by Ronald Rice
Whenever I’m asked about where I live, I mention the things I love: Prospect Park, the progressive spirit of the neighborhood, the historic architecture. And, I say proudly, “There’s a great independent bookstore.”
CARMELA CIURARU is the author of Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms, published by HarperCollins. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and PEN American Center, and was a 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Nonfiction.
Meg Waite Clayton
Books Inc., PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA
When I confessed my favorite sin to the priest behind the screen each week as a girl, I stuck to the basics: I admitted to disobeying my parents, generally adding some random number of times to make it sound more real than I imagined it was. I was a good girl, with a good girl’s propensity to go to church even on weekday mornings when I didn’t have to. I contorted my early-grade-school shoulders in a failed attempt to gain the proper slant on my cursive without turning my paper upside down (which disconcerted the nuns), and brought home As in everything but penmanship, and yes, even played school with my friends on muggy summer afternoons. If what I did under the covers in bed at night was a sin, I realized it only in that vaguest of ways expressed in those confessionals, and if caught in the act, I would have given up my brother Patrick; if he sequestered a flashlight and a book under the bedcovers, then surely it wasn’t a sin for his little sister to do so. It’s one of the guilty indulgences that has survived being a parent myself. Something about the illicitness of slipping a light back on after everyone is asleep makes reading all the more pleasurable. And it is similar after-hours bad behavior that shapes my affection for one of my favorite bookstores, Palo Alto’s Books Inc.
My relationship with bookstores splits neatly into two periods, and at the pivot is Books Inc. A bookstore habit that began with childhood bike rides to the Book Bin in Northbrook, Illinois (run by book people who knew what a Judy Blume reader might like next), found its way to college years perusing the Ann Arbor Borders when it was a single jumble of a store, sans café. My early adulthood was spent in Dutton’s Books (may it rest in peace), where booksellers introduced me, presciently, to the works of Irish-Catholic writer Alice McDermott, with whom I would later get to study. I began to hook my two sons on my bookstore habit at Nashville’s Davis-Kidd, in whose fiction section I discovered not just the works of Ann Patchett, but the author herself.
By the time we came to Palo Alto, I was a story-and-essay-published writer, if not yet a book-published one, entering bookstores with the hope that I would find that next magical read, yes, but also that I would someday find a place myself on the shelves. The Palo Alto Books Inc. was in a mall across the street from Stanford University at the time. It was part of a small, locally owned bookstore chain that had just celebrated its sesquicentennial—150 years of selling books.
Books Inc. has the kind of history that is California: Man strikes it rich in gold rush and sets himself up selling books. Store thrives despite fires, relocations, changes in ownership, shifts in the market, and—because this is California, after all—shifts in the underlying land itself. Store grows into a chain of stores, which, after fifty post-war years under a single owner, is left to trusted employees… in a state of financial peril. (Did I mention this is California?) Two of the employees, Michael Tucker and Michael Grant, see the stores through a bankruptcy restructuring, emerging in 1997 with a four-location chain. Fifteen years later, twelve beautiful and well-run stores owned by Michael and Margie Scott Tucker—book people of the finest kind—employ some 200 other enthusiastic book people. The stores host over thirty reading groups a month, as well as dozens of literary events every week, authors connecting with readers in a more personal way than can ever be had online.
I first stumbled upon the Palo Alto store a few days after we moved to town, while shopping for new-home necessities. We hadn’t even emptied our moving boxes, much less alphabetized the books on our new shelves, but I’d just received the amazing news that my agent had sold my first novel to a swanky New York publisher. I stood just outside the store, looking inside longingly, regretting the cup of coffee I’d bought before I’d realized there was a bookstore in the mall. The bookseller at the register invited me to have a look around, and when I suggested I would just find a bin to dump my coffee, he welcomed me to browse with coffee in hand. I left with a bag full of great reading that afternoon—and without my non-book shopping bag. I am forever setting bags or coffee cups or wallets down in bookstores without even realizing I’m doing so, and leaving them behind. No doubt it is subliminal. No doubt I’m looking for the easy excuse to come right back.
Just over a year later, my husband called me from a pay phone at the mall and told me there was something there he wanted me to see. And when he took me to the front table at Books Inc., I was flooded with the greedy anticipation that my novel might just be there.
I didn’t see it at first. I was too excited to see my own novel right in front of me. When I did, finally, I started bawling. There was nothing I could do to stop the blubbering and the laughter over the fact of my book—my book!—actually being something a stranger might read.
Mac picked me up and twirled me around like he had when the priest at the front of the church pronounced us husband and wife.
“It’s her first novel,” he explained to the gawking shoppers. “It’s the first time she’s ever seen it. Not just in a store. Anywhere.”
A young mom with a child in a stroller asked about the story, and bought a copy, and asked me to sign it, right there at the counter. She was from Pleasanton, across the bay, I remember. The bookseller handed me a pen, and I wrote the woman’s name in my best back-slanting penmanship, along with a few words and my signature. The bookseller asked if I would mind signing the other copies they had too. Mind? It’s the most enjoyable writing an author ever does, writing her name on the title page of her published book.
The hard part was keeping my tears from running the ink.
At home I returned to the penmanship practice I’d so unsuccessfully undertaken in the second grade. Write your name a hundred times. Surely you can make it look prettier than that! It’s even harder when your forearm hangs over the edge of a book that will belong to someone else.
Ask any of the Books Inc. staff what they’re reading and you’ll learn a whole lot about books—perhaps even the ones you’ve written. I walked in one Sunday with a cup of Peet’s to hear Jason at the register ask if I’d named Mrs. Peets, a minor character in The Wednesday Sisters, after the coffee shop two doors down, where I so often write. Clearly I had on some level, although not a conscious one. It’s booksellers like these—booksellers who read broadly and thoughtfully and have opinions they love to share—who help new literary voices find an audience. Without their support—hand-selling my novels and keeping them front of store—I might well be back practicing law. If they dissappear, our choices as readers will narrow, and our lives as well.
The Palo Alto Books Inc. is now in a different location—a bright space less than a mile from my own bookshelves, which are so full of books I haven’t yet managed to read that I ought not to be allowed to buy any more. I usually bike or walk to the store, out of choice rather than for lack of a driver’s license now. The feeling is not unlike that of the kid I once was, biking to the Book Bin for the new Judy Blume. My dog, Frodo, will sit quietly tied to the bench outside for the time it takes me to buy a book I already know I want, but by the time I’m done chatting with the booksellers he has often chewed through yet another leash. It’s been suggested I might bring him in with me, but it’s one thing for a bookseller to keep a bag of coffee beans for the time it takes its owner to remember it, and quite another to keep a seventy-pound golden retriever who can’t even read.
My favorite time in the store comes on the fourth Tuesday of each month, when we gather at seven with Margie to discuss that month’s Fourth Tuesday Book Club read. Great company, great conversation, and great b
ooks. Or sometimes not such great books. Sometimes books some of us love and others of us don’t. Sometimes books we all find disappointing. We have drinks. We have cookies or cupcakes or all those other things we aren’t supposed to eat, much less in the clean, white space of a bookstore. The company and the conversation never fall short.
The sign on the door clearly states the store closes at eight, but we never leave by then. Some fourth Tuesdays, we’re still there at nine, a full hour after the booksellers might have locked the doors and headed home to their own shelves of books. Shame on us.
“I stay after hours,” I might confess in the dark safety of a confessional, except that the place I find solace now, and really always have, tends to hold more shelves than pews. In confessing one’s transgression, too, one is supposed to commit to trying to do better, and I have no intention of trying to leave the store by closing time. If Margie stays after hours, then surely it’s not a sin. And there is something particularly delicious about staying on in a bookstore well after the hour when the lights are meant to be turned off.
MEG WAITE CLAYTON is the nationally best-selling author of The Four Ms. Bradwells, The Wednesday Sisters, the Bellwether Prize finalist The Language of Light, and the forthcoming The Wednesday Daughters. Her novels have been translated into languages from German to Lithuanian to Chinese. Her essays and short stories have aired on public radio and appeared in commercial and literary publications such as The Los Angeles Times, The San Jose Mercury News, Writer’s Digest, Runner’s World, and The Literary Review. An Order of the Coif graduate of the University Michigan Law School, she now lives in Palo Alto, California. www.megwaiteclayton.com
Pearl Cleage
Charis Books & More, ATLANTA, GEORGIA
I’ve been blessed to have had several amazing long-term love affairs with several amazing bookstores. But with bookstores, as with the flesh-and-blood objects of my affection, there is one that stands out as a passionate, life-changing encounter against which all others must forever be judged and found wanting. For me, that bookstore is and always will be Charis Books & More. Charis opened its doors 40-plus years ago, nestled in the heart of a gloriously and perpetually funky Atlanta neighborhood that continues to resist all attempts to gentrify or justify it. Opening an unapologetically feminist bookstore in Scarlett O’Hara’s hometown may have seemed at the time like some kind of weird post-Nixonian fever dream, but Charis’s founders were visionary women. They knew that those of us who were searching for information about the movement that was already changing our lives needed a place to get our hands on all things feminist.
We were desperate for theory, hungry for fiction, and longing for poetry by women who understood that revolution and romance can sometimes go hand in hand. We needed Simone de Beauvoir and Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin and Alice Walker and Audre Lorde and Anaïs Nin and Octavia Butler and Marian Zimmer Bradley and Ntozake Shange. We needed writers who could provide a context for our anger as we discovered what sexism really was and recognized the ways gender oppression proscribed our lives from the cradle to the grave. We were enraged and outraged, but we were ignorant. We had no context. We had no vocabulary with which to explore our newfound feminism. We needed a language to express our rapidly emerging realities. We needed narratives, real and imagined, that allowed us to explore our sexuality without the judgment of the male gaze or the tyranny of somebody else’s idea of what sin looks like. We needed ways to think about Spirit that allowed us to affirm our own magic and claim our own power without depending on patriarchal models. We needed a way to see what it felt like to place ourselves at the center of the universe without apology.
We found all that and more as Charis offered shelves crowded with the world’s best feminist writers and thinkers and poets and playwrights and organizers and activists. But that’s only part of what Charis was offering. The aforementioned visionary founders also knew that the community to which they were giving a voice needed a gathering place, a safe zone, a freedom house, that was unequivocally for and about women. So in that cozy little space where we found the stories of our inspirational foremothers and our brave pioneers and our Super Sheros, we also found each other, in all our complicated, passionate, work-in-progress messiness. To our great delight, Charis’s amazing staff welcomed us with open arms and open hearts and a play area full of books and toys in case you brought a kid with you. At Charis, we realized we were part of a community, a tribe, a sisterhood of seekers, bound together one to one and each to each in a way that made us stronger and happier and ultimately more whole. It was that place where, to paraphrase Ntozake Shange, we found God in ourselves and we loved her fiercely.
It is still that place. During its 40-year history, I have been a part of many programs at Charis, alone and in the company of other writers I admire, including a few enlightened men. I have celebrated the publication of each of my books with a reading at the bookstore that always feels like coming home. These days, I sometimes greet grandmothers who are bringing their granddaughters to Charis for the first time, or share a laugh with women who tell me they were there at my very first reading, when the bookstore was less than a month old and poet Kay Leigh Hagan and I sat together in a small back room, listening to the murmurs of the women gathering to hear us share our work, and knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that we were part of a once-in-a-lifetime moment when women worldwide were finding our power and our voices and our joy. It sounds kind of corny to say it that way now, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true—because it is. And I ought to know. I was there.
PEARL CLEAGE is the author of eight novels, four books of poetry, a memoir, and more than a dozen plays. Her book What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day was an Oprah Book Club pick and a New York Times best seller. Her memoir, Things I Should Have Told My Daughter: Lies, Lessons & Love Affairs, was published in 2014. She is currently the Mellon Playwright in Residence at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta.
Jon Clinch
Northshire Bookstore, MANCHESTER, VERMONT
The minute I heard the banjo music, I knew I’d arrived.
And by arrived, I mean arrived.
This must have been the hundredth time I’d walked into the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont. I certainly can’t remember the first. The first was probably ten years ago now, which would make it five years before the banjo music. My wife and I lived in Pennsylvania then, and we commuted to our place in Vermont as often as we could. Northshire was an important stop along the way—northbound, it was a signifier that we’d arrived in a better and far cooler place than the Philadelphia suburbs; southbound, it was a nearly irresistible reason to think about sticking around forever and ever.
Which we finally did. Statisticians may tell you that people cluster around jobs or transit or high-speed Internet, but some of us cluster around more important things. Like bookstores.
Anyhow, I’d never known a bookstore quite like Northshire. Make that anything like Northshire. Like so many suburban readers, I’d been a creature of the chains. Little B&Ns in shopping malls and sad downmarket outposts of Waldenbooks and end-of-the-trail remainder houses like Encore. In those days, a Borders was a big deal. Remember Borders? They had a better selection than anybody, grant them that. Kind of like Amazon, only without those flashing banners that tell you what other folks just like you have been buying lately, whether it’s books or backpacks or barbecue grills.
Northshire was different. It was big, for sure. Big enough to get lost in. (What the heck kind of building did it occupy, anyhow? Was it a house? Was it two houses? A commercial block? Something else? I still can’t quite get the hang of it, and I’m afraid there’s a Borgesian quality to the whole business that I won’t go into here.) But size and scope weren’t the half of it. The main thing was that the instant you stepped inside the door you knew that this was a place where books were honored. There was a kind of respectful intelligence behind everything, and to make your way down the aisles was to engage in a conversation with whoever it w
as who’d arranged them.
This wasn’t a chain store decorated with images of Twain and Faulkner and stocked with a sorry array of vampire books. This was a place where literature wasn’t window dressing. Take it all around, Northshire was a revelation.
The place was always crowded with people, too. Locals and tourists and, above all, staff—real live booksellers worthy of that elevated title. And there was always plenty of conversation going on. Never mind the conventional hush of the library or the cunning jacked-up motivational Muzak of the mall, folks here understood that books are things that you talk about. Things you need to talk about, because the more you talk about books, the more you understand the people you’re talking about books with. It’s as simple as that.
Speaking of which, I learned pretty quickly that a Northshire bookseller is likely to get excited about one of two things: a book he loves, or a book he’s pretty sure you’re going to love. Who wouldn’t get excited about that? About approaching a friend with a little stack of books that you just know he’s going to be crazy about? It’s a gift, really. A gift to everybody. A gift that goes in both directions. And the only way it can happen is through conversation.
One conversation I never expected to have, back in those days at least, was the dreaded “I wrote a book” chat. But when Finn was coming, and word trickled down from my publisher that folks at Northshire thought pretty highly of it, there was no turning away. I had to make contacts on a new and entirely different level. But I didn’t want to blow it. See, an author event at Northshire—a reading, a signing—was a prize to be sought after. All kinds of important authors stopped there on their way through New England, and I’d begun to hope that I might be able to do the same one day. So trust me when I suggest that a certain amount of trepidation went along with starting up the “I wrote a book” conversation. I girded my loins and had it anyway.