My Bookstore

by Ronald Rice

  When I first started visiting Magers & Quinn, signing my books even though it broke my heart that they were remaindered, I worried that the Borders across Hennepin Avenue would put Denny Magers out of business. Orr Books was across the street too, tiny but lovingly curated and with a passionate following. When I started my own bookstore, I asked Denny for advice. He didn’t send me to a twelve-step program to try and stop me. Instead, he offered to let me go through the pallets of books in his basement and choose the new books, which he would sell to me for practically nothing. I found out that’s how real book people are—delighted in the existence of other small bookstores, supportive of anyone crazy enough to start one. He would have done the same thing if I’d opened up next door to him, probably. As I hand-chose the first books I would put on my shelves, I had a feeling that our stores would both, somehow, survive.

  My first date bought his books, I bought mine, and as we walked back to our cars he handed me a book he’d chosen as a gift. It was on Druids. I was slightly freaked, but he looked at me intently and asked if I also had a thing for trees. I told him about my elms. He saw that my car was a decisive date killer, a Ford Windstar minivan, and he looked troubled. Then he manned up and gave me the other book he’d chosen for me—the collected poems of Theodore Roethke. As we stood in the parking lot he began to recite, I knew a woman, lovely in her bones.… I looked into his eyes to detect some irony—there was none. But I’d already had lots of irony—maybe I had gotten it wrong. Maybe I needed not an ironic man but a man who ironed. Four years later, I did the only thing I could do.

  Bookstore Lovers, I married him.

  He still presses his jeans.

  And Magers & Quinn is now old enough to vote for Obama. Happy 18!

  LOUISE ERDRICH is the author most recently of The Round House, The Antelope Wife (new and revised) and LaRose. She is the owner of Birchbark Books, in Minneapolis.

  Jonathan Evison

  Eagle Harbor Book Co., BAINBRIDGE ISLAND, WASHINGTON

  The little island on which I’ve lived most of my life has changed considerably over the decades. The bowling alley where we loitered as teens is long gone, along with the Jiffy Mart and the Island Bazaar. The Kell-in burger joint owned by our overweight gym teacher was paved over for a shopping center. American Marine Bank, where my mom worked for twenty-nine years, is gone. The Country Mouse, Yeakels Shoes, Torvanger’s Gas Station—gone, gone, gone. The names, the faces, the personalities long associated with these local institutions are goners, along with their Fourth of July floats, their Little League sponsorships, and their ads in the Review.

  We’ve got a Safeway on the island now. A Rite-Aid, a McDonald’s. They’ve got a Walmart just over the bridge in Poulsbo. A Barnes & Noble in Silverdale—even a Costco. Heck, these days, a guy can procure just about anything from 30 weight oil to Chicken McNuggets 24/7/365 around here. And once Amazon starts selling fast food at impossible prices, a fella won’t even need to leave his house to get a fake beef cheeseburger! Oh, joy! Just think: We can all get fatter and lazier and more vaguely dissatisfied, and we won’t have to deal with other human beings! Plus, since we will no longer have to slog all over town supporting local shops and paying an extra buck or two, and talking to actual people, we’ll have twenty extra minutes a day to watch TV advertisements, and we’ll have a few extra bucks we can spend on lotto tickets and phone apps!

  All of this is just a long way of saying: Thank heaven for Eagle Harbor Book Company! For the names, the faces, and the personalities that make EHBC so quintessentially local—so Bainbridge Island. Victoria and Janis and Morley, and Andrew, and Jane and Allison—along with Jan, and Mary, and Paul, who preceded you with the same spirit and energy. Thanks, Eagle Harbor Book Company, for being made out of bricks and mortar, so I can soak up your atmosphere, haunt your shelves, and turn my own books face out when nobody’s looking.

  Thanks, Eagle Harbor Book Company, for letting me drive ten minutes out of my way to get to you, and thanks for letting me spend a few extra bucks to buy what I could purchase cheaper sitting on my ass at home without having to make any effort at all. Thanks, because effort matters. Effort is key to the survival of anything healthy or meaningful. Double thanks, Eagle Harbor Book Company, for putting that few extra bucks I spend by not shopping online or at a box store right back into the community, for bringing your resources into our classrooms, for sponsoring local events, for championing local authors, for encouraging book clubs, for providing your community with a venue for discourse and discussion. Thanks for ordering obscure titles for me. For answering questions, for making suggestions, for letting my kid trash your children’s section three times a week, and for blowing his mind with your recommendations.

  Above all, thank you, Eagle Harbor Book Company, for representing—for being exactly what you are: totally unique and personable in an increasingly uniform and impersonal world.

  JONATHAN EVISON is the New York Times best-selling author of All About Lulu, West of Here, and The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving. He lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington, with his wife and son.

  Kathleen Finneran

  Left Bank Books, ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI

  As with many things in my life, I did not discover it until I was in my twenties and moved from the suburbs of St. Louis, where I grew up, to a small apartment in the city, where I grew up again. I knew little about literature, even less about the world. When you know little, it is easy to assume you know a lot. In knowing little, I assumed it was named for the Left Bank in Paris (it is) and that it was a tribute to Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Stein and the other expatriate writers who lived and wrote there (it isn’t).

  I worked nights as a proofreader and aspired to be a writer (knowing little, assuming much). I knew so little about what it meant to be a writer that I thought the way to begin was to buy a hefty volume called Writer’s Market (The Most Trusted Guide to Getting Published! Completely Revised and Updated! 3,000 Listings to Help You Sell What You Write!). I hadn’t written anything, but I was eager to sell it.

  The woman working the cash register asked if I was a writer. I hope I wasn’t arrogant (or naive) enough to say that I was, but whatever my response, it led her to recommend another purchase: Poets & Writers Magazine. She went and got a copy off the shelf and showed me the classifieds section in the back with its Call for Manuscripts, Contests, Conferences, Residencies, and Retreats. I remember feeling respected, taken seriously, understood. Yes, I did feel all those things in the slight time span of that transaction. And I was naive enough (and, yes, also arrogant enough) to think that she was personally responding to me and my self-purported future and not just skillfully increasing her sales.

  In fact, she was doing both. Doing both, I suspect, is one of the reasons Left Bank Books has survived for over forty years. The cashier that day was Kris Kleindienst, an aspiring writer herself, who co-owned the bookstore with Barry Leibman, an artist. Both had been employees of the original shop, a source for underground newspapers and leftist literature started by a collective of student activists from Washington University who named the store, then located nearer to campus, in recognition of the protests that took place in Paris in the spring of 1968, the year before Left Bank Books began.

  I did not know, that day, who the woman was that waited on me, but she influenced me greatly from that first day forward. I became a regular customer, and as such, I was the benefactor of her taste and intellect and values. The decisions she made about what books to stock in her store became the discoveries I would make when browsing with that kind of idle intention that good bookstores inspire. Indirectly, and without my conscious consideration of it, she was as much a mentor to me as any of the writers I went on to study with later.

  At Left Bank, my browsing always began outside the store. I found it impossible to enter without surveying the flyers, postcards, handbills, and rental notices—Register to Vote Inside! Keep Art Happening! Pelvic Workshop for Women!—that filled the community bulletin bo
ards framing the store’s corner entry. That entryway! Without it, would I have learned of some of the more obscure readings, concerts, plays, and exhibits I attended in my twenties? Would I have plotted my imagined moves to apartments that promised more character than mine, more love, more life? Would I have become a true citizen of St. Louis? Would I have encountered my pelvis? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

  Once through the door with its long, oval window, I tended always to descend the stairs that led to the store’s lower level—offices and an art gallery on one side, used books on the other. Essays were my weakness. And autobiography too (it would be another ten years until memoir came into its own). In time, I gained enough sense to realize that writing was not about publishing but about reading and seeing and thinking and listening and developing a sense of one’s self. And, yes, about putting words on paper. I acquired sacks and sacks of used books from Left Bank’s basement and occasionally splurged on new books from the store’s main floor, where I favored the set of shelves labeled “Belles Lettres.”

  For years, “Belles Lettres” was located opposite the cash register. It has since been moved further back. Because I spent a lot of time in “Belles Lettres,” I often stood in the shadow of the sales desk. It is situated, roughly, in the center of the store, and elevated slightly. The salesclerks sit higher still whenever they are perched on their tall wooden stools, busying themselves with paperwork and special orders and whatever other tasks fill their time between transactions. Something about this spatial arrangement satisfied me, especially when I stood in “Belles Lettres,” the casual chatter and banter of bookstore business—book recommendations, on-the-spot reviews—occurring just over my shoulder.

  Shortly after my first visit to Left Bank, I became a subscriber to the magazine Kris had recommended, and several years later I sent off a manuscript in response to an advertisement in its pages for a scholarship to attend a summer writing workshop in Vermont. The next year, through connections made at the workshop, I got a clerical job in New York City and moved away from the Midwest to make a life in Manhattan, land of many bookstores.

  Curiously, I never became a regular at any of them. I lived a life nearly barren of books except for one: the one I was writing. A few weeks after I moved to New York, on the basis of an essay I wrote at the summer writing workshop in Vermont, I was offered a book contract to write a memoir. Even now, so many years later, it’s difficult for me to admit how little I read during the decade I spent writing that book. The deprivation was born of fear, I suppose, fear that I would never write something equal to anything I read, fear that I would borrow someone else’s voice before I found my own, fear that the limited hours I had to write at night and on the weekends could get easily lost to reading. During that time I mainly went to bookstores to hear other writers read from their work, or, more honestly, to see other writers read from their work, but I had left my habit of browsing back in St. Louis, along with all the books I had bought at Left Bank, stored now in boxes in my parents’ basement.

  When my book finally came out, it had what is known in the industry as a “quiet” publication. But before it settled into its obscurity, it enjoyed one night of immeasurable attention. I was scheduled to read at Left Bank. I flew home to St. Louis the day before the reading, and the next morning I realized that I had left my only copy of the book—an advance reading copy—in New York. I hadn’t yet received my box of hardcover copies from the publisher. I panicked. I had planned to spend the morning selecting what to read from the book, timing it and rehearsing it. Although I had no real experience giving readings, I knew that I was no natural at it and that showing up that night and reading cold would make for a less than impressive debut.

  I was staying at my parents’ house in the suburbs. I drove to the new big-box bookstore up the road to buy a copy, but they didn’t have my book in stock. (A week or so later, they did begin to carry it, but since the book was about my younger brother’s suicide, they shelved it in a section of the store called “Family Psychology” far away from the shelves of literature and memoir, and few people found it.) I drove a little farther down the road to the mall, to the small chain bookstore I frequented when I was a teenager, with its single catchall shelf marked “Literature,” but, again, no luck. So I drove across town to Left Bank. Since I was reading there that night, they would have to have copies.

  I didn’t browse the bulletin boards that morning before going in that oval-windowed doorway that I loved. I know this for a fact because I was stopped short by a single flyer announcing my reading there that night. It was the first publicity I had seen for my book, and the sudden surprise of it made me start to cry. Not wanting to enter the store crying, I walked around the bookstore’s Central West End neighborhood a bit. Like the bookstore, it was a neighborhood that fought hard to sustain itself, one that had been revitalized by urban pioneer retailers and restaurateurs, Left Bank an early anchor.

  I made my way back to the bookstore and went in. I hadn’t been inside in over a decade, but it was still as I remembered, light-filled, calm, simple, and straightforward, a contrast to its ornamental early-twentieth-century terra-cotta exterior. New nonfiction was displayed and shelved on the left. New novels on the right and beyond that the children’s corner, always looking somewhat suitably disheveled, signifying a place where curiosity is encouraged. Straight ahead, the stairs to the lower level, where now a sign—More Books Below—hangs overhead, featuring the painted cutout silhouette of a black cat, with the store’s actual black cat, Spike, slumbering or slinking somewhere below it.

  I walked over to “Belles Lettres.” I knew my book wouldn’t be in that section—it wasn’t a book of essays of the sort that filled those shelves—but I suddenly felt self-conscious about going directly to wherever it might be. For all the time I had spent writing my book, I had never really thought about what it would be like for it to exist in the world, or for me to exist in the world with it. It was my first time being in a bookstore in which some other part of me was there as well, some shadow self, some better, truer part perhaps. I browsed a bit in “Belles Lettres,” and when I felt more settled into this new circumstance—me here in person, me here in print—I proceeded to look for a copy of my book to buy.

  I didn’t have to look far. In fact, I simply looked up and there on the sales desk were several stacks of my book, with a sign above them saying I would be reading at the store that night. I took one from the stack and handed it to the salesclerk. She said something that created an awkward moment. I don’t remember her words exactly. She either told me about the reading or asked me if I planned to come. I stood there—the me here in person, the me here in print—feeling somewhat embarrassed. Should I admit that I was buying my own book?

  (Several years later, my book out of print, I got into the routine of checking online book sites for used copies that were marked in “like new” condition and selling for under five dollars. Every couple of months I would buy a few to replenish my own supply. Once, after buying a copy online, I received an email almost immediately from the seller saying she couldn’t help but notice that my name was the same as the name of the person who wrote the book. Did I know the author, she asked. I am the author, I replied. Within minutes, she sent another email explaining that my book had been required reading for a class she took. Now that the class was over, she said, she had no reason to keep it. “I’m happy to sell it to you,” she wrote. “It’s not a book I’d ever want to read again.”)

  On the day of my reading at Left Bank, faced with the salesclerk’s question or comment, I decided I should say who I was. After all, I would be returning a few hours later. If she was still working at the time of the reading, wouldn’t it be even more awkward to have her recognize me and wonder why I hadn’t introduced myself earlier? I told her the book was mine and explained why I was buying it. I’m relieved to say she got excited (more than the woman years later who unmasked me online). She put the book down and walked around to my side of the counter, tel
ling me that I had to meet Kris, one of the owners, who loved the book and would be introducing me that night. She took me to the back of the store where Kris was meeting with a book rep from Random House.

  It may seem unimportant that the book rep was from Random House, and maybe it is. But she was the first (and only) representative of Random House that I have ever met, and I felt a little starstruck in her presence. When I was a child and spent much of my time alone wondering about random things, one of the random things I wondered about was Random House. As a child, I had few books. One, a favorite, was Bennett Cerf’s Book of Laughs. Just thinking about the yellow cover of that book with its multicolored, multi-patterned drawing of a giraffe still makes me smile, and often even laugh. It’s one of the few reliable responses I have to anything in the world. As a child, I spent a lot of time with that book, reading it mostly with my older brother, who fancied himself as funny as Bennett Cerf, but wasn’t.

  We had a few other books too: Bennett Cerf’s Book of Riddles, Bennett Cerf’s Riddles and More Riddles, Bennett Cerf’s Book of Animal Riddles, and when we were older, Bennett Cerf’s Treasury of Atrocious Puns. With the exception of Bennett Cerf’s Treasury of Atrocious Puns (a book of more-sophisticated wordplay written really for adults, which we mostly didn’t understand but laughed at anyway), all were published by Random House Books for Young Readers. I was drawn to those words “Random House” and wondered about them maybe more than I should admit. I’m sure I even often said them out loud—Random House, Random House—in the privacy of the room I shared with my sister. Rhythmically, they were, to me, words worth repeating.

  When I was in fifth grade and assigned to write a report on my favorite author, naturally I chose Bennett Cerf, and in my research solved for my young self the mystery of those alluring words, Random House, suggested by Cerf as the name for an enterprise undertaken by he and his friends “to publish a few books on the side at random.” (Note: As a benefactor of all the laughter he provided in my childhood, I willingly overlook Cerf’s role in founding the infamous Famous Writers School and admit that if I had been of age to enroll in that seemingly specious correspondence school, vanity and Bennett Cerf fandom would likely have led me to do so.) And so for me, among its many significances, Left Bank will always be the place where I met one of Bennett Cerf’s descendants. And recognizing my name (recognizing my name!), the rep from Random House congratulated me on a review of my book she had read in her hotel room that morning in USA Today. I had had no idea that my book had been reviewed in USA Today that morning—it was my first review—and without her mentioning it, I doubt I would have heard about it, much less had a chance to buy a copy before one day’s edition became the next’s. Thank you, thank you, rep from Random House. Thank you, thank you, Sam I Am. (Yes, of course, I also had Green Eggs and Ham, a book that my fifth grade research revealed was written by Dr. Seuss when Bennett Cerf bet him that a good book could not be written using only fifty words.)