by Ronald Rice
Comfort the smallest of the ballplayers, who have never gotten a hit, and those who strike out time and time again or languish on the benches day after livelong day, for their moment, too, is destined to be.
When the book was published, Harcourt Brace sent Willie and me on the road to promote it. All around Dixie we went, from Jackson to Chapel Hill, from Atlanta to New Orleans. From Memphis to Blytheville. We did a live radio show on public radio at the Research Triangle outside Chapel Hill. And never, ever did Mr. Willie Morris pass up an opportunity to tell an audience the very funny story about Moser, the nearsighted kid who had a zero batting average.
The dedication of A Prayer for the Opening of the Little League Season reads:
For our friend, John Evans: who is either a literary man who loves baseball, or a baseball man who loves literature, or both.
—W.M & B.M.
I could keep on telling such stories, at least the ones I can remember. But I am afraid that my readers’ patience might run short, so I’ll tell just one more.
From 1995 till 1999 I was hard at work illustrating what happens to be the first and only fully illustrated King James Bible of the twentieth century. It was a pretty big deal in certain specialized corners of the book world, especially the world of the limited edition. Viking Studio picked it up and published it as a trade hardback that appeared simultaneously with the Pennyroyal Press edition. Viking sent me on a nationwide tour in the autumn of 1999—twenty cities, I believe it was. And, as always, I asked that they set up an appearance at Lemuria at the very end of the tour, which would be in early December.
And that happened.
When I got to the store to sign stock, Johnny gave this really cute woman the chore of helping me sign box after box of these big, heavy books. I didn’t catch her name right off, but that did not dampen my urge to flirt with her. And, though modesty forbids, she returned the attention, though in a sassy, smart-ass kind of way. She was the first person I ever signed books with who could keep up with me—as a printmaker, I have learned to sign my name really, really fast. When I mentioned this little bit of information, she looked me straight in the eye, one eyebrow raised, and said, “You’re not so fast. John Grisham’s a lot faster than you are.” Well, shut my mouth. And it did. I did ask her name, though, and was told that it was Emily.
A few weeks later, Johnny called to do an interview with me for the store’s newsletter. He asked Miss Emily to listen in, take notes, and write it up. I asked her to kindly send it to me so I could thoughtfully reconsider my responses to Johnny’s questions.
And so she did.
The story from here is far too long and complicated to tell, but the capsulated version is that within six months Emily and I had nearly two thousand pages of email correspondence. Some letters were a couple of lines long. Others several pages. Alas, we fell in love in the old-fashioned epistolary manner. At one time I had to confess to her that I did not know her last name and that somehow it seemed important that I do. “Crowe,” she said. “Emily Crowe.”
The next year, January of 2001, I stole her away from her beloved Johnny, from her beloved Lemuria, and her beloved Dixie and brought her up here to “the Kingdom of the Yankee,” as Willie Morris once called the northeast. Two years later we were married. At sundown on the island of Antigua in the British West Indies, seventeen and a half degrees off the equator, on the summer solstice. And we’ve been living happily ever after in a big house in Western Massachusetts with rooms full of books, big mastiff dogs, and a couple of neurotic cats that made the trip north.
So, you see, how could Lemuria not be my bookstore?
BARRY MOSER is the prizewinning illustrator and designer of nearly 300 books for children and adults. He is widely celebrated for his dramatic wood engravings for the only 20th-century edition of the entire King James Bible illustrated by a single artist. He is the Printer to the College at Smith College, where he is the Irwin and Pauline Alper Glass Professor of Art. His work can be found in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among scores of other libraries and collections. He lives in Western Massachusetts.
Howard Frank Mosher
Galaxy Bookshop, HARDWICK, VERMONT
Five years ago I embarked—in my falling-apart 1987 Chevy with 280,000 miles on the odometer—from my home in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom on an inspiring, if somewhat crazed, 100-city book tour. Three months, 20,000 more miles, and nearly 200 independent bookstores later, on the day after I got home, a reporter from our local newspaper called with a question. Could I, he asked, from my coast-to-coast and border-to-border odyssey, select a favorite bookseller, a favorite bookstore, and a favorite town or city?
“Absolutely,” I said. “My longtime personal bookseller, Linda Ramsdell. Linda’s Galaxy Bookshop. And Hardwick, Vermont, at the southern gateway of the Northeast Kingdom, because that’s where the Galaxy is located.”
But wait. Just where in the world, you may well be wondering, is the Northeast Kingdom? And how did it get its name? “The Kingdom,” as it’s often referred to, comprises the three northeasternmost counties of Vermont: Essex, Orleans, and Caledonia. Named by Governor (later U.S. Senator) George Aiken in the 1950s while he was fishing a wilderness pond near the Vermont-Canada border, the Kingdom is a spectacularly gorgeous enclave of glacial lakes, icy trout rivers, jumbled mountains, and heavily wooded hills interspersed with dairy farms and tiny villages. At the same time, Vermont’s “last best place,” as the Northeast Kingdom is sometimes referred to, is an economically depressed northern fragment of Appalachia, with interminable winters, few decent-paying jobs, desperately underfunded schools, and the highest incidence of rural poverty in New England.
As for Hardwick—well, as the Kingdom poet, playwright, and novelist David Budbill put it, “Hardwick is tough and has always been tough. It was tough one hundred years ago when it was the center of a huge granite industry, and was referred to as ‘Little Chicago,’ and it’s tough today when it is the center of nothing.”
Let’s face it. The Northeast Kingdom in general and, for all of its gritty authenticity as one of those rare, “true places” Melville mentioned in Moby-Dick, Hardwick in particular are about the last spots on earth where you’d expect a nationally renowned bookseller with a small but marvelously eclectic bookshop to survive for six months.
Yet as Linda once said to me, “A bookshop in Hardwick is not an oxymoron.” Point taken. Still, how under the sun, in this era of Amazon.com, big-box chain bookstores, and dwindling numbers of readers for literary fiction and nonfiction, has the Galaxy Bookshop managed to flourish for nearly a quarter of a century in a community that, to this day, looks more like a hardworking western cow town than a quaint New England village?
It all comes down to the vision and determination of a trim, attractive, entirely unpretentious, delightfully humorous, and remarkably friendly Northeast Kingdom woman and world-class bibliophile and bookseller named Linda Ramsdell.
If I were asked to describe, in a single word, Linda’s personal vision for the Galaxy, I think I’d say “connected.” As independent-minded as Vermonters—especially Northeast Kingdom Vermonters—have been since the beginning, citizens of the Green Mountain State have also, perhaps necessarily, been deeply connected to the natural world of the fields they’ve tilled, the forests where they’ve cut their firewood and tapped their maple trees, and the communities where they live and work. They’re connected to Vermont’s long and unique history as a bastion of grassroots, town-meeting democracy. Most of all, they’re connected to their immediate and extended families and to their neighbors. Linda Ramsdell and the Galaxy Bookshop exemplify the tradition.
For starters, there’s Linda’s impeccable pedigree as a native Vermonter, born and raised in the Northeast Kingdom. After graduating from Craftsbury Academy, just a dozen or so miles north of Hardwick, Linda did her undergraduate work at Brown University. In 1988, a year aft
er completing college, she returned to the Kingdom—which, unlike Thomas Wolfe’s Great Smokies at the other end of the Appalachians, seems very much a place to which people can and frequently do “go home again”—and established a bookstore in Hardwick’s old firehouse.
“I didn’t have anything else to do,” Linda said. “I opened the Galaxy before I could even think about it.” That’s a Vermonter’s way of saying that she did what her heart told her to do, bookselling being, most decidedly, a labor of love. No doubt Kingdom natives are drawn back to their hardscrabble hills and granite mountains for the same reason. An avid cross-country skier, hiker, horseback rider, and cyclist, Linda lives on a dirt road in a farmhouse built in 1830 that overlooks a rural prospect as varied and lovely as any in these United States—the sort of place visitors from New York and Boston would, and do, toil fifty weeks a year to enjoy a few days in. In the Kingdom, geography still shapes character. It’s hard for me, at least, to imagine Linda living anywhere else.
In many ways, the Galaxy is both a reflection and an extension of Linda’s personal connection to the Kingdom. After shifting quarters three times since 1988—once to a former bank, where the Galaxy had the distinction of being the only bookstore in the country to sell books out of a drive-through window—the store now occupies a former local grocery. In fact, the Galaxy still has the feel of a welcoming country store, where Kingdom residents and visitors alike gather at “the table” on which Linda displays her favorite books each month, instead of around a potbelly stove.
The Galaxy’s Northeast Kingdom and Vermont section is a trove of regional literature and information. You can find poems set in the Kingdom by Robert Frost (who loved to botanize at Lake Willoughby, the “Lake Luzerne of Vermont”), Galway Kinnell, and Leland Kinsey; browse through essay collections on local country fairs, railroads, and old-time woodsmen by Edward Hoagland; pick up a memoir by Garret Keizer about teaching in the Kingdom, or buy the kids a stack of children’s and young-adult stories by award-winning Kingdom author Natalie Kinsey-Warnock, who grew up on a seventh-generation farm nearby.
Over the years, Linda has hosted scores of local and nationally acclaimed authors at some of the best and most inclusive readings I’ve ever attended. In the company of Northeast Kingdom farmers, teachers, business owners, horse loggers, high school and college students, seasonal visitors, and retirees, I’ve had the pleasure of hearing and meeting such distinguished writers as Wallace Stegner, Howard Norman, Richard Russo, Jodi Picoult, Chris Bohjalian, Jeffrey Lent, and Gish Jen, among many others.
At the heart of Linda’s own philosophy of bookselling is her unwavering belief in our constitutional right to read whatever we wish to read. A former president of the New England Independent Booksellers Association and board member of the American Booksellers Association, Linda worked with librarians and other booksellers to petition Vermont’s Congressional delegation to sponsor legislation to repeal Section 215 of the abominable (and abominably named) “USA PATRIOT Act,” which requires booksellers and librarians to turn over their purchasing and borrowing records to federal agents. In a 2002 press conference in Washington, D.C., with then Representative (now U.S. Senator) Bernie Sanders, Linda declared, on behalf of all readers, writers, and booksellers, “We celebrate the freedom of expression that brings us books with stunningly divergent points of view. We open our doors to welcome all customers and celebrate their freedom to read exactly what they choose without threat of government intrusion.”
At home in the Kingdom, Linda and her longtime, knowledgeable bookseller colleague at the Galaxy, Sandy Scott, have also fostered the bookstore’s ties to the region by cosponsoring book events with, or donating books to, local schools, libraries, churches, and nonprofit arts and social-service organizations such as the Northeast Kingdom Learning Services, the Hardwick Area Food Pantry, Head Start, and AWARE (Aid to Women in Abuse and Rape Emergencies).
So. How about that 100-city, 200-bookstore junket of mine? What’s that got to do with the place Kingdom residents regard as “the greatest indie bookshop in the galaxy?” On the last day of my trip, very early in the morning, as I drove back into the Kingdom through Hardwick, I glanced down Main Street and glimpsed the colorful and distinctive Galaxy Bookshop sign, under which, some months earlier, I’d had the jacket photo taken for my own latest book.
I don’t know if I’ve ever had a true epiphany. But suddenly I realized, with almost transformative clarity and force, that I was home. Not just home in Vermont and the Northeast Kingdom. But back in the place that has for twenty-five years provided me with the books that are my truest home of all.
To my dear friend and neighbor Linda Ramsdell, then—Ivy League graduate, Kingdom native through and through, and bookseller par excellence, whose Galaxy Bookshop is the heart and soul and home of readers throughout the Northeast Kingdom and far beyond—on behalf of book lovers everywhere, thank you.
HOWARD FRANK MOSHER is the author of 10 novels and two memoirs. He has lived all his adult life in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.
Arthur Nersesian
St. Mark’s Bookshop, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Greenwich Village always had a great tradition of independent bookstores, from Frank Shay’s Bookshop on Christopher Street back in the 1920s, which invited every major and minor writer of the day to sign its front door (including Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson) to the legendary Eighth Street Bookshop owned by the Wilentz brothers near MacDougal that finally closed, some say because of their refusal to allow their employees to unionize.
They lasted thirty-two years, officially making the St. Mark’s Bookshop, at thirty-five years, the oldest indie bookstore ever to exist in the Village. Spring Street Books in Soho and old Marloff Bookstore in the West Village, both long gone, are examples of how bookstores sometimes are the canaries in their financial/cultural coal mine. By the time the Spring Street Bookstore went under—in a neighborhood once known for its rich art community—most of the artists were gone as well. When the Marloff in the West Village turned into a bar, the neighborhood, too, became… different. These were just a few of the countless bookstores that came and went through the area over the years. They are not to be confused with the many book resellers, such as those that made up the infamous Book Row. In its heyday, it had used-book shops side by side all the way up Fourth Avenue from 8th to 14th streets—now more or less consolidated into the mighty Strand.
New bookstores sometimes sprout out of old ones. Both Roger Jescha and Charles Dudley started out at the old Eighth Street Bookshop before they joined the staff at the St. Mark’s in 1977. In fact, Robert Contant and Terry McCoy, the two owners of the St. Mark’s, met and got their initial experience at the old East Side Book Store, a store that lasted about ten years. When they opened the first St. Mark’s Bookshop at 13 Saint Mark’s Place—they’re currently on their third location—the neighborhood was still feral, febrile, and, by today’s standards, dirt cheap.
Whether they knew it or not, the store was launched at the right place and perfect time, just as the East Village was coming into its own as the new artistic center of Lower Manhattan. In the relatively tight grid of as-yet-ungentrified and therefore affordable streets that made up the area, over the course of the next three decades there were vibrant movements in film, theater, and literature, as well as the visual and performance arts. Although the area had its share of crime and grime, you still felt the possibilities and the sense that your future was before you. During that time, before the age of laptops and cyber cafes, St. Mark’s Bookshop was the Internet. If you wanted to know about a writer or artist or anything, you stopped at the bookstore. It simply held the finest selection of books and journals that one could find. In this age, when the future of bricks-and-mortar stores seems uncertain, this store illustrates precisely how the Internet fails. Never, while Googling someone or purchasing some obscure work, did I meet another writer or editor or learn about some new journal or anthology soliciting for submissions. The St. Mark’s B
ookshop is a crossroads for the serendipitous and the unplanned, where you can meet older authors—and frequently find why the best parts of them are in their books.
For fledgling writers and poets, the consignment shelf at the shop offers a chance to display their work and earn an audience. Likewise, editors of local literary journals, like The National Poetry Magazine of the Lower East Side and Untitled and Between C & D and The Portable Lower East Side and so many others, can come in with a sweaty armful of their latest issues and have a chance alongside the tweed-jacketed members of the literary establishment. Modern counterparts of these journals now live online, but in fairness you simply can’t hope to hijack the attention of readers who came in for genre best sellers and the “it” books of the day. The St. Mark’s Bookshop is meritocracy in action, where a browser might pick up an unknown novel, read through a few pages, get hooked, and become a loyal reader for life.
Although I’ve always appreciated the chain stores, whenever I’d ask for their small-press buyers I was usually given an extension of their corporate headquarters, frequently in another state.
Back in the late 1980s, when I finished my first novel and secured an agent, he sent the manuscript around and a year later it was roundly rejected. After years spent on it, I defiantly decided to self-publish it and let it be my headstone to the futility of writing. After every major house had passed on it, I really had no expectations of sales.
Susan Wilmarth, one of the buyers at St. Mark’s at the time, took my little offering and gave it front-shelf ranking side by side with the big presses. Over the ensuing weeks, every time I’d stop by, she’d ask for more copies. Soon I had run out and ended up going back to the printers. Eventually I reprinted the book three times before I finally received a solicitation from an indie press that was just starting out, Akashic Books. The editor asked if they could make my book their maiden novel. Afterwards a large corporate press secured the rights. It has since sold more than 120,000 copies and has been translated into over a dozen languages. Currently my tenth novel is going to press, and I couldn’t imagine any of it without the St. Mark’s Bookshop.