by Wendy Welch
CHAPTER 24
Bibliophiliacs Versus Book Snobs
We read books and tell stories to find each other.
—Wendy Welch
ONE DAY A LADY CAME in with an older woman in tow. The older woman clutched a baby doll. That should have been a clue, but apparently my brain had the day off. The lady, perhaps in her sixties, pointed to an easy chair near the Christian books. “Sit there and mind your baby and I’ll be ready in a minute.” The older woman perched on the chair and with a vacant smile began crooning to the doll.
Jack approached the younger woman as she browsed Christian nonfiction. “Can I help you find anything?”
“I’m looking for a book about—”
The older woman shot from her chair. “What are you looking for, dear? I’ll help!” she shouted, dropping the doll and lurching forward.
“No, Mama, it’s okay, sit back down.” Her daughter grasped the older woman’s elbows and moved her backward—gently, as if in a waltz—until she reached the chair. “You might fall. Sit with your baby and I’ll be ready in a minute.”
Jack figured it out first. He turned to the mother. “That’s a lovely child you have there. Would you like a cup of tea while you’re waiting?”
“Not too hot,” the browsing woman said, even as her eyes scanned the shelf in rapid strokes.
“Help you find something?” I asked sotto voce as Jack and the mom began a conversation with no meaning but lots of volume.
“I’m looking for the latest in that Amish series,” she said, referencing a popular topic for Christian romance writers.
“Wrong section.” I led her to the other side of the shelf. “Where you were was nonfiction. Are you looking for Beverly Lewis or Wanda Brunstetter?” Both write bestsellers in this genre.
Just then her eyes lit up, her hand swooped down, and she snatched a paperback to her chest. “This one!” she exclaimed in triumph, and her mother dropped her conversation with Jack and came loping over.
“Did you hurt yourself?” the older woman half asked, half scolded. “I told you not to run inside the school!”
“Okay, Mommy, please, sit down,” the woman said. Mommy subsided into her chair and began undressing the doll.
“Do you have any Dean Koontz?” the woman turned to me, whispering.
“Yes,” I said, and didn’t move. My brain could not connect someone who read Christian romances set among the Amish with a request for horror; it seemed more like an odd rhetorical question.
The woman stared at me. “Um, miss, I’m kind of in a hurry. Mama won’t wait long.”
“Oh! Of course.” I led the way, embarrassed, to the horror section, and stood there as she ran her finger down the row of titles stacked on the counter. Watching customers browse is a no-no—leave them to it and wait until they ask a question—but shopkeeper etiquette had flown out the window. Behind me, I heard Jack saying, “And here is your tea, madam.”
The browsing woman’s head flew up and she started to say something, but Jack’s voice floated through the doorway in reassurance. “It’s tap water in a paper cup. No worries.”
The daughter gave a smile of radiant sunshine and bent to the Koontz titles again. She selected two as I continued to stare, unabashed. “These three, please,” she said, holding out the romance and the horrors.
“Yes, ma’am.” I shook myself and hurried to the other side of the room where the cash box and receipt book waited. The woman followed.
As I tallied and added tax, she said suddenly, “I guess you know Mama has dementia.”
“I figured it was something like that,” I said.
“Normally I get time to myself once a week when my daughter comes and sits with her, but her daughter’s sick and stayed home from school so she couldn’t come, and I’d been wanting to check this place out—” She indicated the bookstore with a furtive sweep of her hand. “Reading is such a refuge for me. When Mama naps I can lose myself.” She giggled. “I go into another world, like Mama. So I figured I would just run out with her this once. She’s not real steady on her feet, falls a lot.” She glanced to where Jack stood next to her mother, chatting like a professional talk-show host as Mom sipped “tea” from the cup and simpered beneath his flirting.
The woman’s eyes filled with sudden tears, but none fell.
“We’re glad you came in,” I said, meaning two different things, but not knowing how to say the second one. I tried again. “Come back anytime.”
The woman picked up her titles and change, then gave me a conspiratorial smile. “Oh, I’ll be back. I just love Dean Koontz. He takes my mind off things. After everything that happens to the people in his books, maybe my life’s not so bad.” She said that last sentence so fast and low, it was almost as if she hadn’t said it at all. “Okay, Mama,” she said in a louder voice. “Time to go. Got your baby?”
Out the door they went, Mama clutching her daughter’s arm and her doll as they descended our porch stairs in a rhythmic, slow step-shuffle-pause, step-shuffle-pause.
Jack looked at me. I looked at Jack. “I’ll put the kettle on,” he said.
We have learned that it doesn’t do for a bookseller to make assumptions about who reads what. People read for information, for entertainment, for distraction, for status, for a plethora of other reasons. Whatever readers want, books—and the people who sell them—should be able to give it to them.
Honestly, the sense of perspective that a bookstore imposes is life-altering. Try moving a presidential biography ten years later, or the tell-all confessional of a Hollywood madam once her fifteen minutes of fame are up. The people writing for all of us, describing things in a timeless way, endure. The rest are quick flashes of burning-out stars. Their light can indeed burn bright and beautiful, but it’s mercifully brief. Timeless writers endure because, in Alan Bennett’s words from the play The History Boys, “The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.”
Or, as Mr. Antolini told Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, “Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”
In the words of Helene Hanff (who wrote 84, Charing Cross Road) we cry, “Comrade!” when we meet someone we recognize in the pages of a book. Leading storytelling workshops, I often compared the well-told story—written or spoken—to a coloring book; there are guidelines, but you create the details for yourself. A television does most of the work for you; one need not even think, only watch. Some writers are like TVs, but the best ones offer you sovereignty.
Jack says watching a customer meet the right book is like seeing a child who thinks she’s lost on the playground spot her mother. Every book, from the most serious to the weirdest, has a buyer. We once had some tome about the British royal family secretly being a group of reptilians masquerading as humans. (Do not get my Scottish husband started on this theme.) I don’t know how it got in the shop, but it sat in—where else—science for a couple of years. Either we missed culling it, or Jack considered it too funny to give up.
In walked Tim (the man who launched our textbook-valuing career). A really nice guy who lives in New England, he’s one of our semiannual regulars. The semiannuals come by mostly during summers and holidays, but also whenever they visit family in the area. Tim trolled the science section, gave a c
ry of delight, and held up the reptilian royalty book. “I’ve heard about this!” he exclaimed. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d yelled, “Eureka!”
“Oh?” It was the most polite thing that came to mind, and probably beat my first impulse: Then should I stop thinking of you as a nice guy and be afraid?
“Yeah. My college roommate dated the geek who wrote its girlfriend.” (It took me a minute to decipher that syntax.) “He was a loony bird, but she was nice. So how much is this?”
A book for everyone, and everyone will find the right book. Eventually. Tim had probably been in our shop twice a year for four years before he “reunited” with that creepy tome. The Scots have a saying: “What’s fer ye ’l no gang by ye.” (What’s for you will not pass you by.) After five years in the business, I can say that this includes books.
CHAPTER 25
On Recommending Books
Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.
—Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure”
BOOKS ARE NOT JUST THINGS, but dynamic artifacts, milestones showing where the road took a sudden turn on our individual journeys—our very individual journeys, since a book that changed one person’s life is another person’s dreaded English assignment. There’s no rhyme or reason to what impacts whom except the alchemy of timing, temperament, and title.
The first shelf someone sees when entering our bookstore is local fiction. Gracing its top, tall and silent, stand two marble bookends in the shape of human noses. Between these lies the section we call “Staff Picks.”
Yeah, our senses of humor aren’t very sophisticated.
Staff Picks is a nod to the awareness that people like to visit bookstores because someone will suggest things for them to read. Do you think Amazon and Half.com would be so aggressively making suggestions “just for you,” or that Facebook would analyze your posts and fill the side of your screen with little pop-up promos if people didn’t like such recommendations?
Getting to recommend books to people is one of the most rewarding parts of running a bookshop, but it’s also a bit tricky. The timing has to be good; as I said before, someone in the middle of a story about their recent family loss doesn’t need to be struck upside the head with a sales pitch. We don’t suggest Old Yeller to a customer talking about her dog’s death. There are basic tenets of human decency (and common sense) that all retailers must follow.
One evening pretty close to closing time, a woman entered our shop and stopped just inside the door. I didn’t recognize her as a repeat customer, so I asked if she needed any help acclimating to where things were.
Her eyes remained stuck on the books in Staff Picks as she said, “No, I think this will be fine.”
“Excuse me?” I asked, since she had nothing in her hands, and the woman shook herself and turned to me.
“You close in fifteen minutes, according to your sign out front. I am in town with my husband; he’s spending the weekend doing some contract work for the town. I will spend the next two days holed up in a hotel room, and I must have something to read or I’ll go crazy. Who chose these books?” Her hand indicated the Staff Picks.
“Mostly me,” I said, “although my husband may have chosen one or two.”
The woman moved to our table and sat down. Extracting a twenty from her purse, she held it out to me. “Find me something to read this weekend,” she said. “I’m in a historic novel frame of mind.”
As I stared at the twenty, the woman’s imperious expression relaxed into a smile. “Four of my all-time favorite books are in your Staff Picks,” she said. “If you like it, I’ll like it. Now get cracking; you close in twelve minutes.”
It is fun to introduce other people to what you like. So, a book about running a bookstore simply must contain a Top Ten List of the author’s favorites. And since I’m a fan of Christopher Guest films, my list goes to eleven.
Here, in pure self-indulgence and alphabetical order, is my own list of books I love to recommend to people who enjoy reading—along with my even more self-indulgent stories of what miles they marked on my personal journey. Like any bibliophile, I will talk about these titles anytime, anywhere, with anyone—and like any bookstore owner, I rarely get to with customers. So consider yourself trapped, get a cup of tea, and enjoy.
Charlotte’s Web
E. B. White wrote what is arguably the greatest opening sentence in literature: “Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast. C’mon, admit it, you’re hooked from that moment forward. A literate spider, a frightened pig, a little girl helping generations of young’uns come to terms with life’s cruelties: magic happens. You learn to cry over the written page when you’re seven, and you never stop.
Storyteller and children’s author Carmen Deedy tells a personal tale about being a slow reader as a child, and how the first book she ever checked out of a library (Charlotte’s Web) took three renewals to finish. “Finally, I marched back to the children’s desk in a flood of tears and said, ‘This is the saddest I’ve ever felt in my whole life! It’s horrible! How can books do this to you? Give me another one!’ And those words sealed my fate. I became a reader for life.” Don’t you know just how she feels?
Web wasn’t the first book I ever checked out of a library; that was The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats, when I was three. My dad taught both my sister and me to read as preschoolers; he filled a paint bucket (hopefully scrubbed clean of toxins) with plastic letters. “Pull out W,” he’d say, and I’d grasp this red spiky thing bigger than my hand and haul it into meaning. Letters formed words, words formed ideas, ideas formed stories, stories formed lives. As with generations of little girls and boys before me, Charlotte’s Web was my earliest introduction to the reality that not all stories end happily, or fit neatly into a cozy world. It hurt, and it sealed my fate.
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Volumes 1–5
Before writing, singing moved information—truth, spin, dogma, lies, and funny things that happened at the castle. Frances James Child published a collection of his favorite ballads in the late 1800s; as my Scots husband points out, they are mostly Scottish even though England enjoys equal titular credit. (He’s not a nationalist, just has his moments.) The poetic expressions found in these outpourings of human spirit remind us what’s best and worst about ourselves.
One of the things I love about this collection is how it proves that there is so little new under the sun. The common themes of literature—love gone wrong, family dynamics, the wistful longing for a better life—are alive and well in ancient snapshots of what people wanted to hear then. It’s still what we want to hear now: who loves whom; who killed whom and why; who overreached himself and fell down; who outran her humble beginnings to make good. In “Twa Sisters,” sibling rivalry for a boy’s love dooms them all; “Long Lankin,” about the murder of a highborn baby, evokes stomach-churning disgust even as it asks some harsh questions about haves and have-nots; the upbeat “Comfort for the Comfortless” gives scorned lovers a new outlook. One of the world’s first paranormal romances, “House Carpenter,” still raises goose bumps on my skin when the fate of the doomed faithless wife and her not-who-he-appears lover is sung:
“Oh what are those hills, yon high, high hills,
With flowers as white as snow”
“Those are the hills of heaven, my love
That you and I will never know.”
Then twice around went the gallant ship
I’m sure it was not three
His hoof broke that shining ship in half
And they sank to the bottom of the sea
Their archaic language makes the enduring quality of their themes stan
d out even more. These ballads are beautiful, creepy, stark, strong, and timeless.
The Grapes of Wrath
Pushing his literary lens in for close-ups of one family, then pulling back to explore a generation’s terrible luck, John Steinbeck made people think. He made even those tucked up safe in warm houses seventy years later feel the fear and betrayal of being turned out from them. And he did it with such beautiful, beautiful language.
I read Wrath for the first time in high school. Up to then, I’d read classics when they were assigned, but everything else in the library like a voracious little vacuum cleaner. My reasoning was simple; adults were weird, so if they were pushing something, it probably wasn’t nearly as good as the stuff they dismissed as “junk.” I devoured Madeleine L’Engle, Paula Danziger, Summer of My German Soldier, and a whole bunch of lit lite for kids, but plowed my way through The Scarlet Letter with martyred sighs and CliffsNotes. Then Mr. Beekman, our eleventh-grade advanced placement American literature teacher, assigned The Grapes of Wrath.
The class was a survey starting with the 1600s, but for some reason, probably availability, I checked Steinbeck out of the library first. Finish and cross it off, then blast through the other titles so I could get back to reading the good stuff: that was the plan.
Do you remember high school, where social strata affect your life every day and the strong rule while the weak try to fly below the radar? And do you remember what The Grapes of Wrath is about? Talk about context creating meaning; this book, an adult treatise of the haves and have-nots caught in the unfairness of economics, takes on a different significance to a high schooler whose understanding of injustice is that pretty girls get asked to dance before sweet ones do. Wrath was a wake-up call with instant empathy; we all knew what “wrong” felt like, but had never seen it on such a large scale. There were worse things than what was happening to us, happening in the world, every day. That simple lesson some kids learn by the time they’re five, sheltered old me discovered in high school. For the first time, the big picture formed in which small players moved, each having to make individual choices, even if there weren’t any good ones.