jack said as we sped away from Fulton Avenue Books to Bookmart.

  Which was also a porn shop.

  “No way,” Jack said, staring at the sign.

  Please note: my beloved is usually far more articulate than “urk” and “no way.” His speechlessness is a sure sign of how deeply startled we were.

  “Let’s get out of this town,” I said, and we floored it, leaving behind two more shops that shall never be explored by the Beck-Welch team. Probably at least one was run by a sweet little old lady with a resident cat, who would have been knitting a sweater (the lady, not the cat). We left Pornsville at 70 mph, passing some incredibly large and beautiful newly built houses. In any economy, they would have stood out, but in recession times?

  “This will be the porn king and his children,” Jack said, and at that precise moment, an ornate sign overhead announced FUQUAY AVENUE.

  Jack laughed so hard I thought he would asphyxiate.

  The Booking Down the Road Tour ended back at our own dear little bookstore in Big Stone Gap, where we rested up and thought about what we’d seen, learned, and enjoyed. We covered 2,690 miles (on just four tanks of gas, thank you!) saw four old friends, made several new ones, and bought forty-two books. We ate at two restaurants that were chains and shopped in Walmart once, because we had no other choices. (Which is kind of chilling, when you think about it.)

  What did we learn? That people who follow their own dreams and do what’s in front of them—build, paint, renovate, stock, defy, buy, sell, and smile—are still standing, while those who wait for permission, or guarantees, or help from someone else, disappear fairly quietly into that good night. One small town we visited in Tennessee stands out as an example; not only was the bookstore we went there to visit closed
down, but the pottery painting place that had replaced it was also shut for good. Meanwhile, the town’s planners are pinning their hopes on reopening the old theater as an entertainment center. All the eggs, as it were, are in one grant-funded basket. What if some of that funding had been channeled to local businesses, as the now-rather-embittered merchants had asked? Likewise, the owners of a general store in a town not so far away had self-published a book about their area’s infamous Scopes Trial, believing they would be supported by the local tourism industry. Instead they found themselves pretty much on their own in moving the stock.

  Several of the booksellers we met had stories about their town’s business associations proving to be what George Orwell might have called “doubleplusdishelpful.” (If you haven’t read his dystopian 1984 yet, that’s the language of Big Brother’s government—and what many of us found when we tried to turn our dreams into permit applications.)

  On the road trip, Jack and I learned that a lot of very capable people who are comfortable in their own skins live in these United States, doing their day-to-day deeds while enjoying what life brings. And we learned that east or west, home looks much better than we thought. Settling back into the store, we implemented some of the cool things we had seen in various shops—hanging signs from the ceiling saying which books were where, putting wheels on shelves so they could be moved to create more floor space for events, and other practical touches.

  We also started a network with many of the people we met, connecting on social media and via e-mails. And we thought about what we’d seen. Is small-town America closing? Well, in large measure, yes. But when it’s not closing, it’s because someone with a vision and a brain got busy. Often it was just an individual who did what seemed best—whether that was investing his life’s savings into a beautiful downtown building and anchoring a shopping block, as Larry did; or Debbie’s buying an aluminum dormer to put atop a concrete slab so her daughter could have a job in Buffalo; or Ron’s reopening his employer’s store as his own, with a new name and a new vision; or Joe’s plastering flyers on all the cars in the Barnes & Noble parking lot. People followed their bliss, but they also worked hard, learned fast, and didn’t take no for an answer. Perhaps that, more than anything else, is what keeps small towns open in America: the tenacity of people who believe in their own abilities.