by Ronald Rice
Each room or hallway is filled with different categories and is accompanied by its own soundtrack provided by little speakers up in the corners. The place is clean, never dusty, but it has that old-bookstore feel, and smells like print. If you love bookstores, you know what I mean. You can get lost here, in every sense of the word. It’s old-school, and people come from out of town just to visit it. There’s also a great coffee shop next door.
After all this time, there are still a few rooms I haven’t sufficiently explored. Categories, genres, and topics that I haven’t gotten to yet, but I will.
The Book Loft was one of the first bookstores I know of to get hip to the new wave of comics and graphic novels. That might not be a big deal to you, but the day I saw BONE on the shelf there was more important to me than the owners will ever know. So thank you, Book Loft, for being there, and here’s wishing you a healthy and prosperous future!
JEFF SMITH is a co-founder of the 90’s self-publishing movement and an early adopter of the graphic novel format. He is best known as the writer and artist of BONE, an award winning adventure about three cartoon cousins lost in a world of myth and ancient mysteries. In 2009, Smith was the subject of a documentary called The Cartoonist: Jeff Smith, BONE, and the Changing Face of Comics. Along with BONE and RASL, his other books include Shazam: The Monster Society of Evil and Little Mouse Gets Ready!
Lee Smith
Purple Crow Books, HILLSBOROUGH, NORTH CAROLINA
“It saved my life,” Sharon Wheeler says, thinking back to that day in April 2003 when she literally walked into the bookstore business. She was still reeling from the news that her beloved husband, Joe, had been given a dire diagnosis—brain tumors and kidney cancer. Sharon had just taken an early retirement from her teaching job in Burlington, North Carolina, but was finding that she “didn’t have enough to do” on that day when she and a friend went window-shopping in nearby Hillsborough.
“I walked into the bookstore and said, ‘Oh, I would give anything to work in a bookstore like this!’”
And the owner said, “You’re hired!”
Thus it began, a few days a week. Joe died two years later. And later still, when that bookstore closed, Sharon realized, “I knew I was ready to open my own.”
In 2009, Sharon Wheeler moved to Hillsborough and opened Purple Crow Books in a tiny storefront on King Street, smack in the middle of the historic town.
At first, her grown daughters were not happy with the move. But now her daughter Ashton says, “I think you have become who you were meant to be.”
“Any time you have something to do—somebody who depends on you—that gives your life purpose,” Sharon explains. “Back in Burlington, my husband knew everybody. But when I came to Hillsborough, I was just me. So I am indebted to the whole community—it allowed me to find my wings on my own.”
The Purple Crow has been flying high ever since.
“The fact that I can have a bookstore and pay the bills in a town of this size, despite Amazon and Kindle, is amazing! I think we read because we want to be connected—and that’s one service of the independent bookstore. People do love to make a personal connection with a book—and this is a place to connect. Also, I try to get to know the people. This bookstore reminds me of the bar in Cheers—we all want to be where somebody knows our name. That’s what makes it work—it’s a place where people know your name. I think that we are all on the short end of actually communicating with people the way we used to—all this electronic stuff, tweeting and email, gets in the way. I like to really connect,” Sharon emphasizes.
“The people who come in here on a regular basis love to read and also love to support bricks-and-mortar bookstores—and real books. They have a dedication to shopping local, too. They cherish tradition.”
Nancy Vest, who works in the store, interrupts: “I think they come to see Sharon! They want to talk to Sharon!”
“I’m astounded at what people come in here and tell me,” Sharon admits, laughing. “But I love stories—I just love their stories!”
She also has a master’s degree in counseling. “I worked in a very poor school,” she says. “And I always used books to help my children. There’s nothing more important for a child than reading a book and realizing that other people have fathers who go to prison, other people have mothers who are on drugs.… Books can give you other worlds and other possibilities, too. All the stories, all the places, can be yours. That’s the gift of books.”
Sharon also used books to develop a prizewinning curriculum for character education. “Everything meaningful and good in life you can find in children’s literature. All the questions of the universe can be answered in children’s lit,” she says. At my prompting she lists some of her favorites: Charlotte’s Web; Teammates, a true story of Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese; Baseball Saved Us; and “anything by Patricia Polacco”—holding up a Civil War book titled Pink and Say.
An old claw-footed bathtub in the Purple Crow has been filled with bright pillows and stuffed animals so children can snuggle down to read a book… or bored husbands can catch a little snooze!
I love to hang out in the Purple Crow myself trying out the new books, soaking up the peaceful atmosphere, and waiting to see who’s going to come in the door next, announced by the little bell.
“It’s good to see you all again,” Sharon says to her many repeat customers, including one visitor who has driven down from Virginia. She listens carefully as this woman describes her granddaughter’s love of reading: “She’s into Greek and Egyptian mythology, she loves series books.…”
Sharon doesn’t have to go far afield for a suggestion, recommending local phenom John Claude Bemis, a middle-school teacher turned author of the popular “Clockwork Dark” trilogy, which he describes as “American Harry Potters.” John’s new book, The Prince Who Fell from the Sky, came out in June, 2012, and the Purple Crow planned a big release party in a larger space—our local farmers’ market, complete with entertainment. John’s a musician, too!
Sharon directs a new customer to her “Local” bookcase. “These books are all by Hillsborough authors—we have over thirty Hillsborough authors. Yes, that’s right—in this tiny little town!” Authors include Michael Malone, Frances Mayes, Allan Gurganus, Jill McCorkle, Zelda Lockhart, Hal Crowther, Craig Nova… the list goes on and on. Elizabeth Woodman’s new Eno Publishers recently published 27 Views of Hillsborough, with selections by many of us.”
In fact, Hillsborough was picked by Garden and Gun magazine as “the most literary small town in the South,” beating out Oxford, Mississippi, and Milledgeville, Georgia. I am not so sure about that!
Hillsborough authors are not exactly “retiring” either, but very civic: Each Christmastime, for instance, Michael Malone and Allan Gurganus don their top hats to present Dickens’s A Christmas Carol with Allan Gurganus as Scrooge and Michael Malone as all the other characters! This show is so popular that they have to have two performances, all to benefit local charities. A yearly storytelling festival brings writers out too—and somebody can always be found writing a novel or a poem at local hangout Cup A Joe, right across the street from the Purple Crow.
This little section of King Street is actually a microcosm of the “New South.” The Dual Supply hardware store next door has looked “pretty much the same” ever since proprietor Wesley Woods started working there when he was “8 or 9 years old, putting up stock, sweeping.…” There’s still no computer. Across the street is Evelyn Lloyd’s little family pharmacy, which she took over from her father in the ’80’s; and the Carolina Game and Fish selling hunting bows and fishing tackle and offering seasonal prizes for deer and turkeys. Their carcasses are weighed on the sidewalk right next to the sophisticated Cup A Joe with its latte, cappuccino, and multiply pierced baristas, doing a thriving business.
With her old-fashioned friendliness and the latest books, Sharon navigates both worlds with ease. “There is a peaceful rhythm to life in downtown Hillsborough, which is u
nique to this town. I have always felt the spirit of Hillsborough encouraging me to succeed. We all cheer for each other. I think Joe feels it too, right now in heaven.”
Ring! Here comes a forthright old gentleman looking for an unabridged copy of The Count of Monte Cristo. No luck on that one. Ring! A woman whispers her request for Fifty Shades of Grey, but no luck on that one, either—Sharon just sold them all at Ladies Night Out. She takes the order, then grins at me when the woman leaves. “I think everybody has a right to read whatever they want, don’t you?” Absolutely!
Ring! Some tourists come in. “Look!” they cry. “It’s a real bookstore!”
Flash! They take a picture.
LEE SMITH is the author of 15 works of fiction, including Oral History, Fair and Tender Ladies, and her recent collection, Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger. Her novel The Last Girls was a 2002 New York Times best seller as well as winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. A retired professor of English at North Carolina State University, she has received many awards, including the North Carolina Award for Literature and an Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Les Standiford
Books & Books, CORAL GABLES, FLORIDA
It was close to five, and time for a drink, I thought. Another sultry summer afternoon in Miami, circa 1981. Thunderheads boiled over the Everglades a few miles west, promising a downpour any minute. No point in hanging around the office any longer. Business was lousy. Who needed a private eye in a town where everything is public?
And that is when she came in.
“I’m sorry,” she said as she appeared in the doorway. She was a trim brunette with curls and the kind of figure that makes men want to write sonnets. “I knocked,” she said, “but it looks like your girl is gone for the day.”
Gone for the year, I wanted to tell her, and still wanting her last two weeks’ pay, but why shake a client’s confidence? I pointed to a chair.
She sat down and crossed her legs. I admired the process. “How can I help you?”
She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “It’s my boyfriend,” she began.
“There’s always a boyfriend,” I muttered.
She looked at me plaintively. “His affections have been alienated.”
I nodded. “So he’s fooling around, and you want me to find out who with?”
She shook her head. “It’s worse than that,” she said. “He wants to open up a bookstore. It’s all he thinks about.”
I leaned back absorbing it all. “So you want to have him Baker Acted. Why didn’t you just say so?”
She dropped her gaze. “It’s all so shameful,” she said. Out on the street a klaxon sounded. What’s a klaxon? I wondered.
“He’d been going to law school,” she was saying. “And then, when that didn’t work out, he started teaching high school English. But I know that was only because he got to read books and talk about them.” She looked up, shaking her head. “Now he wants to sell them. He’s in love with books.” Tears were running down her cheeks. “Books and books,” she said helplessly.
I came around my desk and put a hand on her shoulder, “Listen,” I said. “I’m just a fictional character, so I’m prejudiced. But your boyfriend… what’s his name?”
“Kaplan,” she said. “Mitchell Kaplan.”
“Right,” I told her. “What this Kaplan’s doing is important. Books are important.”
“But this is Miami,” she said. “People fish. They drive fast boats. They commit fantastical crimes. They don’t read.”
“That could change,” I said. “This Kaplan’s a smart guy.”
“How would you know that?” she said.
“Well, he picked you, didn’t he?”
You don’t need me to tell you how it worked out. Kaplan did go into the bookstore business, all right. He leased a 1920s building in Coral Gables, on Aragon, a block east of LeJeune, and filled its rabbit warren of rooms, upstairs and down, with artwork and books, most new, some rare. And people parked their boats and came. They liked the books, sure, but they liked the atmosphere just as much. They could browse and talk to this Kaplan about what he thought was worth reading—including all the books about crime in Miami—and no actual gunfire ever blew out any windows.
Though the store’s biggest room was about the size of a shoebox, Kaplan started bringing in authors to read from their books. At first the publishers in New York only wanted to send down people who had written manuals on better geriatric living and how to crime-proof your condo, but Kaplan kept at them, bringing in the local desperadoes all the while. Before long, no book tour worth its salt failed to list Books & Books as a destination.
Kaplan wasn’t satisfied with just bringing people into his store, though. He teamed up with Eduardo Padrón, president of Miami Dade College, to create the Miami Book Fair. The idea was to close the streets of downtown Miami and set up tents where people could buy and sell books and listen to writers of every stripe, 500 or more of them over the course of a week. Good thing the girlfriend hadn’t shared that plan the day she came into my office, or I might have gone along with the Baker Acting. The funny thing is, the Miami Book Fair—in pretty much the form Kaplan described it—has become this smashing success.
For a dozen years or more, Kaplan had it pretty good. He was inching back toward the level of luxury he’d enjoyed as a high school teacher and had even opened up a second store in Miami Beach, on Lincoln Road, which at the time had one shop that sold used vacuums and another that refurbished buggy whips, and that was about it. Kaplan had grown up on Miami Beach, though. As amazing as it sounds, he wanted to give people there access to books, and once again he was proved a visionary. The store on Lincoln Road—where he added one of the best sidewalk cafés around—has thrived.
It was not until the early ’90s that things got a little dicey. During the prior decade, entrepreneurs in the U.S. had been making out like bandits, creating chain and franchise stores for shoes and vitamins and fishing tackle and ladies’ underwear, so it was only a matter of time until someone figured out that there was a fortune to be made by getting people to buy stock in bookstore chains. Before you knew it, there were as many bookstores being opened around the country as there were doughnut shops, driving a bunch of the independent stores out of business. This is also the point at which my author got involved with Kaplan in a way that threatened to end things between us forever.
“Yo, Mr. Big Shot,” I said, when my author finally picked up. I’d been calling him for days. But that is a character’s lot in life.
“What is it, Exley?”
“What’s this I hear you’re going to write a novel about the Kaplan guy?” I said.
“You hear correctly,” my author said. “Mitchell was saying he thought there’d be a good thriller in the so-called bookstore wars, and I thought he was right. I told him he would have to die in the book, of course, but he was cool with that, so I’m going to do it.”
“How about me?” I said. “Do I get in the story this go-round?”
“I’m sorry,” my author said. “It’s going to be a John Deal book. You’re just not right for the part. Maybe we’ll get you into something another time.”
It hurt, but when you are just a figment of imagination, what are you going to do? Besides, the book did get published (though why they called it Deal on Ice instead of Book Deal, I’ll never know) and my author got to read from it at Kaplan’s store. Everybody seemed to like it, even the part where the bookstore owner gets offed. I figure some of the people laughing were probably criminals themselves.
What makes for a really amazing story, though, is the fact that in real life this Kaplan not only doesn’t die, he keeps on chugging like the Energizer Bunny. A few years back, he finally outgrew the original store and moved up the block on Aragon to a new set of digs that my author likes to call “The Temple to the Book.” It is a big place with two wings and a cozy central courtyard cafe where combos jam on weekends, and it
has the same old-timey charm that the first store had. On moving day, a couple hundred customers showed up to form a book brigade, and they passed the books from the old place to the new, hand to hand, section by section. It’s the kind of thing people would accuse you of making up if you put it in fiction.
The new place has also gone gangbusters and draws people from everywhere—presidents have signed books there and you can find celebs and famous writers skulking around the stacks all the time. Kaplan has gone on to open another spot in Bal Harbour and to partner in more Books & Books stores in the Miami International Airport, Fort Lauderdale, Grand Cayman, and Westhampton Beach, and this is at a time when a lot of independents and even a bunch of those chain bookshops are closing up.
If you want to know how he’s managed it, I figure it this way: Just like I told that bombshell who came in the office all those years ago, this Kaplan understands that books are important in a way that safari shirts and whole-grain cupcakes are not. Anybody who walks into one of his stores—they are more like destinations, really—can tell that the guy who set the place up knows and cares about what he has for sale; and if you ever doubted it, all you would have to do is spend a few minutes talking with him, or any of the dyed-in-the-wool book people he has working with him.