by Ronald Rice
I have been lucky enough to return for several more MacDowell residencies since 2004. When I am working at MacDowell, I visit The Toadstool almost daily, in that edgy, wistful, look-but-don’t-touch way, exhilarated and refreshed by the presence of the books and the bookstore but careful not to let myself become lost in other writers’ voices.
And my son and I have continued to make regular pilgrimages up to Peterborough to shop at The Toadstool. He heads straight for the used section, where he amasses an armload of novels, sits in a chair to sift through them, and generally ends by buying them all. I try—and fail—to cover the entire store. Speaking of failure, some of my most vivid Toadstool memories are of books I saw there and failed to buy: the complete poems of Joseph Brodsky, an old edition of Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House (Cather wrote at MacDowell and is buried in nearby Jaffrey, New Hampshire; her books often show up in local bookstores, but you don’t often see The Professor’s House, unlike the strangely ubiquitous Death Comes for the Archbishop and Sapphira and the Slave Girl). But I’ve had many more successes: other Willa Cather novels; a boxed set of four volumes in the George Braziller “Great Ages of World Architecture” series for my husband; several old children’s hardcovers—Shadow of a Bull, The Witch of Blackbird Pond—each of which has caused the staff person at the register to say, “Wow, I wonder if the owner even knew this was here,” making me feel that I am getting not only a treasure, but a bargain, a diamond priced as rhinestone.
But although I am happy to enjoy The Toadstool as the sunny book-buyer’s banquet it is, I always have a poignant moment at the checkout counter when I catch sight of the nearby shelves devoted to books by MacDowell Colony Fellows. It’s an exciting collection of work—poems, novels, short stories, plays, works of history and biography and journalism and criticism. My books are there, the new one I wrote during my last few residencies and the one I was working on in 2004, mingled with other books I first heard about when their authors were still struggling to figure out how to tell the story. “How was your day?” is a frequent question around the dinner table at MacDowell. The answer is “Great” or, sometimes, “Awful,” but there we all are, doggedly ready to head back to our studios the next morning. I always find, looking at those shelves in The Toadstool, that I am longing to be back at MacDowell, deeply engaged in the trance of my work.
And that, really, is what I love about The Toadstool. There, more than in any other bookstore, I’m aware of writers and of writing. Those shelves of books by MacDowell writers, some of whom are working just up the road while my son and I are happily buying new things to read, remind me that every book in the store—every book in every bookstore and every library—was once a work in progress.
JOAN WICKERSHAM is the author of The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story and The Suicide Index. Her op-ed column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.
Terry Tempest Williams
The King’s English Bookshop, SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH
In Salt Lake City, Utah, The King’s English is more than a phrase about proper speech; it is a place where speech is honored, free speech in particular. Betsy Burton, its proprietor, is more than a bookseller; she is a community advocate.
“Local First” is not just a slogan she uses for supporting local businesses within her hometown, but a philosophy she extends to include local writers. I am fortunate to be one of The King’s English Bookshop’s local writers. When my husband and I moved into our first home on 1520 Garfield Avenue in 1977, we lived within walking distance of Betsy’s store.
Fourteen years later, I published Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, a book about the historic rise of Great Salt Lake and the corresponding death of my mother from ovarian cancer. Part memoir, part natural history, it is a story of love and loss, women and birds. When it was published in the fall of 1991, Betsy Burton invited me to read from Refuge at The King’s English. Salt Lake City is a small town where my family is known. The book was personal.
My perspective was on the page. I believed the men in my family deserved to be heard from their point of view. Betsy listened to my concerns and agreed to have a family panel instead of the traditional reading and book signing. The panel would consist of my father, John Tempest, and my brothers, Steve, Dan, and Hank.
This is what I remember:
The King’s English was packed. Bookshelves had been moved to the side. Chairs were set and the men in my family were seated behind a table. I introduced my family and stepped to the side.
My father spoke first. Picture him as the Marlboro Man without the cigarette—tall, dark, and direct. “As most of you know, my daughter has written a book about Great Salt Lake and my wife’s death. I’m not happy about it.” He pauses as his emotion surfaces. “It’s easy for her to say what a wonderful experience Diane’s death was, but she could leave. I couldn’t. Terry was there during the day and went home at night. And she isn’t the one who now sleeps alone. It’s easy for her to romanticize the situation and turn it into poetry, but I am the one who’s left. This isn’t some fictional story. It’s my life.” Another pause. “And as far as Great Salt Lake goes, it’s a cesspool covered in flies. We all know that once you’ve seen it, no one ever goes back if they can help it. Terry’s got a flair for exaggeration. Maybe this book will help some people. That’s all I have to say.”
No one in the chairs moved.
My father sat down. My brother Dan stood up, a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Utah, and for the next twenty minutes read his dissertation on Wittgenstein and the covert uses of language. His abstract language interspersed between mathematical equations went right over my head.
Next was Hank, my youngest brother. He was short and concise. “I don’t remember that much because I was…” And as he finished his sentence, I flashed back to our family entering rehab together to support his sobriety.
I looked at Betsy. And she looked down as she covered her mouth.
Steve, ever the peacemaker, and closest to me in age, defused the growing discomfort and simply bore his testimony in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints as he spoke of his love for Mother and how he believed he would see her again. “Mother died as she lived—with grace.”
I could not speak. Betsy did and thanked everyone for coming.
What I remember is that people left quickly. I signed very few books.
Now, Betsy and I can laugh about it. So can my father, who loves Betsy and was in a close relationship with the manager of The King’s English for almost twelve years.
This is all to say that we are family. Every Christmas Eve, my father buys each person in our expanding family a book that Betsy recommends. He signs each novel or biography or cookbook and passes them out as the first gifts of Christmas Eve.
And it was Betsy Burton’s mother, Fran Minton, the curator of education at the Natural History Museum of Utah, who gave me my first real job as assistant curator of education right before she retired. I worshipped her. She was a woman as blunt and smart as my father. We come from rough-hewn western stock where intelligence is gauged not only by the books you have read, but by the way you have been taught to read the land, the weather, and each other.
Betsy Burton and I have come to read each other. Local first. We have become sisters in our love of words. Literature has shaped us and gathered our voices in the name of community—literature and the sage-brushed landscape buttressed by the Rocky Mountains that we call home.
The King’s English is home. The place where I always return. The place where Betsy Burton not only sells my books, but edits them. The place where independence lives and freedom of speech thrives. The King’s English is where my family has gathered in grief and celebrated in joy.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS is the award-winning author of 14 books including Leap, An Unspoken Hunger, Refuge, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, and, most recently, When Women Were Birds.
Simon Winchester
The Bookloft, GREA
T BARRINGTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Nobody likes a strip mall. They are the cheerless inventions of those cheerless creatures known as “developers.” Most often they—the strip malls more than the developers, one has to suppose—are diabolically ugly. They are built gimcrack, and they usually sport the cheap varnish of the ephemeral. They alter and usually spoil the internal workings of the towns they so parasitically surround. They were all built in blind fealty to the automobile. Most of us surely wish that strip malls just didn’t have to exist.
But they do; and there are the usual swarm of them around the charming old western Massachusetts railroad town of Great Barrington, near where I live. Great Barrington, which lies in a shallow river valley in the southern Berkshire Hills, is a settlement of some antiquity, and a place that no less than the Smithsonian magazine has lately declared to be the Best Small Town in America. It was given the award for being what we locals all know it to be: an eminently habitable and strollable little omnium-gatherum that manages to mix architectural charm, culinary energy, and a sound and lasting commercial success.
So it will surprise no one to learn that it is a town with a cheesemonger, a café run by a couple from Normandy, and a hardware store that sells antique brass tools. It has a toy shop and a candy store, and there is a place run by two men who always wear shorts and who will enlarge old pictures taken on black-and-white film. It has two great diners and a grocery store where you can buy Cooper’s Oxford marmalade and baguettes. It has one of the best bagel stores beyond the Lower East Side.
But what Great Barrington does not have in its town center is a proper bookstore. Other than mine, that is, which is a full half-mile away from Main Street and has been set down for all of its existence in a strip mall.
So the first thing to say about The Bookloft (other than that it is one of only three remaining proper bookstores in Berkshire County and is still going strong after more than 35 years in business) is that it is not your imagined small-town bookshop. No mullioned bow windows, no thick carpet and coal fire, no cat on the counter, no sleepy clerk dozing before his opened volume of Dombey and Son. It stands instead rather modestly between a hairdresser and a telephone store—there is a GNC store and a nail salon a little farther away, and a dollar store, a Kmart and a supermarket beyond them. And it has an architectural style that, to put it kindly, is entirely consonant with the look and feel of the mall around it.
But once through the door—a positive Aladdin’s cave! A sanctuary, a private and never-seething lectorium. It is just packed, with groaning shelves jostling against shelves, with thousands upon thousands of just-what-I-always-wanted and I-really-must-take-a-look-at-that and the-review-said-it-was-brilliant books.
A subset of the ten or so staff, some full-time, some hauled in for duty when there’s a rush, greet newcomers from the desk, as if they were the chefs in a Japanese restaurant. You approach, glancing at the stack of bottles of homemade maple syrup on the impulse-purchase side. Have you got? you ask, and almost without demur, and seldom with recourse to the monitor at the desk’s far end (beside Biography, across from Classic Fiction), one or all the staff will say something akin to I’m sure we have a copy, back there, around that corner, second shelf up—have you found it yet?
They Know Books at the Bookloft, as the best of the independents do, and as most of the chains never need to. The staff there read; they know; they anticipate. They scan all the trades, the blogs, the Twitter feeds. The handwritten Staff Picks: a fifth of all sales come from such suggestions. Hand selling is the order of the day. They know their customers, they know their tastes, they are ever prepared for demographic quirks they have never imagined. Books on Somali cuisine? On uses for argon? Knitting on Anglesey? Tort reform in Albania? Little seems to faze or escape the jackdaw minds of those whom Eric Wilska has been employing here since he first opened the store, in what was the then-very-new strip mall, in 1974.
He was something of a free-spirited, tie-dye-and-THC kind of youngster back then. He remembers, if cloudily, that he was either going to open a free school or a bookstore, and that a few lungfuls of chemical magic swiftly decided him on the shop idea.
No bank would lend him a dime, of course; but his grandfather loaned him $3,000, and somehow he managed to get a lease on a small mall space a few yards away from where he runs the business now. He gathered perhaps 4,000 titles to offer, and in those first days had only a salvaged cable spool as the store’s central table and gathering spot.
His grandmother made the first sale: Diet for a Small Planet, by Frances Moore Lappé. Just as you might expect, though Ms. Lappé’s book is still in print today, and one might look at that particular sale as a harbinger, of sorts, a forecast of the kind of book and the kind of customer that this clever little store has been managing to bring together ever since. The Pentagon Papers sold well in those first few years; the official report on the Watergate affair; and Helter Skelter. “All blockbusters,” mused the craggy wraith that Eric Wilska has now become. His manager, a bearded and ever-quietly-smiling-to-himself bear of a man, Mark Ouillette, agrees. “A great help.”
These two men, a kind of literary dog-and-pony show, have managed—with the invaluable help of Eric’s wife Ev, a fiction writer and reader of formidable perspicacity—to keep this uniquely successful independent store up and running through all the bad times that have been brought serially to them and their kin by the men in black hats, the now-slowly-receding-in-the-mirror Mr. Barnes and Mr. Noble and the now-still-on-all-sides, everywhere, Mr. Bezos. How they have done it is a mystery to all, not least to them, too. “It can’t be our management skills,” grinned one or other or both of the pair, pleading incompetence. “We wouldn’t hire ourselves if we came here looking for a job.” All they can suggest is that their success—the first months of this year were the best ever, despite all the other trends elsewhere—is born of a formula compounded of having a huge stock (30,000 titles), a remarkably gifted staff, and a deep and abiding loyalty both to, and of, the customers.
All of that, plus the maple syrup and the maps; their links to their second store, secondhand-only, a few miles away in West Stockbridge; their friendly acceptance of all new technologies; and their ready awareness that theirs is perhaps the most literate and literary corner of the American world. Herman Melville lived up the road. W.E.B. Du Bois just down the street a ways. Roy Blount, Jr., is nearby. Edith Wharton was a few miles away. Edna St. Vincent Millay. Pauline Kael. Ruth Reichl. The names keep on coming—and those of their number who are living and fit enough in these parts come and speak at the Bookloft, as ready recompense for the pleasure that they all admit to savoring in coming here to shop.
That they are all here conjoined—the writers and their bookstore, the book-loving customers and their formidably well-read army of booksellers—underlines the point that Eric Wilska likes to make: that this is a community bookstore, providing a much-needed service for a community that, as he believes and which all of us pray is true, simply could not and will not countenance the vanishing of one of the last truly great independent bookstores in the country.
And if this precious place happens to be lacking a mullioned bow front window or two, and has to exist sans a cat napping on the Agatha Christie shelf, but is in fact down from the dollar store and a step away from a Vietnamese nail salon, who truly cares? Just so long as it is here, and stays here until we are all gone, and long after. It is the kind of place that almost makes the notion of strip malls acceptable, provides the very idea with some kind of commercial blessing, and is a literary benison for us all.
SIMON WINCHESTER is the best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman, Atlantic, The Map that Changed the World, Krakatoa, A Crack in the Edge of the World, The Man Who Loved China, Skulls: An Exploration of Alan Dudley’s Curious Collection, and more than a dozen other books. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, National Geographic, Lapham’s Quarterly, and elsewhere. Mr. Winchester was made Officer of the Or
der of the British Empire (OBE) by Elizabeth II in 2006. He lives in New York City and Massachusetts
Afterword
1. I’ve spent a lot of time on tour these past few weeks, moving from bookstore to bookstore across the United States and into Canada. Book tours are wonderful and tiring and lonely. Touring America without a driver’s license involves a lot of time in sketchy Greyhound stations and pleasant walks through strange towns in search of the bookstore where I’m supposed to read that night. There are long hours in buses bound for cities I’ve never seen, taxis between bus stations and hotels, peaceful interludes in airports, the occasional train. It’s tiring, but I feel very lucky and there are things that I love about it.
What I love, specifically, are the independent bookstores where most of my events take place, this archipelago of books scattered over the landscape. I grew up surrounded by books, and my apartment in Brooklyn is filled with them. When I was a child I was in love with Laughing Oyster Bookshop, the wonderful independent bookstore that’s still my favorite shop on all of Vancouver Island, and to this day stepping into a bookstore feels a bit like coming home.