My Bookstore

by Ronald Rice

  I was always grateful for the research that made Brave Hearts possible, but it was hugely satisfying to finally discover everything about those courageous nurses in Elizabeth M. Norman’s superb history.

  Full Circle’s impact on me has been profound and I am only one of thousands who have come to the store. Who can gauge what difference Full Circle has made in the lives of so many readers?

  Jim Tolbert’s accomplishments are many, but I feel sure that he has a special place in his heart for Full Circle and for all the books and all the readers. To me, Jim and Full Circle are a superb expression of a Bible verse I treasure:

  Philippians 4:8: Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, let your mind dwell on these things.

  Thank you, Jim, and God bless.

  CAROLYN HART is the author of 56 novels. Her most recent titles are Ghost to the Rescue, Don’t Go Home, and High Stakes, a suspense novel.

  John Hart

  Rainy Day Books, KANSAS CITY, KANSAS

  A Letter to Vivien

  Dear Vivien,

  Ten years ago, who could have known that you would change my life? I didn’t know your name. You’d only recently heard mine. We lived half a country apart, yet this miracle occurred: you answered a phone call, and made a dream come true.

  The year was 2006, and I was a week from the publication of The King of Lies, my first novel. I knew nothing of publishing or bookselling or promotion. I was an ex-attorney, a want-to-be best-selling author, a father of young children. My wife believed in me, as did my editor and my publisher. To the rest of the world I was less than a great unknown. How many books are published every year? How many actually find an audience? I’m not sure of the percentages, but even in 2006 I understood that they were grim. Thousands aspire. Many thousands. Yet only a handful of writers find the perfect balance of timing and luck and that elusive book that speaks to publishers and booksellers and then—and only then—to readers. No one knows enough to guarantee an audience for any writer who is new to the business. Even the finest publishers are casting bones and reading tea leaves. The fossil record is easy enough to interpret: the big advances, the failed debuts. The landscape is littered with such tales.

  My story began humbly. In graduate school, I wrote two failed novels. When the third caught an editor’s eye, the advance was equally humble. I remember the day my agent tried to move above the $7,500 number and was told—and I quote—“Everyone recognizes the value of a five-figure advance.” It seems remarkable now, that such small beginnings can lead to such great things.

  But I get ahead of myself.

  The advance was small, yet the publishers had faith. They planned their campaign: the print run, the tour, the media. Advance readers’ editions were part of the plan and this, Dear Vivien, is where our paths first crossed. You were one of the early readers, perhaps the first. Why you chose The King of Lies from the vast selection of advance copies sent to the care of Vivien Jennings at Rainy Day Books in Kansas City is beyond me, but select it you did. You lifted it up, and you read it. Most importantly, you liked it.

  Which brings us to the day you changed my life.

  Unbeknownst to me, the Wall Street Journal was planning a two-page article about the big books of summer. As part of his due diligence, the reporter reached out to those persons he suspected might have their thumbs on the pulse of the industry. Clearly, he recognized that your opinion mattered to many, that you were a mover and a doer and a voice. I would love to have heard the conversation. All I know for certain is that he asked what authors excited you, and you asked if he’d heard my name. Two questions, consecutively posed and the conception, I believe, of the career that has sustained me. He read the book. He loved it. When the article appeared, eight novels were suggested as must-reads for the summer. Mine was the only debut.

  The article appeared on a Friday.

  Four days later The King of Lies hit the shelves.

  Was it the biggest seller of the summer? No. Not even close. But it debuted on the New York Times best sellers list and laid the foundation for more books on that very important piece of publishing real estate. That article was not the only media attention my novel received, but it was the first and timeliest, and it set the tone. I’ve now written five best sellers, and hope to play the game for a long time to come. Would that have happened without you, Vivien? I really don’t know. Only the past is certain, and you played such a large role in mine. We’ve met over the years. I’ve signed at your store, met your wonderful husband, and joined you both for dinner. When I mention our friendship to important people in publishing, I invariably receive the same response. “Vivien Jennings,” I hear. “What a bookseller! What a fine person!” I can attest to both things, and to the power a single person has to change the course of another’s life. I love what I do. It’s meaningful. It feeds my children.

  So thank you, Vivien Jennings. Thank you for reading, for caring. Thank you for changing my life.

  Your friend,

  John Hart

  JOHN HART is the author of five New York Times best sellers: Redemption Road, The King of Lies, Down River, The Last Child, and Iron House. The only author in history to win the Best Novel Edgar Award for consecutive novels, John has also won the Barry Award, the Southern Independent Booksellers Award for Fiction, the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. His novels have been translated into 30 languages and can be found in over 70 countries. A former defense attorney and stockbroker, John spends his time in North Carolina and Virginia, where he writes full-time.

  Sheila Heti

  Type Books, TORONTO, CANADA

  In Toronto, practically the only new bookstore I go to is Type Books. It’s always hard, because I want to buy every book in it. It’s situated on Queen Street, across the street from a busy park. Type opened about ten years ago, around the time that all of the city’s best bookstores—Book City, Pages, Nicholas Hoare—were closing down. Type has walls painted cream with huge, black flower-shaped overlays. The window display is always something handmade, elaborate, funny and beautiful. The store is much longer than it is wide. Design and architecture books are stocked in the front, fiction and nonfiction are in the middle, cookbooks, criticism, and history are farther back, and children’s books and toys are in the very back room. Toadstools are scattered about for sitting on. A large magazine rack covers one of the walls, and I have seen many writers speak at Type, and launch their books or have panel conversations. There is a basement that once was used for events, but now people mostly crowd together and drink wine upstairs in the evenings, and leaf through the books that lie on the tables when things get dull.

  What can you say about one of the last remaining independent bookstores in a downtown as large as Toronto? My heart feels a little heavy thinking about it, as it might get thinking about the last of any endangered species.

  My twelve-year-old step-daughter, Sophie, and I spoke with the excellent writers (and talkers) Kyle Buckley (The Laundromat Essay) and Derek McCormack (The Well-Dressed Wound, The Haunted Hillbilly, Wish Book, Dark Rides) one summer morning in the bookstore’s cool basement, sitting at a fold-out table.

  I wanted to do this because talking to Derek and Kyle is one of my favourite things to do whenever I go to Type. (I would talk to the other people who work there, too, but I have known Kyle for a decade and Derek for two, and with people I know less well, I never know what to say.) We spoke for over an hour. Along the walls were books in duplicate, and piles of boxes all around, a dingy little washroom, and hand-drawn art posters hanging on the walls. Upstairs, about a dozen people browsed, because there are always people browsing in Type, lining up to buy several books at once. Kyle and Derek said that their customers were mainly “young women,” by which they meant women under sixty years old.

  Derek: I think one of the horrible
things about the world now is there aren’t record stores and bookstores for writers and artists and musicians to work at—and not have to work full-time. We have flexibility in our schedule here; we have bosses who let us do our thing or take time off when we have a book out. I feel bad that these jobs are now few. As someone—at forty-seven—who has been able to do this forever, and who expected to do this when I was growing up… I wanted to be a writer, so I thought, I’ll just get a job at a used bookstore. But it was the last time you could think that.

  Kyle: I just assumed that I was going to be famous and so—

  Derek: Oh, this is going to be a heartbreaking part of the interview!

  Kyle (laughs): That’s actually what I feel like I’m doing here at the bookstore—I’m still waiting. I just assume it’s going to happen.

  Derek: Waiting for someone to discover you?

  Kyle: Yeah.

  Derek: Just… an editor wanders in—

  Kyle: —likes the look of me…! Laughter.

  Sheila: Does it depress you at all to observe the faddishness of books?

  Kyle: Yeah. I think that that’s eighty-five percent of what Derek and I talk about all day long at the store—we just complain about that over and over again.

  Derek: Like for example, culture does go through waves where people have the same feelings about the same person. You go through a crest with some writer—

  Sheila: —where everyone’s like, She’s a genius.

  Derek: She summed up my life and she’s doing what no one else has done and she’s the most important thing…

  Kyle: And we will happily make fun of this, whether it’s a writer we like or not—the fact that all of a sudden every single book that author has ever written, we can sell piles of.

  Derek: Yet it’s constantly a bafflement to me how people will, say, love Lydia Davis, but you can’t for your life sell a Katharine Davis book or a—

  Kyle: It’s always weird to us that we can’t get someone who loves Lydia Davis to read Diane Williams, or someone similar—

  Derek: —who they would enjoy. It’s unfortunate. There are moments for writers, and some writers don’t get their moments, no matter how hard you try.

  Sheila: Do you think in the long run, the ones who don’t ever have a moment… I have this hope that they still last. Or do you think, no, writers need those huge bumps?

  Derek: I don’t know. In gay literature, which you can only count going back a hundred and whatever years, there used to be a cultural imperative to remember and rescue those writers. But I think now with gay culture, the literary part of it has dissolved, there is no more of that. So what I saw as a young man was We love our oddball, obscure authors. That has died in my lifetime. There’s no one who remembers them or wants to remember them. The romantic-literary-outlaw side of gay culture has just vanished.

  Sheila: And do you think, in general, outlaw literature is not as interesting to people anymore?

  Derek: Yeah, it’s not. What I used to hope is that writers and really good readers would revive the people they loved, but I get the feeling now that everything is so based in universities and MFA programs that if you’re not part of that world, you don’t get resuscitated. People look to writers in the MFA and university world [to revive], because they get points for writing about them, or they get to go to conferences or get a job. It’s very insular, and I feel like the writers who existed at the margins have no one to help them out anymore.

  Kyle: You’re probably right.

  Derek: I see writers in academia who are lousy, who are promoted as our great underground writers. Maybe I’m just being a sore loser because I’m not in academia, and I’m an obscure writer, and I will die in poverty probably in the next three or four weeks—

  Kyle: —but I hope not.

  Sheila: So this is interesting, if it’s true that it used to be more booksellers and readers who created the canon, while now it’s more people in the academy who are creating the canon, because now almost everybody who’s interested in writing goes to university. The way I got introduced to great books—well, I don’t even understand how I came to read so many great books when I was a teenager. How did I find Marquis de Sade when I was seventeen years old? I have no idea, but it must have been through a used bookstore, because I wasn’t in university till much later, and my friends didn’t know.

  Kyle: Yeah. I remember always being interested in alternative aspects of culture, so I’d go to a rep cinema and see a cool movie about a writer I’d never heard of, and then I’d go and read all the books by that writer…

  Sheila: Why did I read Albee or Balzac when I was seventeen? Who told me to? I think I literally found those books browsing in Eliot’s—the second-hand bookshop on Yonge Street.

  Derek: I would hang on every word of the writers I liked. For me, I would buy the Review of Contemporary Literature and the interviewer would say, Who do you like? And if I read an interview with Dennis [Cooper] and he said, You have to read Anna Kavan, I would go and find it, right? A writer would say, You have to follow this lineage—you have to read Artaud. I remember in the nineties reading Kathy Acker saying, No one reads Cormac McCarthy! And it was a hell of a thing finding a copy of one of his books. Maybe that’s the good thing about writers working in independent bookstores. You get a writer and a bookseller recommending a book.

  Sheila: And you can stock it.

  Derek: Yeah. Maybe what bookstores are feeling now is not only a loss of market share, but also a loss of power or influence. Yet there are these old bookstores all over the world that we fetishize for their history and quirkiness—like Shakespeare and Co. but maybe people love the idea of these places more than they love shopping there. But what is required for that system to work is booksellers who know their books, who are willing to stock obscure things, and writers who are voraciously well-read, who are not just reading the most fashionable books. Maybe MFA culture really has imperiled that, because I still read what writers recommend, but it’s usually people in their program, or it’s people you read about in the New York Times. It’s very odd or rare that you read an author recommend really oddball things.

  Sheila: Because they all study the same stuff at university?

  Derek: Yeah.

  Kyle: My years at university were definitely the worst reading years of my life. I just don’t feel like I was reading anything I really loved.

  Sheila: How many books do you actually finish, that you start?

  Kyle: Most of them.

  Sheila: Do you always finish reading books you start, Derek?

  Derek: No, no. Even books I love. Like, I can be loving it up to the last twenty pages, but when it’s done for me, I close it up.

  Sheila: Me too. I almost never finish books.

  Kyle: It never bothers you to think about what happens in those last twenty pages?

  Sheila: No. I mostly just read to get a feeling for the author.

  Derek: Me neither. I don’t care what happens in the plot. I care about the effect and the writer’s style. I feel like I’m a predator. I’m an animal that just goes in and eats the heart.

  Kyle: But what if something really exciting was going to happen with the punctuation right at the end of the book, and you’re not going to know?

  Sheila: That never happens.

  Sophie: You never made it to the end of the book, so you don’t know.

  Sheila: That’s true.

  SHEILA HETI is the author of seven books of fiction and non-fiction, including the novel How Should a Person Be?, the novella Ticknor, and the illustrated children’s book, We Need a Horse.

  Elin Hilderbrand

  Nantucket Bookworks, NANTUCKET, MASSACHUSETTS

  For the past nineteen years, I have been blessed in the most specific and wonderful way: I have lived on an island that has not one but two independently owned bookstores. No Amazon for me, no Barnes & Noble, no Hudson News, no Books-a-Trillion, no Chinaberry catalog. I used to go to Shakespeare & Co. when I was in New York Ci
ty and Waterstone’s when I was in Boston, and I will always live in awe of Prairie Lights in Iowa City and the Tattered Cover in Denver… but really, none of those stores have been mine the way the Nantucket stores are mine.

  For our purposes today, I am going to talk about Nantucket Bookworks, although Mitchell’s Book Corner is also a unique and amazing place. You will trust me on that.

  Nantucket Bookworks is a free-standing one-story building with the look of a cottage about it; probably it has a provenance other than a bookstore. Decades ago it might have been an ice cream shop or a private home for someone like Angela Lansbury. It is on quaint, leafy Broad Street, sandwiched between a famous hotel, the Jared Coffin House, and a famous restaurant, the Brotherhood of Thieves. In fact, let’s say the first time I discovered Bookworks, I was standing in the very, very long line outside of the Brotherhood, waiting for a table. Bookworks was conducive to browsing, and I was a budding writer; a good browse was my favorite form of free entertainment. Bookworks is cozy and not unlike a rabbit warren—shelves and shelves of books, nooks and crannies, places to sit, folk art and gifts and greeting cards and cool jewelry and funky handbags… but mostly books.