by Ronald Rice
Like any rapidly changing community, Durham has gotten increasingly self-conscious lately—there are T-shirts and bumper stickers that announce, with slight aggression born of supercilious comments made by friends in New York, “Durham: It’s Not for Everyone.” Others demand, with the fear of recent arrivals who are worried that the next arrivals will destroy what they came to enjoy, “Keep Durham Dirty.” Sometimes it does feel as if Durham is a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn. Still, there’s something true and good about the desire to keep things local. And it is a striking fact that within downtown Durham itself you’ll find almost no chain stores (beyond the inevitable McDonald’s). The city has gotten rather famous for its ever-proliferating food culture; every week, it seems, a new food truck appears, and within a few months it becomes a store, and then another follows, until it’s become quite difficult to decide precisely where to get a cupcake or pain au chocolat, not to mention a delectable meal of all locally produced food, on any given day.
Artwork by the author’s son, depicting his favorite characters reading from their own books in The Regulator. From left to right: Greg from Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Vordack from Vordack the Incomprehensible, and Nate from Big Nate.
But among all these local businesses the Regulator holds a particularly central place. Part of what Durham is, in so many ways, is the intersection between Duke University and the broader community, and the bookstore is pivotal in that relationship. It is a hub around which much life in Durham circles, bringing together readers and talkers in a swirling, open way.
My son’s reading life circles around the Regulator too. The day a particular book is released—the latest installment of Big Nate was the last one in question—we speed from school to the shop. He dashes out of the car as soon as we park along 9th Street, and by the time I manage to catch up with him at the counter he’s already holding the book, handed to him with a “Here you are, Anton!” Then it’s the dash back to begin reading, then and there. If there’s no book waiting, he skips past the counter with a quick “Hi!” and I’ll find him, minutes later, sitting down amongst the bookshelves, engrossed. We used to read together; now I’m basically superfluous (except for my wallet, of course), but I do get to look at particularly hilarious or notable pages in the books he’s reading. Sometimes he’ll make a pitch that his school desperately needs a particular book in its library. Each year his school holds a two-day event at the store where kids read favorite books, as well as some of their own writings, and parents can buy books requested by the teachers. I love that he’s learned that we each play a role in the big warm web of books: choosing, giving, reading, writing. With two writers as parents, he’s already kind of surrounded by the idea of reading and writing books, but the Regulator is what makes that experience truly one of community in the largest sense.
There’s a spot in the back of the Regulator, at the crossroads between the children and young-adult books and the “Society” section of recent nonfiction, that always has the feel of a twenty-first-century salon. There’s a small area with a comfortable couch, a chair, and a long pillowed bench, where you’ll usually find a group of people sitting and reading together. They might chat occasionally about what they’re reading. Anton and I can spend hours there, slouched and paging through different books, chatting with others doing the same. Sometimes a writer happens by, and we buy a book and have him or her sign it. Sometimes there’s a reading downstairs, and it might include a short concert of blues music, a heated political argument, or cascades of delirious laughter. There are political meetings, book-group meetings, and the more informal meetings that make up the texture of daily life in a place worth living in. The work of the bookstore is, ultimately, to create that kind of space. At the Regulator, they do it through their books, of course, through the events that, week after week, bring a remarkable group of writers and thinkers to the store. But they do it as much through the cultivation of a space that says to anyone and everyone: Come on in, take your time, stay for two minutes or two hours. And because of the time spent inside, you’ll walk out into a world that’s a little bit different from when you came in.
LAURENT DUBOIS was born in Belgium and grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. He graduated from Princeton in 1992 and received a doctorate in anthropology and history from the University of Michigan in 1998. Since then, he has taught at Harvard University and Michigan State University and is now Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History at Duke University. He is the author of Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (Metropolitan, 2012), Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (University of California Press, 2010), and Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2004) and is currently writing a history of the banjo.
Timothy Egan
The Elliott Bay Book Company, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
The floors have to creak, of course. There should be a bit of a chill inside—not dank, or damp, but enough to bring on thoughts of curling up somewhere with one of the bound companions. If the table displays, favorite picks, and the like have a quirky randomness to them, in defiance of the latest imperatives from publishers, all the better. And placing the erotica section not far from religious tomes shows social engineering skills rare among bibliophiles.
All of this you take for granted at The Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. Or did, in the years when the store was hard by Puget Sound. After they decided to move up the hill to a new home, for survival, there was much concern about loss of the ambient charm. The personality, I’m happy to report, is intact.
But with the move you realized that Elliott Bay, as with all great bookstores, is only partially about physical space. You remember all the nights when you forgot where you were.
There is Terry Tempest Williams paying raspy reverence to the slickrock canyons of the Southwest. Here is Sherman Alexie making you laugh so hard you gasp for breath. And here, there, and everywhere are the many obscure poets who arrive on Tuesday nights in January only to find that they are not obscure, not at Elliott Bay, an author’s affirmation shrine.
Joe Lelyveld, a fine writer who also served as executive editor of The New York Times (full disclosure: Joe is my former boss, a likable one at that, and a friend), told an Elliott Bay audience not long ago how lucky they were. How so? You can walk nearly the length of Manhattan, he said, and not find a bookstore with such devoted readers as Elliott Bay’s.
He did not have to convince me. For a time, I traveled almost 50,000 miles a year throughout the American West, looking for stories. A Carnegie Library, planted, say, on a patch of prairie somewhere more than a century ago, stood in many a town that had lost everything else. Rare was the well-tended, well-stocked independent bookstore—not just a haven, not just a refuge, but damn near a miracle. To return home and see a store like Elliott Bay housing all those stories and, nightly, all those storytellers, made me a fierce partisan of the indies.
We consider ourselves in Seattle—often with a bit of smugness—to be the most literate, best-read city in the nation. If you look at number of books sold per capita, the percentage of people with advanced educational degrees, and support for visiting authors, Seattle ranks near the top in all categories.
Is this Elliott Bay’s doing? No, of course not. But you can’t have one without the other. An informed, enlightened, well-read community needs an anchor. In Seattle, the only big city in the nation that people move to in order to get closer to nature, as the British expat Jonathan Raban said, our lives are defined by the natural world close at hand. But equally important are the interior spaces where we gather in order to tell each other stories. The climate, no doubt, encourages the latter—especially during the rainy season.
And while that “institution” (a word I use with caution in regard to Elliott Bay) must change with the times, as formats and “content platforms” sprout from tech labs in the digital revolution, certain things should remain constant. In Elliott Bay’s universe, the written word is second
to nothing. As it should be. As it will be.
TIMOTHY EGAN is a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and the author of six books, most recently The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America, a New York Times best-seller and winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and the Washington State Book Award. His previous books include The Worst Hard Time, which won a National Book Award and was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice. He is an online op-ed columnist for the New York Times, writing his “Opinionator” feature once a week. He is a third-generation Westerner and lives in Seattle.
Dave Eggers
Green Apple Books, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
I feel weird choosing just one Bay Area bookstore, because at different times in my twenty years living out here, I’ve frequented Black Oak and Pegasus Books and Cody’s and Moe’s in Berkeley, Book Passage and the Depot in Marin County, Books Inc. and Modern Times and Dog Eared and City Lights in San Francisco, and many others in between. The Bay Area has the most independent bookstores in the country—maybe the world—but for the purposes of this collection I’d like to mention the first store I had a relationship with in San Francisco, Green Apple Books. They’re also the ones who mentioned this book about indies, the one in which you’re reading this essay, so they get dibs.
My brother Toph and I lived in the Laurel Village/Richmond area for a few years, and when we did, the bookstore we went to was Green Apple. Like a lot of great bookstores, on the outside, Green Apple is deceptively simple, humble, even misleading. At first glance, you’d think it was actually a fruit market. There’s the store’s name, of course. Then there’s the green awning, the global symbol for produce. There are even a few bins outside, where fruit would normally go. The first many times I passed by, driving or walking on the other side of the street, I thought, huh, another fruit market, and moved on. But it’s a bookstore, and it’s a world-class bookstore, and people love it deeply, and I love it deeply.
It was started by a former soldier named Richard Savoy, who in 1967 borrowed a few hundred dollars from a credit union to rent a storefront on Clement Street in San Francisco’s Richmond District—a wonderfully diverse, predominantly Chinese and Russian neighborhood also known as The Avenues. The store originally carried used paperbacks and comics and magazines, but it was successful from the start and grew steadily over the years, into new books, and collectors’ books, and every genre available, while always expanding physically, too. Into the second floor, and over into some of the neighboring storefronts; it’s gone from 700 square feet to 8,500. Not bad for an independently owned store opened by a guy with no experience in the business.
Mr. Savoy ran the store for forty-two years, until 2009, when he handed the reins over to three longtime staff members—Kevin Hunsanger, Kevin Ryan, and Pete Mulvihill—who own the store and run it together. I’ve known these guys for about fifteen years now, and I have to say there are no purer book people in the world. They know their store, they know their customers, and of course they know books. They know everything Green Apple carries, which is more or less everything—new books, used books, antiquarian rarities, humor oddities, coffee table masterpieces, paperback thrillers. The crazy thing about Green Apple is that everything, even a cat calendar, seems far more interesting and wantable in their hands.
This is the beauty of atmosphere and careful, inspired curation. First, a few words about atmosphere. Green Apple’s floors, most of which are over a hundred years old, creak wherever you go, and when you walk upstairs, there will be small clouds of dust. The place is old, and smells old, in the best sense; it smells like paperbacks and sun and paperbacks faded in the sun. It smells of 1904, when the building was erected, and it smells of every decade and era in between. It smells of ink and leather shoes. The shelves occasionally bend in the middle. The hallways are narrow and the upstairs rooms are often small. It is a warren. It is a labyrinth. It has the feeling of the Winchester Mystery House, a building that seems to go on forever and into impossible directions and illogical spaces. But it never feels cramped. Instead, there is the feeling you get when walking into a house of worship with fifty-foot ceilings and stories told in stained glass, a feeling of grandeur and possibility.
There have been marriage proposals proffered in the store. Former employees have married each other. People, or at least one person, has died in the store (he had a heart attack, and, for the first time anyone could remember, just afterward, a bird flew in, alighted briefly, and left through the window). The store is frequented by children, by tourists, by older women seeking Patricia Highsmith, by students, by sellers of used books (the store has six full-time buyers), by passionate young readers, by last-minute holiday shoppers, and by Robin Williams.
I may need to check the data on this one, but my informal research says that no one has ever left the store empty-handed. I have personally never left the store without buying something.
There is a lesson here. I think stores should be well organized and have self-contained sections where you can find your philosophy books, your nonfiction, your books about fast cars, on and on. But there is equal, and possibly greater, benefit, in having these sections closely intermingling, or even overlapping. When you walk into Green Apple, the new and best-selling books are right there, in your face, but just to the left are the oversized art books, and there’s always something that jumps out at you there, or just a few inches from those, where they keep fifty or so different new paperbacks, carefully curated, reminding you of all the books you missed in hardcover but would be a fool to miss now. Within a few feet are the humor books, the topical ones about zombies and shark-fighting. And again, in Green Apple, everything seems essential. Even without their thousands of handwritten notes of recommendation—which of course are heartfelt and urge-creating—even without these, something in the building casts a light of wonder and inevitability on everything they carry. Maybe it’s the history of the building, which predates and survived the earthquakes of 1906 and 1989 and has the psychic wounds to show for it. Maybe it’s the history of the business, which is after all the history of small family businesses in America. Maybe it’s just the feeling that if a bookshop is as unorthodox and strange as books are, as writers are, as language is, it will all seem right and good and you will buy things there. And if you do, it will persist, and small publishers will persist, and actual books will persist. Anyone who wants anything less is a fool.
DAVE EGGERS is the best-selling author of Zeitoun, winner of the American Book Award and Dayton Literary Peace Prize and Hologram for the King. His novel What Is the What was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won France’s Prix Medici.
Louise Erdrich
Magers & Quinn Booksellers, MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA
November 2004. George Bush just reelected. Dejection and apocalyptic dismay. But on the bright side, I am on my own, working on a book I love, happy in a complicated, messy house with my singular daughters. The great elms around my house have survived a drought. I’ve started running again. Then a man asks me out for coffee. I haven’t been asked out by a man I wasn’t already friends with, ever. I ask my date-guru friend, S., what to do? At our age, she says, having coffee with an interested man is like first base. She advises me to scout out the coffee shop a few minutes early and choose the table with the softest lighting. She tells me that after he falls in love with me, he won’t care what I look like. I don’t want him to fall in love with me, but still, I choose a table lighted to my advantage and am waiting at Dunn Brothers with my chai latte when he arrives. He’s tall and very attractive in a youthful, silver-fox sort of way; he has a dimple on one side of his South Dakota grin. But he’s not my type, a businessman, a tile importer in building supply. Sure, I like tiles, but they have no irony. I’m ready to go home. Then he says, what next? Want to go to Magers & Quinn?
I remember catching glimpses of him as we walk the aisles of books, absorbed, then checking in with each other, then getting lost in the books again. He i
s wearing a black corduroy jacket, pressed jeans. Oh my god, pressed jeans? Actually, it occurs to me, I love the smell of ironing. I haven’t ironed in years. We keep browsing. People love independent bookstores for the same reasons they love other people—looks, personality, interesting mind, smell. Magers & Quinn has been a boyfriend of mine ever since I moved to Minneapolis. I wonder if this man intuits that he is making himself part of a landscape I love?