by Ronald Rice
She’s actually a gentle person, with a cap of white hair, blue eyes, dimples, a smile that animates her entire face, and an irrepressible sense of humor. Today she’s wearing a rhinestone pin that spells out READ in glittery letters.
We’re sitting in a coffee shop talking, as usual, about books. She mentions a novel she’s just finished. It could become an American classic, she says, if people just knew about it. She’s indignant that Publishers Weekly—the almighty pre-publication arbiter of literary opinion—didn’t review it. She’s called them herself and asked if they’d consider doing a post-publication review. (She has cachet with Publishers Weekly: In 2001, they named her Bookseller of the Year.) PW has agreed to have a look at the novel; two copies are on the way.
“Oh, Angela, you’ve got to read this book,” she says, leaning forward. “I’ll lend you my copy. I want to know what you think.”
The effect is hypnotic. As soon as we part ways, I drive to the store, where I’ve already been earlier that day, buy the book, go home, and dive in. She’s right. I love the book.
Nancy has a genius for matching books and readers. People often ask her, “What should I read?” She knows her regular customers well enough that she can usually make an immediate suggestion. If she doesn’t know the reader—or the reader’s friend or aunt, for whom the book will be a gift—she asks about preferences, sometimes walking around the store, mulling it over with the customer until she has an answer.
A lifelong voracious reader, she has a substantial mental catalog to draw upon. She also knows her stock; all the books in the store were handpicked by Nancy and her staff and come from small as well as large publishers.
Nancy also has a rare capacity for attention. When she greets someone—in the store, or elsewhere—she comes to a physical and emotional pause. She takes you in. She wants to know how you are, and what you’ve been reading.
Only connect, Forster said.
Connection is the genius loci of this bookstore. Its motto, “Bringing Readers and Writers Together,” is not an empty slogan.
Many people, myself included, think of the store as a second home. People who work there are like family. I go in so often that if I miss a few days, a staff member might ask, with genuine concern, if I’ve been ill. People occasionally bring their lunch. One woman slept on the couch in the afternoons when she was recovering from chemotherapy. Some people come every night for the readings by authors, many of whom are famous; the store is a prime destination for writers on tour. (Their autographed photographs fill the walls of the cozy bathroom.)
There is no coffee bar. Before the last expansion, Nancy asked her customers if they wanted books or coffee. One hundred percent voted for more books.
Nancy’s aim is to offer books not found everywhere, along with the expected titles. (Best sellers are on a shelf facing away from the door.) There’s a section of international fiction, an impressive collection of books on writing and publishing, and an eclectic mix of paperbacks laid out on a table. (I recently discovered an Iranian novel there—Women Without Men, by Shahrnush Parsipur—and Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think.) Classic fiction is shelved with the contemporary American and British work. Jane Austen occupies most of a shelf; Anthony Trollope stands beside Joanna; there are multiple editions of War and Peace. Occasionally I come across a tempting work of new experimental fiction tucked between books by established writers.
There’s a large, separate area for children’s books, overseen by children’s-literature specialist Carol Moyer. The music section offers the only substantial collection of classical-music CDs in Raleigh, along with jazz and American traditional music.
The reading area, with its table and four armchairs, can be quickly transformed into a public space for readings and other gatherings.
The store hosts discussion groups (on topics as diverse as the Koran, health care, and Flannery O’Connor); writers’ groups, including one for teenage writers; numerous children’s programs; concerts; and quarterly town-hall meetings. In programs cosponsored by the local classical-music station, WCPE, the conductor and assistant conductors of the North Carolina Symphony give talks at the store about upcoming performances. Music director Grant Llewellyn prepared his audience for Mahler’s Ninth with excerpts from the music; Shakespeare’s influence on composers from Mendelssohn to Bernstein was the subject of another lecture.
An annual used-book sale raises money for Books for Kids, a nonprofit that Nancy founded for children whose families can’t afford books. Since 1999, 50,000 children have received books through the program. (This effort is operated almost entirely by volunteers. Devoted volunteers also help in the day-to-day operation of the store, shelving and wrapping books.)
From the beginning, Nancy Olson has given strong support to North Carolina writers and Southern writers. The first author she invited to read at the store was Jill McCorkle, who had just published two novels with Algonquin Books.
Nancy scheduled the event on an afternoon that happened to coincide with a football game between North Carolina State and the University of North Carolina. No one showed up.
“I’ve learned a lot since then,” Nancy says with a laugh. “But Jill was very gracious. We spent an hour or so going around the store, talking about books. We bonded for life.”
She has also bonded for life with numerous writers whose books she has saved from oblivion, including mine.
A writer’s career can rise and fall with stomach-dropping speed. My first two novels had done well, but my third, Plum Wine, made the rounds in New York for years without a sale. I finally placed it with a university press, which produced 1,000 copies of a beautifully designed volume, but the press didn’t have money to promote it. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, which had given my earlier books excellent reviews, overlooked it.
Nancy Olson, who is quick to say that she is not necessarily drawn to each book by her many writer friends, happened to be passionate about this one. After a gala launch, the store gave the book what one staff member called “The Big Push.” Customers could hardly get out of the store without hearing about Plum Wine. Nancy nominated it as a “Pick” for Book Sense, which is published by a national consortium of independent booksellers. The novel was chosen, featured in stores around the country, and began to sell. Nancy sent the book to an agent in New York who took on the book with enthusiasm. Suddenly I had a contract for four books: paperback editions of Plum Wine and my first two books, as well as a new novel. Nancy Olson saved my career.
She has also given boosts to dozens of other writers. She praised fledgling North Carolina fiction writer Ron Rash during an NPR radio interview; that day he received several calls from editors. (He has since won numerous awards for his fiction, and a movie based on one of his novels is in the works). Nancy saw promise for a wide readership in Jan Karon’s first novel, At Home in Mitford, originally published by a small Christian press, and sent the book to an agent. Jan Karon now has a series of Mitford novels that have sold millions of copies.
In the decade before Charles Frazier published Cold Mountain, he often came into the store, and he and Nancy became well acquainted. She was a little anxious about what to expect of that first novel, she says, but when she read it, she was electrified. Quail Ridge launched the book with spectacular sales from the start, and Nancy was by Charles Frazier’s side when he won the National Book Award for Cold Mountain.
Although Nancy Olson has become a major voice in the book world, she and her husband Jim started out in 1984 with a modest budget and no experience in bookselling, or in any form of retail.
Nancy had just retired from a government job in Washington, D.C., when she and Jim began to think seriously about opening a bookstore, Nancy’s lifelong dream. Their research consisted of a national tour of twenty-four bookstores. “I saw what I liked and what I didn’t,” Nancy says. She decided that Raleigh, with its seven colleges, including one university, an
d at the time, no other independent bookstore, was fertile ground.
Since then, the store has grown from 1,200 to 10,000 square feet, with a stock of some 70,000 books. Customers drive to the store from other states and place orders from various foreign countries. (Just because a scientist or professor moves from this area to Sweden or Italy doesn’t necessarily mean that he or she will leave her book home behind.)
Quail Ridge Books & Music, which Newsweek recently named one of the great bookstores in the country, has been phenomenally successful. Even in these hard economic times, the store is holding its own.
But as the years pass, and the culture shifts, the book business and bookstores have become increasingly fragile.
What if there was no Quail Ridge Books & Music?
An unthinkable question, but I’ve heard many people ask it. If we did not have this magnificent bookstore, I and countless others would lose a refuge, an intellectual home.
Since this particular store is so vital to our community, there’s a good chance it will continue for decades, in one form or another.
But the possibility of an ending makes the existence of any living thing—and bookstores are live entities—more precious.
So read, Reader, read. And buy books, from stores.
ANGELA DAVIS-GARDNER has published four novels, most recently Butterfly’s Child. Her novel Plum Wine was featured on NPR and was named a Notable Book by the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Prize committee for its contributions to East-West understanding. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Ivan Doig
University Book Store, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
“Home. Home. I knew it entering.” Richard Hugo’s exalted greeting to a beguiling place of business that instantly and forever wins one’s heart is hard to better, and though my late, great poet friend was saluting a Montana institution in “The Only Bar in Dixon” for The New Yorker, I can’t resist hoisting that same 100-proof tribute to my home bookstore, Seattle’s one and only University Book Store. Down through the years of readings and talks, I have hailed booksellers (and librarians) as the bartenders of information, and nowhere is the intoxication of reading more readily at hand than at the big store by the big U (of Washington).
The iconic UBS, which began in a cubbyhole next to the university president’s office in 1900 and had grown to take up most of a city block by the time I arrived to the Seattle campus in the 1960s, was literally another world, bookwise, for me. In my college years at Northwestern, the available bookstores (two) drew notice only as to which would buy back used texts for fifty cents more. But the marketplace of tomes awaiting this slightly overage graduate student in the green and glorious Northwest, wowie. Here, an easy stroll from the grove (Douglas-fir size) of academe, my three years of giddy full-time reading began not on the UW campus where I was ostensibly enrolled, but at the shelves of just about the biggest and best-stocked emporium of authorial output to be found anywhere. I loaded up at the University Book Store, according to my handwritten list, all the way from Tacitus’ Annals to Murray Morgan’s contemporary saga of Grand Coulee, The Dam, with plenty of novels and poetry in between.
This new literary romance with the UBS got even better. My wife, Carol, and I, in mid-career as magazine editors, had abandoned all that and the Midwest and arrived to Puget Sound in a gunboat Buick intending to stay only as long as it took for me to snag a Ph.D. and become a journalism professor. The Ph.D. came on time, but we have never left; fourteen books authored by me seem to have gotten in the way. The very first of those, my Montana memoir This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind, was immediately championed by the Mr. Books of this end of the country, Lee Soper, and his fantastically intuitive buyer in the UBS trade department, Marilyn Martin (Dahl). What a ride that was for a first-time author, with the University Book Store vigorously selling, oh, 15 percent or so of the national total as the book ascended all the way to the National Book Award finals with Kazin, Boulding, and Matthiessen, to within a whisker of winning. Talk about a satisfied customer.
From there to, yes, my latest novel, The Bartender’s Tale, my experience with the UBS has been both comfortable and stimulating. An instance of each:
—The back rooms of bookstores, where the staff and imagination run free, are one of the secret delights for an author on book tour. It is back there, before the readings and the Q&A sessions and the (hopefully) long lines of customers waiting for books to be inscribed, that the airport-raddled hoteled-out touring writer is treated to those necessary small comforts, someplace to sit and a restroom. Back there, too, are the stacks of advance galleys, the cartoons on the walls, the postings such as “A book is the only electrifying experience that won’t kill you if you drop it in the bathtub.” And, of course, the predilections of the word-mad tribe, booksellers. At their behest, backstage there, I have signed posters, walls, doors, tables, and more than once, booksellers. Yet the back room I most look forward to is one of those calmer ones, the offices of Lee and Marilyn’s successors, Mark Mouser and events manager Stesha Brandon, where I know there will be a window looking out on the grandly wooded campus that began all this, with a foreground of high stacks of my books to be pre-signed. To this writer’s eyes, it is old loved scenery, and I mean the forest of books as well as the trees.
—If memory serves, it was two or three books ago, in the UBS’s fine loft area for readings, that a young woman in the signing line asked me what words of mine I would like to have tattooed on her ankle. She was not pulling my leg. She displayed a quite nice ankle with indeed a neat blue-inked circlet of sentence—quite nice in its own right—and explained that she would like to match it with a sentence from one of my books. Which particular set of words took some fast thinking, but we came up with it, she and I. And so it is a lovely thought to me that somewhere among us, even today, walks a magical woman with Norman Maclean’s unforgettable ultimate line from A River Runs Through It, “I am haunted by waters,” on that first ankle, and on her other, my lyric one from the title song of Dancing at the Rascal Fair, “Feel love’s music everywhere.”
And so it goes on, blessedly, in my bookstore where I am author, shopper, customer, and grateful browser, now and then, along that certain shelf on the second floor of the University Book Store where fiction is housed and the inhabitants happen to be Dickens, Doctorow, Doig, Dostoevsky…
IVAN DOIG is the author of three nonfiction books and 11 novels, including The Bartender’s Tale (2012). A recipient of the lifetime Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western Literature Association, a record six Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, the Wallace Stegner Award, and many other honors—including an Audie for his audio reading of A River Runs Through It—he lives and writes in Seattle, Washington.
Laurent Dubois
The Regulator Bookshop, DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA
“Can we go to the Regulator?” Among the many different questions I get from my 9-year-old son, Anton, when I pick him up from school, this is by far my favorite. He well knows by now that—in contrast to many of the other requests for exciting outings he might make at 5 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon—the answer will always be an easy and emphatic “Yes!” An outing to the Regulator has its attendant attractions, to be sure: a dinner at Dain’s, our favorite 9th Street pub, concluded either with their only dessert item (Oreos and a glass of milk) or a milkshake at Ox & Rabbit, an old soda shop converted into hipster heaven. We’ll likely run into some friends as we wander up the sidewalk. But this is just preparation for the main course: sauntering into the Regulator, where Anton runs back to the kids’ section of the bookstore while I stop to talk about the latest soccer news with Wander (whose life history includes a stint in a Dutch youth soccer academy) or Tom, the store’s benevolent sovereign.
More often than not, there’s a hefty stack of books waiting for me, the ones I’ve ordered online from the store. When I pick them up I get the pleasure of some sincere questions about precisely why I might be reading a self-reflexive ethnography of West Afric
a, a recent book on soccer in Mexico, the latest collection of critical essays on NGOs in Haiti, and a classic work by Amitav Ghosh. But unless I’m in a rush I know better than to pay for these ordered books when I arrive. It will be tough for me to get past the tables inside the door, decked out with recent titles of perpetual diversity, many signed by authors who have recently made the necessary stop to a store that has, over the years, helped to define the intellectual culture of our funky, changing, contented post-industrial city.
The Regulator opened its doors in 1976. It was, as one of the store’s founders and its current owner Tom Campbell wrote in 2006, “a small and perhaps improbable bookstore.”1 At the time, Durham’s 9th Street, which is just two blocks from Duke University, was largely defined by a closer neighbor: a large textile mill that sat basically across the street. Back then it was packed with workers who went to 9th Street for meals and errands. All the stores that were there in 1976—including McDonald’s Drug Store, a hardware store, and a series of grills that served breakfast and lunch—are gone now. The Regulator is the oldest business on a street that now caters to Duke students and Durham residents looking for coffee, toys, hip T-shirts, records, yoga classes, and, of course, books.
The building that houses the Regulator was, at the time, home to a small local printing press—the Regulator Press. The name, probably gleaned from a history class taken by some of the Duke graduates who worked there, honored a locally famous bunch of precocious North Carolina rebels who, years before the American Revolution, carried out an uprising against the British. It was, as Tom Campbell recently summarized to me, both “local and rebellious,” which at the time captured the spirit of the store. It still does.
While the name preserves a bit of local history, the store also commits itself to offering customers a wide selection of books about North Carolina. Since I moved to Durham five years ago, the Regulator has been where I’ve learned about the sedimented stories that define my adopted home. The town’s history is defined, even dominated, by tobacco. Though the city no longer smells like Brightleaf being dried and cured, the red brick factories loom everywhere—though most are now converted into apartments, studios, offices, shops, or restaurants. Because it really didn’t exist until after the Civil War, Durham was defined less by the plantation than by the factory. It became home to a prominent and successful African-American middle class, famously boasting a “Black Wall Street” and touted as a model by Booker T. Washington. North Carolina Mutual, long one of the largest African-American business in the country, was founded here by an ex-slave. One of the country’s oldest historically black universities, North Carolina Central University, makes its home here. It abuts a neighborhood known as Hayti, so named as the city was built because—like the country in the Caribbean—it was a place where people of African descent could rule themselves and build their own institutions. As it happens, I’m a historian of Haiti, so the fact that I can find myself in Haiti while in Durham—and can take my various Haitian visitors home, in a way, when they are here—is something that gives me particular pleasure. Durham has long greeted seekers like myself—immigrants with various convoluted stories who have found in North Carolina something nearing the home they’d long imagined.