My Bookstore

by Ronald Rice

  Romeo came from a family of lumberjacks in the backwoods of Quebec. In 1923, he immigrated to the United States, settled in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and found a job cleaning out the cellar of a local pharmacist. Working for Simon Flynn was a stroke of luck. Over the years, Romeo moved up—literally from the cellar. He helped out in the store, learned the pharmacy trade, and studied for his license. He also took a liking to the boss’s daughter. Ten days after Pearl Harbor, Betty Flynn and Romeo Grenier eloped and eventually bought Glesmann’s pharmacy in nearby South Hadley. Romeo and Betty sold toothbrushes and shampoo and added a small shelf of books at the front of the store. Romeo couldn’t help himself with the books; he already had a personal habit of buying a book a week. As Glessie’s book space expanded, more shelves were added, and soon the copies of Thackeray overtook emery boards and Old Spice. Although a pharmacy by name, Glesmann’s became the town’s literary gathering place. Students and faculty from across the street at Mount Holyoke College congregated at the pharmacy’s round table and booths for lively discussions about art, politics, and literature. The College community became so fond of Glessie’s that at reunion time, students swung by as if to visit their favorite nook in the library. Romeo Grenier, one professor observed, “resolved to be the most cultivated apothecary since John Keats.”

  In 1963, the inevitable came to pass. The cough syrup lost and books won. At the urging of Mount Holyoke, Romeo opened the Odyssey Bookshop, a few doors down from Glesmann’s. Students and faculty helped pack the pharmacy’s stock of books and carry them down the sidewalk to the new shop. For two decades, Romeo, Betty, and the shop’s dedicated and knowledgeable staff ran the Odyssey Bookshop, making it not only a popular bookstore but a tourist destination as well. Vacationers who stopped in nearby Amherst during foliage season or parents who visited children at the local colleges came by the Odyssey for a chat with Romeo. Customers loved it when staffers hand-selected books for them and explained why they thought the choice was a good fit. For a region that claimed Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Richard Wilbur as locals, the Odyssey was the very embodiment of what residents valued: Literature was as important as breathing.

  That’s why it hurt so badly when the unthinkable happened.

  In 1985, Joan Grenier, Romeo and Betty’s daughter, was in the final months of finishing her degree in history at the University of Massachusetts. With graduate school in mind, Joan sat in an auditorium that December morning with hundreds of other students poring over entrance exams. She was so concentrated on her work that she jumped when an exam official called her name at the end of the testing session. There was an urgent message. A friend, who didn’t want Joan to drive home alone past the store, waited at the door. The Odyssey was on fire.

  For the next months, Joan worked alongside her 75-year-old father to reopen the bookshop near the spot of the original Glesmann’s. The College pitched in too. The theater department offered their set-design talents to decorate the store. Students and faculty filled out stock cards for incoming books. Grateful customers found themselves using the phrase “phoenix rising” to praise the Odyssey’s remarkable recovery. But five months later, just as the tulip trees were beginning to bud around campus, a second fire consumed the store and the shops around it. Romeo didn’t think he could go through the ordeal of salvaging and reopening another bookstore. Joan stepped in. “I probably didn’t know what I was getting into,” she admitted. Graduate school went out the window, and over the next year, Joan, the shell-shocked Odyssey staff, and the Mount Holyoke community once again worked to reopen the shop, this time in the hall of the nearby South Hadley Congregational Church. Months later, when a new shopping complex rose from the ashes of the second fire, the Odyssey was the first business to open its doors in the Village Commons opposite the college.

  Joan took advantage of the unenviable clean slate before her. She expanded the retail space to nearly 4,000 square feet, organized author readings, instituted a First Editions Club, a Shakespeare Club, and a children’s book club. The Odyssey became the spot not only for new books, but also for used and bargain books, and for unique gifts for bibliophiles. When social media became a powerful force in business, the Odyssey created a full-service website for customers to order physical books and e-books. Now the largest independent bookstore in western Massachusetts, the Odyssey hosts over 120 literary and cultural events a year, from Rachel Maddow to Alexander McCall Smith and Stephen King to Rosalynn Carter.

  Betty Grenier died in 1989, and Romeo, the “most cultivated apothecary,” followed a decade later in 1997. Romeo’s portrait hangs prominently on the Odyssey’s wall, along with photographs of Glessie’s and the store’s two fires—a reminder of the indomitable shop’s past.

  As for me, I finally read all those orange-spined Penguin novels and got up off the Odyssey floor. Like my friend, Joan, my career took a turn that I wasn’t quite expecting. After years of teaching at that college across the street, I turned to writing narrative nonfiction books. There’s nothing I love more than spending time in archives or traveling to a town where I’ve never been and interviewing someone I’ve never met before. When my first book was published, The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight, Joan called me with ideas for the book launch. I’ll never forget the night of my first reading. C-Span and my entire softball team showed up, a reader presented me with a baseball cap from Sally Ride’s inaugural flight, and Joan introduced me, making friendly jokes about our mutual age and my peripatetic career from Emily Dickinson scholar to space chronicler.

  Later that evening, after the wine and those wonderful pastries that always seem to show up at Odyssey events, Joan helped us load the car for the trip back home. It was nearly ten o’clock, practically everyone was long gone, and the Odyssey—still all lit up—looked like a beacon against the dark New England mountains. When I looked back at the store, I couldn’t help thinking about Romeo’s beloved books crowding out the Old Spice, and I couldn’t help feeling grateful for how this wonderful shop has enriched my life. As Joan grabbed a box of party supplies and carried them to the curb, she yelled back at the lone shopper still browsing the new fiction shelves. “Could you watch the store for a minute?” she asked. As the former grad student who loved sitting among the Odyssey shelves, I relished the joy in the customer’s reply. “I’d be happy to,” she said. “I’ve been waiting my whole life to be surrounded by books.”

  MARTHA ACKMANN is a journalist and author who writes about women who’ve changed America. Her books include The Mercury 13 and Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League.

  Isabel Allende

  Book Passage, CORTE MADERA, CALIFORNIA

  I am old-fashioned. I believe that one should have a personal doctor, a dentist, a hairdresser, and, of course, a trusted bookstore. I wouldn’t think of buying books at random, without my bookseller’s recommendation, no matter how good the reviews may be. Fortunately, when I immigrated to the United States twenty-five years ago—because I fell in lust with a guy whom I eventually forced into marriage—I ended up living in Marin County, California. Almost immediately, I found the perfect bookstore. However, to find the proper doctor, dentist, and hairdresser took some time. Book Passage, an independent bookstore in Corte Madera, is only ten minutes away from my home, and it rapidly became my refuge and the extension of my office. The owners, Elaine and Bill Petrocelli, welcomed me with open arms; not because I was a writer, but because I was a neighbor.

  Since l987 I’ve started the tours for each of my books at Book Passage, the favorite place for authors on tour because they get an enthusiastic audience and are treated like celebrities, even when they are not. I have had the opportunity to attend readings by great writers, politicians, scientists, stars, gurus, and many more whom I would never have met elsewhere. I have enjoyed fabulous meals at the Cooks with Books events organized by the store in classy restaurants. Due to the requirements of my
job, I am a nomadic traveler. Before any journey I visit the store’s great travel section, where I get maps and information, including, for example, where to buy beads in Morocco or where to get the best pasta in Florence.

  Book Passage is much more than a store for me: It’s the place where I meet friends, journalists, students, readers, and fellow writers; it’s where I have my mailbox and an open account for me and my family to buy and to order all our books. As soon as my grandchildren learned to dial a phone they would call the store to order kids’ books and then call again if they didn’t get them the next day. For years, they were present every Sunday at story hour, and they were the first ones in line, wearing the appropriate outfits, for the fun midnight Harry Potter parties.

  Willie Gordon, my husband (yes, the same guy I met a quarter of a century ago), retired as a lawyer and decided to become a writer. I couldn’t believe that he intended to compete with me but he persisted. At Book Passage he attended the Annual Mystery Writers Conference and opted for crime novels as the most appropriate genre for him, not because he has a particularly mean streak, but because he knows a lot about law and forensics. He took writing classes and read the books suggested by the staff. To my dismay, Willie has written five novels in the last few years, translated into several languages. Nothing pleases Elaine Petrocelli so much as to see a student at her conferences return a couple of years later to teach as a published author. Willie is just one of many cases. Elaine is the first person to read Willie’s manuscripts and review them. Bill helped Willie to publish in the States.

  The buyer at Book Passage selects novels, audiobooks, and reader’s copies for me. I don’t even bother to choose my own reading material! She gave me The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean and Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese in manuscript, long before they were published. With the help of the store’s knowledgeable staff I have researched sixteen books, including several historical novels and—go figure!—a treatise about aphrodisiacs. Before writing a trilogy for young adults I attended the store’s Children’s Writers Conference, and later, so that I could learn what kids really like to read, they organized a yearlong kids’ book club.

  This bookstore is the cultural soul of a large community. It’s the place to take writing classes, learn languages, attend conferences, participate in book clubs and speakers’ series, and, if you are a teenager, Twitter-talk (whatever that is). Elaine and Bill Petrocelli work with schools, community organizations, and restaurants, they do fund-raising for many causes, and they have a partnership with Dominican University so that students can receive credit for classes and conferences. Their clientele is so loyal that Amazon and the chains have not been able to put them out of business, and, let me tell you, they have tried.

  The only place as comforting as a friendly bookstore is probably your grandmother’s kitchen. The sight of shelves packed with books of all kinds, the smell of printed paper and coffee, and the secret rustle of the characters that live in the pages warm up any heart. I go to Book Passage to pass the time, to read, to gossip, and to lift my spirit. But I have also gone there to share my sorrow, as I did when I was grieving for my daughter’s death. At the store, amidst all those books, many of which were painful memoirs, I realized that I had to write Paula’s story, as others had written about their broken hearts before me. During that terrible year of mourning I spent many hours at Book Passage writing by hand, sipping tea, and wiping my tears, supported by my friends at the store who kept me company while respecting my privacy.

  Sometimes, when I have a fight with Willie, or when I feel particularly nostalgic, I fantasize about going back to live in Chile, but I know it will never happen—because my dog can’t travel so far, and I am not willing to lose Book Passage.

  ISABEL ALLENDE is the best-selling author of nine novels including The House of the Spirits, Inés of My Soul, Portrait in Sepia, and Daughter of Fortune.

  Rick Atkinson

  Politics & Prose Bookstore, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Sometimes in our lives habit becomes ritual, and ritual then becomes superstition. For me, such a transmutation began in October 1988, when I typed the last line to my first book, a group portrait of the U.S. Military Academy class of 1966. The final scene is set in the West Point cemetery, where so many of those killed in Vietnam are buried, and the book ends with the academy chaplain reflecting: I loved these men. I loved these men with all my heart.

  Now what? I asked myself. What do authors do when they complete a manuscript? I pushed away from my writing desk, tugged on a pair of sneakers, and headed down Utah Street before turning right on Nebraska Avenue to cross Connecticut Avenue. There in a drab retail building was a hole-in-the-wall shop that showed promise of becoming a neighborhood institution in Washington, D.C.—Politics & Prose Bookstore. This, I thought, is what writers should do when they finish writing: They should seek the company of other writers, at least through the books they have written. And what extraordinary new writings could be found at Politics & Prose that fall—Gabriel García Marquéz’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Stephen W. Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities.

  I would repeat that homely routine by trotting down to Politics & Prose upon finishing my second book in the fall of 1992. Then, fearful of jinxing myself by deviating from the ritual, I did it again, in 2000, and in 2003, and in 2006, and, most recently, on February 3, 2012. For me, a book feels incomplete without that capstone visit to the bookstore. Browsing among the shelves is the equivalent of typing The End on the last page, and less trite.

  My family and I had moved into Washington’s Chevy Chase neighborhood not long after Politics & Prose arrived. A remarkable woman named Carla Cohen opened the shop in the fall of 1984, selling the season’s big books—Robert Ludlum’s The Aquitaine Progression and an eponymously titled memoir by automobile executive Lee Iacocca—but also Barbara W. Tuchman’s The March of Folly, Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings, and a curious biography by local author Bob Woodward titled Wired: The Short Life & Fast Times of John Belushi. A Baltimore native who had worked as a city planner and a federal housing official, Carla was savvy, gregarious, and forceful, with avowed ambitions of running “the sort of bookstore in which I liked to spend time.” Another local writer and store patron, Ron Suskind, later observed, “There are hundreds of writers who imagined Carla as their ideal reader. She is a tribal leader, like Abraham.”

  Carla had placed a newspaper ad for a store manager and instead found a business partner in Barbara Meade, who had returned to Washington after several years on the West Coast. Barbara knew books, and she knew retail. The two women, both voracious reading mothers soon to turn 50, complemented one another perfectly: the effusive, opinionated Cohen and the reserved, meticulous Meade. Barbara later described their collaboration: “I, the cat, walk unobtrusively into a room and sit quietly on the periphery, intently watching everything that is going on. Carla, the dog, joyfully bounds in and jumps on everyone.” Among their few business disagreements was the name of the store, conceived by Carla as somehow emblematic of Washington. “I think that’s a terrible mistake,” Barbara told her, but the name stuck.

  For the first few months, the staff consisted of the two owners and a part-time clerk. Within a year, a second sales associate was added, and by 1989 Politics & Prose had a half-dozen employees. That summer the store moved across the street to more spacious digs with a wider show window. A policeman tamed the traffic on Connecticut Avenue as neighbors mustered to carry 15,000 books from the old shop to the new. I was among them, hauling cartons of that season’s big sellers: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, David Halberstam’s Summer of ’49, A. Scott Berg’s Goldwyn, Simon Schama’s Citizens. For many of us, the experience of lugging best sellers and backlist titles, obscure poetry anthologies and must-read classics that somehow we’d never read, embodied the store’s slogan, printed on tote bags and T-shirts: “So m
any books, so little time.”

  In keeping with the owners’ concept of a bookshop as both a community center and a tabernacle of ideas, Politics & Prose had been among the first stores in Washington to sponsor author events, nurturing personal and, usually, amiable conversations between writers and readers. The store had started with about five events each month, often using D.C. journalists and other hometown scribblers to draw a crowd; by 1989, that had doubled to ten a month. The store became, as The New York Times observed, “a virtually mandatory stop on the book tours of authors who write about politics.” In truth, an affluent, educated clientele with catholic interests seemed keen to support all substantive genres, from literary fiction and poetry to narrative nonfiction and topical journalism. “Like the children of Lake Wobegon,” the Politics and Prose staff liked to say, “all of our customers are above average.”

  Soon nearly every night of the calendar was booked with events, along with many afternoons. For each author given the podium at P&P—whether a Nobel laureate or a first-time local novelist—three or four others were necessarily turned away. For writers like me who have been lucky enough to speak at the bookstore repeatedly, the encounter with an inquisitive, mettlesome audience can be revelatory, deepening an author’s understanding of his own work and giving new meaning to that old aphorism, “I write so I know what I think.”

  The store would expand again, spreading its wings and adding a coffee shop and a bigger children’s section. Threats to the business came and went, including Crown Books and Borders. Other threats came and lingered: Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, Costco pallets, the digital book. Several fine local competitors vanished, including the likes of Olsson’s Books and Records. The existential struggle faced by independents around the country seemed ever more dire.