by Ronald Rice
I must have looked confused.
“Don’t worry, there’s a sign on the gum machine that says it’s not for children,” Lyn said.
Step out on the breezy, sun-dappled balcony and you will likely see a writer, although smoking isn’t allowed anymore and boy do writers love to smoke. I hear stories about the days when Barry Hannah, Willie Morris, John Grisham, Donna Tartt, and Larry Brown used to congregate on the balcony together, and I imagine that most of them—especially the ones who are dead now—were smoking like chimneys.
Tom Waits was spotted lurking in the “Mississippi Writers” section. We all wanted to know what he bought. Probably some Larry Brown, everyone decided. This is the kind of speculation that Richard discourages. Discourages? Once an innocent clerk asked me whether on a previous visit I had really purchased Jung’s The Red Book, an enormous facsimile of his twisted dream journal it would take two people to carry. I was happily responding when Richard appeared in a puff of smoke and scared the poor kid so bad his skeleton jumped out of his body.
“We don’t discuss our customers’ purchases,” Richard said.
He was serious, too. He’s a zealot. He’s a priest. He doesn’t joke around, not about books. Well, I take that back. You know how thriller writers usually have a full-color portrait of themselves taking up the entire rear side of their dust jackets? Once I saw Richard go to the table where those books were displayed and turn them all around until there was nothing but a big, terrifyingly cheerful pyramid of author photos staring and grinning insanely at the world.
“Let’s see how long it takes anybody to notice,” he said.
In the old days Richard talked books with Larry Brown. Square Books was Brown’s alma mater. There and the public library were the places he learned to write.
I didn’t know him.
I ran into Barry Hannah a lot at Square Books, though. I saw him in the store just a couple of days before he died. He talked the way he wrote. Once he told me, “Everybody wants to go to the Baptist heaven but nobody wants to do the Baptist time.”
A lot of good writers have gone to Baptist heaven recently, including Lewis Nordan and William Gay, both of whom I used to see at the store. Our neighbor Dean Faulkner Wells passed away. She was Faulkner’s niece and he raised her like his own daughter. You go over and take the tour of Rowan Oak, his home, and the only picture of William Faulkner smiling was taken at Dean’s wedding.
The last time I saw her was at Square Books too.
Even Michael Bible, the nosy young clerk whom Richard scared, is gone. Not dead, though a pixie-like representative of Hollywood came into the store and literally snatched him away to the coast in a chariot of gold. That makes Michael the Lana Turner of Oxford, Mississippi, and Square Books our Schwab’s. He’s out there working on an adaptation of Light in August. One of my great joys used to be bugging him while he tried to work.
You walk around town and things aren’t the same. We leftover writers are fine, but we’re not fooling ourselves.
Thankfully, when you walk into Square Books, feeling comes back strong. Nobody’s dead. Everybody’s at the party.
It’s the books, stupid.
One New Year’s morning Square Books was giving away free Bloody Marys but I guess somehow the word didn’t get around because it ended up being just me and the New York Times columnist John T. Edge on the quiet balcony over the empty square, sipping our drinks and thinking about how nice it all was.
Sooner or later we had to go home but I guess we could have sat there all day.
JACK PENDARVIS is the author of two story collections and a novel. He is a columnist for Oxford American and The Believer.
Steven Price
Munro’s Books, VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA
BOOKSTORE IN APRIL
I thought of it as a testament
to the fixed thing: the luminous drift
of dust in the stained-glass, the burnish
of polished shelves in the shine, book
after book held firm in articulate
pockets of pine. All was sun-warmed stone,
flush in the hushed glow of afternoon,
while the street outside scraped hollow
under a busker’s shriek and the clatter
and rasp of traffic blackened asphalt.
Then the door banged shut, and I
was a boy again, hunched over a book,
gauged in wonder and wondering
at this other way of reading the world,
at speech spoken in silence and held in place
like the nail that trues the beam
that trues the roof. Somehow the huge improbable structure
stands.
I drifted in the drowsy aisles, dreaming.
“He did not reach the stoppage,” said one,
or was it, “He did not read the passage”?
“His words follow the new fashion,”
I think it was. “I’m looking for a book,”
the voice drifted nearer, “but can’t recall
the title or who wrote it.” A softer muttering next:
“All these remainders. More reminders
no one reads.” A laugh. “That one changed
my life.” I slid aside a book to see who spoke
but glimpsed only dust-blown aisle, a gleaming
blue stack of histories of the Nile mussed
as if some brushed coat had just swished past.
I fixed them flush with a finger. In the air
a rustling, as of tiny jaws tearing glue, tearing paper:
“No there’s nothing back there but the poetry.”
Then we stood shuffling in a backlit bookshop
lined with shelves, the shelved spines
along each beveled bank shining as a low thrum
of Bach belled down from the vaulted ceiling,
blurred, as if borne underwater, and we knew then
we moved among the probable and the found.
While the lights went out aisle by aisle,
punching into darkness; and elsewhere a shadow
inked itself across a child’s desk, a blur of drapes,
and a bed, where in blue pajamas a boy
hunches over a book.
The first thing you notice is the light. It pours through the clerestory windows of the old converted bank building, articulated columns of dust and shadow, descending along the spines of the books as the day rises. From outside will drift the sounds of street musicians, the clatter of hoofs from horse-drawn carriages, the low thrum of tourists and shoppers wandering up from the harbor. But inside all is still, cool, dreamlike.
Munro’s is the bookstore book lovers dream of. It is filled, like a church, with the vast hushed stillness of itself. You enter it and it enters you. Tapestries by BC artist Carole Sabiston adorn the walls, aisles of tightly packed books run the perimeter, the middle of the floor is cluttered with tables of remaindered books and the staff’s fortress-like checkout. Deep beneath the floor and in the streetside receiving area stretch the old bank vaults, their dramatic doors standing ajar, their original 1909 tumblers visible through sheets of glass. These great chambers are filled now with books and a more dangerous kind of currency than their builders envisioned. Overhead, of course, all is dizzying quiet air.
Founded by Alice Munro and her then husband, Jim, 50 years before she won the Nobel Prize, Munro’s remains a bastion of carefully curated books, its high coffered ceilings swelling with the classical music Jim insisted be played. Jim, passionate, idiosyncratic, generous, is retired now; Alice long ago moved on to her career in writing. But the spirit of the store remains infused with their faith in the printed word, in the regenerative power of literature. Jim bequeathed the store to his longtime employees and there is still nothing fashionable in it, no coffee shop, no e-book displays; all leans instead toward the timeless, the dignified, the thoughtful. I have been walking its aisles for 25 years, listening to its visiting writers, attending
its book launches. I learned the connectivity of literature, the erasure of borders and languages, the vastness of a word’s possibilities from the books arrayed on Munro’s shelves.
My wife, the novelist Esi Edugyan, and I and our two children walk down to Munro’s every Saturday afternoon to browse and usually buy books. Our daughter, 4 now, wriggles out of her coat the moment we enter and then vanishes down the aisles into the cozy back room where the children’s books are laid out. Our son, at 15 months, staggers along the aisles, pulling out the alphabetical dividers with a crazed excitement, then holding them high above his head in triumph. And the staff tolerate it all with great patience and kindness. All of them are readers first, booksellers second. Those we have come to know best, to care about, are also friends. Todd, whose encyclopedic reading is worn modestly under his scruffy hair, his shy manner. Or Jessica, with her warmth and wry wit. Doug, with his inscrutable beard and his infectious love of world music and history. Vito, who rolls up his sleeves patiently for our daughter each time she asks, to show once again his tattoos. And our gentle guardian angel, who ghosts up out of the crowds of browsers to extend some kindness to our son and then vanishes just as abruptly. All of them.
But when I think of Munro’s I think, most of all, of the beloved books I’ve found on its shelves. Such as Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, the first novel I ever purchased from the store. Its dreamlike cadence and eerie otherworldliness astonished me, showed me a different kind of reading. The same is true of José Saramago’s terrifying Blindness, or the sly works of Enrique Vila-Matas, or the architectural poems of João Cabral de Melo Neto. All of these were suggested reads by the arcane, wonderful, irreplaceable booksellers at Munro’s. Many have been the afternoons my wife and I have sat on small folding ladders in the fiction section and sorted through a dozen books, trying to decide what to keep.
The late American poet Philip Levine once wrote: “Some things / you know all your life. They are so simple and true / they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme.” Munro’s Books is that sort of a truth, to those lucky enough to meet it, a truth beyond art, a truth as silent and lasting as the written word, a truth passed from reader to reader with a nudge: here, we say, have you tried this one, this one changed my life.
STEVEN PRICE’s second novel, By Gaslight (2016) was nominated for Canada’s Giller Prize. His first collection of poems, Anatomy of Keys (2006), won Canada’s 2007 Gerald Lampert Award for Best First Collection, was short-listed for the BC Poetry Prize, and was named a Globe and Mail Book of the Year. His first novel, Into That Darkness (2011), was short-listed for the 2012 BC Fiction Prize. His second collection of poems, Omens in the Year of the Ox (2012), won the 2013 ReLit Award. He lives in Victoria, British Columbia, with his family.
Francine Prose
Strand Book Store, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
For as long as I can remember, “18 Miles of Books” had been the slogan of the Strand Book Store. To the passionate reader and the writer—or in any case, to me—this sounds like a description or a map of the Kingdom of Heaven or the Emerald City of Oz.
When I was in high school, in the early 1960s, the few blocks that now constitute Fourth Avenue in Manhattan were lined with secondhand-book stores. These stores were treasure troves, crammed full not only with books but also with prints and photographs, postcards, and God knows what else.
Perhaps the most famous customer of these places was the artist Joseph Cornell, who combed the Fourth Avenue bookstores for the images and objects he used in his beautiful and otherworldly shadow boxes. I often wondered if my path ever crossed that of Joseph Cornell when I went to the stores with my friends, as we did almost every Saturday morning.
The Strand is the last remaining survivor of these destination bookstores. It’s the kind of bookstore to which I go when I want a specific book, but also when I don’t know what I want, or when there’s nothing I want, in particular, except to be in a bookstore. It’s the ultimate place to browse: that thing one can’t do when one orders books online.
At the Strand, I can allow serendipity to pull me from table to table, all the while discovering interests I never knew I had—a fascination with medieval medicine or Scythian gold, with the poetry of Philip Larkin, with the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett, or with Walter Benjamin’s recollections of his Berlin childhood. It’s easy to spend hours there, and easy to buy books at the end of those hours. In this way, like so many others, it is different from bookstores that somehow manage to make me feel that I’ve overstayed, or that the time I’ve spent there has been wasted. Eventually, I rush out of such stores as quickly as possible, which may be why I see so few customers at the registers and so many, like myself, hurrying out the door.
I feel extremely fortunate to live very near the Strand. Quite often, it’s where I go when I want to take a break from writing. I can go there in every season and during most waking hours and clear my head, much in the way a healthier person might go to the gym or an unhealthier person might step outside for a cigarette. By now I have friends who work there, whose advice and conversation I value, and who I am very glad to know.
The Strand’s rare-book room is astonishing: a wonder of the world. One of my proudest possessions is a first edition of the fiction of Jane Bowles. My students chipped in and bought it for me as a gift at the end of a semester during which we’d read her work together.
I fear I would not be telling the entire true story of my relationship with the Strand without mentioning the fact that it not only sells but also buys books, including used books and review copies. I’ve often sold it books I have enjoyed but simply have no room to keep. I live in a New York apartment! Were it not for the Strand, and its proximity, I would have had to move out of my apartment years and years ago. There would have been no room for me.
So that is yet another way in which those 18 miles of books are the description not simply of a bookstore but of an institution that, in many ways, makes it not merely more pleasurable but possible for me to read and write—and live.
FRANCINE PROSE is a novelist and critic whose latest book, the novel My New American Life, was published by Harper in May 2011. Her previous books include the novels Goldengrove, A Changed Man, and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award, and the nonfiction New York Times best seller Reading Like A Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them and Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Condé Nast Traveler, ARTnews, Parkett, Modern Painters, and The New York Times Magazine. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, among them the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edith Wharton Achievement Award for Literature, and Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, and is a past president of PEN American Center. She is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York City.
Ron Rash
City Lights Bookstore, SYLVA, NORTH CAROLINA
Buying an independent bookstore is a risky venture in the best of times, but when Chris Wilcox bought City Lights Bookstore in 2009, it was an especially risky venture. With the economy in shambles, how could a small-town bookstore survive? But booksellers, like book authors, tend to be a dreamy yet determined lot, and when Chris took over he managed to persevere when many other independents went under. Hard work (Chris always seems to be at the store) and frequent readings and signings are certainly part of why City Lights has continued to be successful, as is a whole room devoted to books about Appalachia. The store itself is pleasing, with a layout, including a fireplace, that allows the customer to feel relaxed, even reflective. But the staff is what makes City Lights such a delightful store. Chris is incredibly well read, and so are his employees. In a country where reading is less and less valued, City Lights is a literary oasis. Books are important here, and so are their readers. Every time I enter the store, Chris or one of his staff is able to suggest a
book specifically for me. City Lights knows its customers, and that, to me, is what makes an independent bookstore great. So the next time you are in Western North Carolina, stop by City Lights. Maybe there will be a fire burning, but even if not, you will find this bookstore warm and welcoming.
RON RASH is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times best-selling novel Serena, in addition to three other prizewinning novels, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; four collections of poems; and four collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.
Tom Robbins
Village Books, BELLINGHAM, WASHINGTON
Baptized in ink and swaddled in a dust jacket, I’m one of those cats for whom a good bookshop serves as a temple, a cathedral, a holy shrine, a sacred grove, a gypsy caravan, a Tijuana nightclub, an amusement park, a mental health spa, a safari camp, a space station, and an indoor field of dreams. Over the years, Village Books of Bellingham has functioned as all of those things for me, most memorably the last, because a few years ago the store quite literally made one of my wildest dreams come true.
It was while on tour to flog Wild Ducks Flying Backward, a collection of my short writings, that I was asked by an interviewer if at that stage of my life and career there was anything missing, anything that I still wanted badly but didn’t have. My answer was spontaneous yet honest. “Yeah,” I said. “Backup singers.”
The more I thought about it, the more the idea appealed to me. What if there were a trio of singers—sexy girls in long, slinky dresses—who’d follow me everywhere I went and harmonize and scat and ooh wah wah wah, riffing on whatever I said in any situation? They’d stand behind the dental chair, for example, if I was undergoing a root canal, just swaying, smiling, seamlessly improvising on my gurgles, my grunts of pain. At the bank, the supermarket, the IRS office arguing about taxes, there the ladies would be, over my shoulder, turning my utterances, however mundane, into improvised three-part harmony, vamping all the while like fallen angels from Motown heaven.