The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book

by Wendy Welch

  It would be some time before we began to understand how naive and unprepared we were to run a business in a small town.

  Jack and I worked hard getting the store ready, and drove each other crazy doing it. My husband’s generally laid-back approach to life is simple. If a problem exists, the buzzer will get louder or someone will start shouting; everything else is small stuff. I am more the type who, leafing through a magazine in the dentist’s office, will read an article about plastics containing carcinogens and call home.

  “Jack, empty the fridge and see if we have any plastic containers in there. If we do, dump the food out behind the back garden. Don’t give it to the dogs, and remember not to put cooked food in the compost pile. I’ll stop on my way home and buy glass storage sets. While you’re emptying the fridge, you might want to go ahead and scrub the vegetable drawer; I noticed a smell yesterday.”

  People often characterize my beloved as “long-suffering.” He refers to living with me as “exciting.” Meshing “Aaggghhh” and “ahhhhhh” life approaches creates a strong balance when we manage it, and since we like each other, we usually do manage it.

  So it was no surprise to Jack when I sat down one day (soon after we scraped together enough cash to go get our furniture and thus had chairs again) to pencil the closest thing we ever had to a plan for opening: a list scribbled on the back of an envelope.

  Find Location (check)

  Get books

  Name store

  Build bookshelves (check)

  Learn to use cash register or something like that (find cash register)

  Establish how to run a trade credit system

  Publicity

  Cat, optional (check and mate)1

  Five years later, I found this list in a drawer and laughed. Besides revealing my housekeeping limitations, it seemed surprisingly comprehensive for someone making it up as she went along. Adding a degree in family therapy, plus lifetime supplies of hand sanitizer, patience, Goo Gone, pencils, packing tape, and humor—not necessarily in that order—would have been wise. Other than that, the envelope pretty much covered it. That’s how you run a used book store. (Dogs may be substituted for cats if well behaved.)

  The day I made the list, Jack poured himself a Scotch and we took the easiest item first. Our shop sat across the street from the amphitheater where the outdoor drama of Fox’s novel ran, so our name needed to celebrate his The Trail of the Lonesome Pine legacy.

  After less thought and more alcohol than should have been put into it, we came up with Tales of the Lonesome Pine Used Books, Music and Internet Café, which seemed to cover everything—although we later learned it wouldn’t fit in the phone book advertisement. As we met other business owners, it became evident that the Lonesome Pine moniker could get even better exposure. With a bottle of wine one night, we had a good time renaming several businesses around town. For some reason, friends who helped create the list wish to remain anonymous, but Ms. Polly the drama director loved it:

  The liquor store

  Ales of the Lonesome Pine

  The local gym

  Whales of the Lonesome Pine

  The car dealership

  Deals of the Lonesome Pine

  The post office–cum–federal courthouse

  Mails and Jails of the Lonesome Pine

  The pharmacy

  Ails of the Lonesome Pine

  The farmers’ market

  Kales of the Lonesome Pine

  The school museum

  Fails of the Lonesome Pine

  And the pet grooming service that actually did use the idea

  Tails of the Lonesome Pine

  In a small town, we make our own fun. Beats people making fun of us.

  Okay, back to that envelope checklist. What next? Well, maybe getting in some books so we could sell them?

  Jack wanted something else first. “A mission statement.”

  “A what? Are we on a mission here, babe?”

  “I come from a business college background, and I need a mission statement,” he insisted, stroking his white goatee. (He does that beard thing when he wants to look wise.) So Jack drafted a mission statement and we hung it on the wall:

  Tales of the Lonesome Pine Used Books, Music and Internet Café Mission Statement

  1. We believe in providing quality books, music, crafts, and service at a fair price.

  2. We believe in making a fair profit.

  3. We believe in shop hours that balance the wishes of our customers with our need for a life.

  4. We believe in assisting and advising customers to the best of our ability; we believe everyone is fallible.

  5. We believe in being responsible members of our community.

  6. We believe that a used book store is neither a new book store nor a garage sale; that it is a hard way to make a living; that it is a kind of sacred trust; and that it should be friendly and fun for customers and us.

  The mission statement provides balance on days when we can’t remember why we thought owning a business/living in a small town/being married to each other would be fun. Usually we don’t have trouble recalling any of that, but in those early days of naïveté and enthusiasm, plenty of marriage-and-resolve-testing times lay ahead.

  CHAPTER 3

  Mommy, Where Do Books Come From?

  Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.

  —Dr. Seuss (aka Theodore Geisel) as quoted in Looking Tall by Standing Next to Short People & Other Techniques for Managing a Law Firm by H. Edward Wesemann

  WE BOUGHT THE HOUSE IN July and planned to open shop in October; a quick turn-around meant the place could start paying us back for its purchase. Since we didn’t have any investment capital, without remorse or pity we culled our personal library for inventory. From a life lived in the Arts and Academia, Jack and I owned a few thousand books, some of them rather obscure and wonderful. Husband and wife looked each other in the eye and swore it went downstairs to the shop if: we had owned it more than three years but not read it; if we had read it but never reread it (even if we intended to someday); or if we’d never used it in research.

  I write scholarly articles and Jack records weekly programs for public radio, besides running an annual tour to Scotland and Ireland for folkies; these facets of our lives require some research. As traditional performers, we sometimes taught at folkie meccas like the John C. Campbell Folk School and Swannanoa Gathering, so if we’d cracked open the spines even once for such purposes, the books stayed. But we dispatched without mercy favorites, gifts, and “important reads” we had intended to get around to someday. Even works autographed by writer friends went in. (If you’re reading this Jane, Theresa, et al., we’re sorry!)

  Before you think too badly of our ruthlessness, stop and consider. Love expressed through a thoughtfully chosen book lingers, along with the memory of its imparted wisdom. Giving up the physical item doesn’t sever anything. As for that beloved childhood copy of Charlotte’s Web, where do Fern and Wilbur live: on the page, or in your heart?

  When Jack and I began culling our collective books, we learned a lot about each other’s previous lives. Bookshelf anthropology can be fascinating; how many times have you scanned a friend or associate’s bookcases to discover similar—or disquietingly dissimilar—tastes? I used to ferret out kindred spirits in the Snake Pit that way. A volunteer working with one of our music programs came in one morning and said, “Hey, you’ve got Ethnomimesis in your bookcase! I loved his interpretation of identity versus ego, how songwriters singing about issues to prove they’re rebels just parrot popular opinion. So ironic!”

  I practically leapt over my desk to embrace her, then took her to lunch.

  Jack certainly enjoyed culling my books. “As near as I can tell, dearest, your life consists of making bizarre items for bazaars—or planning to—and reading boring ethnographic tomes,” he said, chucking Crocheted Finger Puppets atop Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folk Tale in the “for bookshop inv
entory” pile.

  “I have squandered my academic existence learning how to analyze someone’s speech, discern their underlying biases, pick up on geographic background, and detect hidden agendas while missing the point of everything they had to say,” I answered, waiting until Jack bent over another box before surreptitiously removing Puppets from the shop pile and stashing it under some laundry. “Being an ethnographer is a noble profession, but it tends to encourage people to turn over rocks looking for hidden meanings, instead of just listening.”

  Jack winked at me. “I know, dear. I live with you.” He stood, stretched, stepped behind me, and pulled Puppets from its hiding place. “You spend a great deal of time analyzing inner voices while crafting things from wool.”

  “Oh, good one,” I responded, dashing to the bathroom and retrieving Jack’s copy of Positively 4th Street from where he’d stashed it beneath the ancient claw-foot tub. I tossed it lightly against my palms, eyes narrowed. Without a word, my husband set Crocheted Finger Puppets on my “keep” shelf, and I handed over Positively 4th Street. We understand each other so well.

  About fifteen hundred volumes went downstairs, even after all the wheeling, dealing, and ferreting out of hiding places. (For days, I encountered Jack’s books lying atop cabinets and stuffed behind house-repair projects. He never found mine because I hid them in my yarn stash.) Having our personal collection in the shop not only made us instant inventory experts, but it turned the whole enterprise into something like an adoption agency. We felt a vested interest in seeing the little guys go to good homes. Once the bookstore opened, our friend Neva Bryan, an author herself, bought a book autographed by one of my writer friends. Neva glowed over her find, while I was happy because My Friend the Book went to live with My Friend the Writer; they would appreciate and look after each other.

  But Neva and the rest of our customers waited in the future (we hoped) as we prepared for the Grand Opening—which wasn’t looking too grand, in all honesty. The books from our personal cull barely filled half of one room’s shelves, yet three rooms waited. It didn’t feel cozy or full of promise, more barren and tomblike. Lacking money to buy more, we tried laying the books flat, end to end. That took up shelf space, but it pretty much looked like a book morgue.

  Surveying the scene of our crime novels, we took stock of, well … the stock. Closing the door on the back room full of empty bookcases helped, but that glorious, open-plan, long front suite with its oak columns and sweet, sticky pocket doors, where we dreamed of patrons edging along overstuffed shelves, remained a veritable cavern with nothing in it but books lying sideways. The word “ridiculous” hovered in the background. Even those with no retail skills whatsoever (namely, us) could see our meager stock foretold doom.

  One evening I came down the wooden stair with its beautiful copper corner pieces, which I planned to shine back to perfection someday after we got the shop ready, and beheld my beloved sitting at the bottom. Shoulders slumped, chin resting in hands, he sat with an empty whiskey glass at his knee. We didn’t have money for extras; Jack dipping into his water-of-life reserve meant things were bad.

  I sat down beside him and together we surveyed the emptiness that embodied our leaped-before-looking stupidity.

  Jack sighed. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have installed quite so many sleepbuilts at the start. We could have put in some more furniture, armchairs, that sort of thing.” (Jack called his shelf design “sleepbuilts,” because they were super-easy to make, and he’d built so many that he could do one in his sleep. I called them that because the saw and Jack’s snoring produced a similar sound.)

  “Where would we have gotten money for armchairs?” I asked. We had already put our personal couch downstairs in one of the front rooms and broken up our dining set, its table holding the shop’s coffee and tea service, chairs spread across the store. Upstairs we had our bedroom furniture, a couple of plastic four-drawer units, and a lot of cardboard boxes.

  Jack shrugged. “I’m not too old to search skips.” Search skips is Scottish for Dumpster diving. Sounds better in Scots, doesn’t it?

  Now, you should know that Jack is just an inch or two taller than I am. If you chose to describe me as “cozily round,” or even use Alexander McCall Smith’s tactful “traditionally built,” that would be a fair cop. Jack, however, is lean muscle in a compact package. Wiry, they calls it in the Old World. He can carry three two-by-fours with ease, yet not see over the edge of a Dumpster standing on tiptoe. The image of my beloved swimming up to his eyebrows in pizza boxes and old diapers made me giggle. Where there’s giggling, there’s hope. Hope coupled with hard work can trump even stupidity. Yes, we’d been silly in our failure to plan, but in the month since we had committed to a bookstore, as we’d built shelves and sifted books, the shop had moved from an antidote to the Snake Pit to having its own meaning. Le bookshop, c’est moi. Or us, in this case.

  We’d gone from the rather selfish need to heal ourselves, to providing something a whole bunch of nice people had taken the time to tell us they looked forward to having. Locals strolled up the sidewalk, stopped us in the grocery store, chatted after church about when we would be open, said how nice it was to have a bookstore coming to town. They liked that they were getting a bookshop! It felt so good to be wanted.

  Staring at the book morgue, I knew the men and women who had come by to ask about our opening looked forward to what we represented: a simultaneous intellectual, emotional, and economic investment in the Coalfields of central Appalachia—not to mention access to books, glorious, cheap, preloved books. So as God was our witness they were going to get the world’s greatest—well, friendliest, nicest, whatever—bookstore. We would not be defeated by low stock numbers—not yet, anyway. Rallying, I said, “Don’t worry, love. Even though we’re in a bit of a bind here, I have a way forward.”

  My husband cast a suspicious eye toward me, knowing that when I said not to worry, he probably should. But I continued with an expansive wave at the dead books, “Clearly we need more inventory.”

  “Clearly we’re out of money, Wendy.” The recent furniture fetch in a rented U-Haul, coupled with the three rooms of newly made shelving, had drained my day job’s modest paychecks. We’d been eating Crock-Pot chili or mac and cheese interspersed with some old army rations a friend from my Snake Pit days had given us. I don’t know exactly why she gave us that box of twelve MREs (meals ready to eat)—perhaps she felt bad when I walked away and didn’t want to see us starve—but let me just say, food that can’t spoil doesn’t taste good.

  “The solution is obvious,” I went on. “And I am the perfect person to implement it.”

  Jack closed his hazel eyes as if in pain. “Just tell me.”

  I kissed his brow. “At great personal sacrifice, dear, I will give up my Saturday mornings to go garage-sale-ing, and will return with boxes of book bargains.” With that, I rose from my seat on the stairs, wiped my hands of the ubiquitous coal dust, and made an internal commitment to get that slump out of my beloved’s shoulders.

  Having been a graduate student for ten years, I was intimately familiar with yard sales. I consider myself adept at spotting bargains and think browsing sales is fun, but had been avoiding them since we were rapidly approaching the point where we couldn’t afford air, let alone amenities. We cut our own hair and changed our car’s oil, so I didn’t want to be tempted to spend even small amounts of money on nonessentials. But now, a lifelong addiction had become a business skill. No way were our dreams dying without a fight. The people who’d stopped and talked to us, who’d told us they were counting on us to open (and then not close six months later) could not be disappointed. The readers of the world—okay, the Appalachian Coalfields—were waiting.

  Yeah, it was overblown self-aggrandizement, but every once in a while, that really works to stop a self-pity party.

  Soon I was at play in the field of the books, with apologies to Peter Matthiessen. (For those of you unfamiliar with At Play in the Fields of the Lord
, his novel about sincere yet bungling missionaries living fish-out-of-water lives in the jungle, it’s a wonderful, thought-provoking read.) Buying from yard sales is one of the least expensive yet most time-consuming ways of getting stock. Time is money—especially when you haven’t got any money. All through July, I swept onto front lawns offering ten cents per for every title they had. My weekend hunts quickly and inexpensively gathered an impressive collection of battered Jackie Collins novels and Farrah Fawcett detox diets, hardback Danielle Steels and ten-year-old batches of Harlequin romances. I didn’t know what I was doing. Fortunately, it wasn’t costing much.

  The shelves grew fat on these unsellable space-takers until I wised up. From e-mailing other bookstore owners, reading Internet advice, seeing what sold on eBay, and restarting my common sense after so many years in graduate school, I soon learned to bypass vintage sets of Better Home and Gardens cookbooks with Volume 2 missing, or Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. (In case you’re interested, those are why Atlantis sank.) Amid aerobic workout handbooks and treatises on U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, regional reading interests soon emerged: coal, country music, Christian romances, and every description of horror novel. The Coalfields population would prove complex in its reading habits.

  Booksellers need to have common sense. Title by title, sale by sale, I began to work out that if everybody had old Stephen King paperbacks, maybe we didn’t need them for our shop. If Harlequins were a dime a dozen, why would people buy them from us for a dollar? You know the old saying: “You’re not a real [insert profession here] until you learn to say no.” Even at ten cents a title, I had to learn to say no. Two life coaches aided me in this process: the books—silent on the tables and cement driveways, testimony to what had been popular last year—and the people hosting the sales, who almost always had specific questions about what we would stock once they found out about the bookstore.