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

by Wendy Welch

  One day while ringing up his books, Jack said something about Bill’s eclectic tastes. Bill shrugged. “I like what I like, and what I like is to like what I read,” he said.

  Jack laughed, and Bill clapped him on the shoulder. “’Sides, at my age, I don’t really care what other people think. I ain’t reachin’ for no big brass ring in the middle. I’ve done my time, I’ve done my duty, and now I’m gonna sit in my house with my wife and read what I want, when I want.” Exit Bill Peace, carrying his bag of miscellaneous supplies for a retirement well lived.

  Truth be told, Bill is the kind of reader we dreamed about, back when we started. He is a reader’s reader and a delight to watch, going ’round the corners at precise angles with that bearlike gait, bending and straightening as he runs his eyes up and down the shelves, spine by spine. He’s so thorough that he takes hours. One winter’s night we actually closed the shop at 6 P.M. as usual, thinking everyone was gone—only to have him appear as I was setting the table for supper.

  “I’ll take these,” he said, materializing suddenly from our mystery and thrillers room, holding out a couple of medieval whodunnits. I choked on a little “whoop” of surprise and nearly dropped the plates, but Bill didn’t even notice. Jack rang up his purchases, opened the door for him, and turned on the porch light. To this day, I’m not certain he knows we locked him in.

  Bill is not the only customer whose tastes vary, or whose enjoyment of the shop has as much to do with ritual and relaxation as with finding a book. My friend Jenny, from the bookstore’s writing group, comes in now and then for a cuppa, and after we’ve talked a while, she goes into “the routine.”

  Casting her eyes over the shelves in a slow arc, she asks, “Got anything I might like?” in her movie-star languid voice, and I’ll haul down a couple of novels or memoirs. Completely unlike Bill in her approach to book shopping, Jenny also has fairly eclectic tastes; she loves not only most of Joan Didion’s books, but also Tom Perrotta’s Little Children—which I hurled across the room around the third chapter. In fact, we joke that if I hate it, Jenny will like it—unless it’s a memoir. We both adored The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio and The Geography of Love, and laughed our way through Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. But we stay off each other’s fiction lists. We want to remain friends.

  From Jenny’s casual eye sweep to Bill’s deliberate steps, people cruise our shop expecting the unexpected. They know that bookshops are magic, and books are the road maps by which misfits find each other.

  As former residents of Edinburgh, we once took friends from Spain on an all-day ramble through every used book store in the city (nine at the time), returning exhausted but happy with four bags to lug on the train. Not even speaking the same language, we trundled up Edinburgh’s medieval closes and down its back alleys, handling volumes musty and fresh, our Spanish friends communicating by gesture with the shopkeepers who guarded these treasure troves. Years later, looking back on that trip, I know we couldn’t have had any deeply meaningful conversations because we shared no common language. Yet I remember vividly what we talked about: literary themes from European folktales common to Spain and the British Isles. We compared heroes and villains and motifs, discussed why witches show themselves in daytime England but nighttime Spain, pitted the Irish giant Cuchulain against the Spanish Caravinaigre.

  Bookshops are magic.

  Big-name box bookstores have installed cafés and armchairs precisely because people like to hang out around books. Next time you’re in one of those cavernous megasellers, see for yourself how they’ve worked to create ambiance. Look at the shelf placement, how they’ve been arranged to mark off cozy little reading nooks. Somebody’s tried very hard to make you forget you’re in a warehouse.

  Fine, said our killjoy friends who stop in from time to time to explain why we’re doomed. So a bricks-and-mortar store still works. Now what about iPads and Kindles and Nooks?

  Shut up, we responded. And pass the wine.

  Actually, that’s not how we feel about e-books. What’s so horrible about e-readers, anyway—either the devices or the humans who use them? I’m a big fan of literacy in any form, digital pulse or printed pulp. Why should e-books spark an either-or division among readers? Couldn’t there be room in our futures for both paper pulp and electronic pulse?

  I first had an e-reader in my hand about eight years before they hit the American market, when I lived in Britain and worked with recovering addicts. About a third of the guys in the “rehab-instead-of-jail” program were dyslexic. (Did you know that dyslexia affects one out of ten people in the United States and Europe, but that one in four convicts is dyslexic? Think about it a sec.)

  E-readers offered a “cool” way to engage these lads on the topic of reading in the first place; while Dick and Jane were neither hip nor happening, having one’s hands on any electronic device was. Add to that the promise of a laptop loaner if they read an entire e-book, and those boys had big incentives to write some of the most interesting reviews I ever read. My favorite remains a young man who compared Captain Ahab to his former drug supplier: “They both just concentrated on what they wanted and didn’t care who got hurt.”

  So, e-readers, eye readers, what’s the difference? Reading is good for us, and if gleaning words from a computer screen is a little harder on the eyes and softer on the brain (as studies are beginning to suggest—something about screens not stimulating the correct eye muscles to make us think, so instead we remain passively observant; the same disconnect happens when watching television), at least it’s still words, not pictures.

  Here’s the thing Jack and I have observed from our perch above the electronic fray: books aren’t just words. They’re objects with specific, physical, desirable properties. I asked a friend with two daughters what books meant to her family, and she waxed eloquent for a full two minutes on their properties: “literal sponges for our tears and muffles for our guffaws; conveyors of knowledge; the hard evidence of our studies; sharing in an adventure or an illness; and companionship with as many other people as there are copies sold.”

  We let that rest for a moment, sipping our coffee, then Tonia laughed. “And I don’t know if you want to hear this, but my daughters built a castle out of books for their dolls. They made the walls and the roof and the steps up to it, all from books. And they made a book garage at the back for the princess to park her pony and her sports car.”

  Try that with a Kindle. The pony would do unspeakable things to the interface circuitry.

  When we started our shop, we couldn’t bear to think a single physical volume should ever be thrown away; that reticence birthed the free book section on our front porch. Surrounded by a bunch of old Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and The Guinness Book of World Records from the 1980s, we stuck them out there hoping someone would want them. Yet as time went on, and we saw just how many geriatric tomes lumbered into Tales of the Lonesome Pine, their information, ideologies, or inspirational power corroded by time, we pitched a box here or there into a Dumpster—never without a wee twinge. They deserved respect for their contribution, after all; we would never treat people or pets that way in their old age.

  But they kept coming, the books no one wanted. Even though we flat-out told people we didn’t deal in rare or old books, our shop still attracted a lot of older volumes in poor shape, scribbled in with ink or otherwise too damaged to be considered true antiques. We never have figured out what to do with these “old dears,” as Jack calls them. We displayed a couple of 1900s textbooks on raising children just because people found them so charming. One depicted (complete with illustrations) how to build a “baby cager,” a device like a playpen that hung from a window so Baby could safely get fresh air. (The book highly recommended these cages for those in walk-up tenements: “economical and efficient for the busy mother who must do her own housework.”) Another tallied the cost of raising a boy against raising a girl. Believe it not, gentle readers, boys were more expensive, because parents had to fa
ctor in college. The beautifully embossed, leather-covered Light at Eventide: A Book of Poetic Comfort for the Aged went to Isabel for a birthday ending in a zero. The poems ran heavily to sunsets and angels folding their snow-white wings. (Isabel didn’t speak to me for three days, but I think she secretly liked it. It was a very pretty book…)

  Although it may be borderline apostasy to treat these linen-and-leather tomes with less dignity so late in their great and far-reaching lives, I must admit that they make great gag gifts. When our photocopier godmother Teri gave birth to a boy after three girls, we sent her The Boy and His Daily Living, published in 1908 (the one with the “boys go to college, girls do not” costs list). Olivia, our writing group coordinator’s daughter, received a copy of Light on Dark Corners - A Complete Sexual Science and a Guide to Purity and Physical Manhood - Advice to Maiden, Wife, and Mother, Love, Courtship, and Marriage on the occasion of her seventeenth birthday. (Her parents were not so very amused, and you really don’t want to know what this 1897 book suggested about the morals of girls who went to co-ed colleges.)

  But by the time we’d been running a few years, books that had seen their fifteen minutes of fame rise and fade were turning into craft projects: angels for Christmas trees, flying mobiles of birds, crudely fashioned twisted-paper statues of literary scenes, even experiments with making our own pop-up books. I made a couple dozen purses, and still carry mine, crafted from a 1935 book called Earning and Spending the Family Income (a helpful tome that explained what I should do with my husband’s paycheck when he brought it home and turned it over to me). Support columns for end tables. Shelves. Planters. Jewelry boxes. It’s amazing how superglue and nails can transform a useless object (and there it is, folks, spelled out in black and white) into a piece of art.

  Bibliophiles recognize that books are not just ideas trapped between covers, but artifacts, mile markers on our life journey. “I think of my bookshelf as a trophy of accomplishment,” said an academic friend of mine. “I look at their spines and remember where I was when I read them, and what I got out of them. And I have a side of the room for books I’m going to read, and a side for books I’ve read. So I can revisit old friends, or try something new.”

  My friend John shared a house, a dog, and a cat with me when we lived in Newfoundland during our graduate studies. He laughed at the idea that “the book is dead and only the information is important. So say people who like digital media. I still organize my life according to a microgeographic model wherein I know what I know based upon what the piles I’ve made contain. Plus my cats like to sleep on certain books, which is how I know they’re important. Cats have historically been hoarders of useful information.”

  Books are physical objects that cause responses to their tactile dimensions. Sara Nelson, in her memoir So Many Books, So Little Time, talked about remembering where she was when she read a book, being transported back to that time and place when she held it in her hands. Even a book’s smell will evoke memories. “A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog’s ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins,” said Charles Lamb (yes, that guy who redid the Shakespeare stories for kids back in the 1800s).

  And books can become, when their shelf life truly has ended, objects of art. Perhaps you read about the mysterious and exquisite little sculptures, most crafted from Ian Rankin novels, which graced several book festivals and shops in Britain in 2011? These creations spawned a fashion for similar objects around the world, and one now finds altered books in many artistic poses. I like to think those sculptures gave their host books dignity at the end of their lives, a kind of final promise: when you can no longer be read as an objet d’art a scalpel and some glue will turn you physically into one, and people will continue to admire, appreciate, and enjoy you, oh lovely little book. It seems right and proper. God grant us all such a dignified end.

  Books, be they physical objects or electronic pulses, are way cool. They are idea houses. So let those who want to read from machines. Those who love the feel, the smell, the gilt edging and the pretty covers and the soft paper, and the kinetic memories will enjoy the physical objects. Either form can be an artifact. So long as we’re all reading, and gaining joy from it, does it really matter so much?

  And yet … it might. E-readers have taken down the big bricks-and-mortar booksellers. Think about it; although this can’t be laid solely at the feet of e-readers, Borders is gone. Waldenbooks is past history, along with Crown and B. Dalton. That pretty much leaves us Barnes & Noble (now the only place where one can buy Nook e-books), Powell’s if you’re lucky enough to live near one, and a few big independent stores, including, in our part of the world, Joseph-Beth in Lexington and Malaprop’s in Asheville.

  The demise of larger retails lets a whole bunch of mom-and-pop bookshops stand out in bas-relief against the starker landscape. The more things fall apart when the center cannot hold, the more small-business owners are picking up the pieces and planting them in their own home soil. Amazing though it may seem, the broken bits tend to take ready root and grow.

  Estimates from the book industry suggest that one in four U.S. bookstores is secondhand, and that there are more preloved book shops now than ten years ago, perhaps by as much as 10 percent. Some futurists believe that only secondhand book shops will still exist in the next century, the new retailers made redundant by e-readers. That may be true if we turn to reading e-books so totally that print runs stop, and while I hate to see the new-only team so threatened, I’m willing to accept that future bookselling establishments may focus on used, or be amalgams of used and new. Can you imagine a world without bookstores? These aren’t just places where shoppers buy books; they are community hubs, people’s third places. Who will listen to the fire stories, the novel plots, if not booksellers? Will the computer make you a cup of tea?

  Jack and I sat down one night and made a list of all the functions our shop served in our region, and realized that, while books anchor our purpose, some of the things we do have only a tenuous connection to them. Four years earlier, Witold had been the first to name us a community center, and he was right. People meet at our place to share activities they like, such as needlework, art films, international infotainments, gourmet meals, lectures on everything from science to politics, game nights, and house concerts.

  We’re one of just a couple of places where you can buy a green salad or vegetarian soup in our whole county. And we’re the only place where you can have honest-to-goodness Scottish tea and shortbread. We can afford to serve food that other, bigger restaurants can’t because we don’t rely on food sales for money; it’s supplemental.

  Newcomers come by and say, “We just moved here and saw your sign” or, more often, “and so-and-so told me to come down and meet you.” They ask questions, tell us how they’re feeling, talk about what they’re looking for in their new home or job, describe where they came from, and get a cup of tea. We’re an unofficial welcome wagon cum support group for bookish people.

  We’re where people can talk. You don’t have to know us, or be known by us, to sit down at the table and tell the story of your mom’s going to the nursing home, recite the poem you’re writing, or disgorge any other story lying heavy within you. We tend to call this being an intellectual pub, but Jack’s pastor friend Tony has another name for it.

  Tony drops by at least twice a week for a cuppa and a quiet chat with Jack, but one day he ambled in when the place was a madhouse. We have a customer who has fixated on Jack’s guitar playing; Chuck was following him around like a puppy asking about chords as Jack briskly sorted books that a rather impatient woman we’d never seen before had brought in to trade. One of the Vietnam vets idled his way through a pile of value paperbacks while keeping up a running monologue to which Jack occasionally answered, “Mhmm.” Meanwhile, “Nikki,” a regular customer whose dying sister was married to a schmuck who wouldn’t let anyone visit
her, cried softly into her cup of tea as I handed over Kleenex and shortbread, calling the creep husband names all the while. (Nikki and I knew each other well by this point, so she didn’t mind my comments.)

  Instead of leaving, Tony poured himself a mug of tea and ambled over to the vet, engaging him in conversation. When the last of this crew had gone and we sat down to the now-stone-cold teapot with Tony, he started laughing. “Y’all are the luckiest people on Earth,” he said. “And this place is a church. No, think about it.” His waving hands negated our exhausted murmurs of dissent. “Churches are where people get fed. That guy [the vet] didn’t have any money and you gave him five books for a dollar. Churches are where people talk about their sadness. That woman cried and you gave her Kleenex and a hug. Churches are places where we connect with God. You’re his hands and feet on Earth. Jack, you let that kid follow you and talk nonstop, and never once lost patience. Y’all are running a church!”

  Sure, Tony, whatever. It doesn’t feel like a church, more like a dusty, dog-hairy, 38K-strong collection of objects that have to stay more or less within certain spaces, including a children’s room that gets hit by cyclones at least twice a day. If anyone wants to call it by a nicer name, go for it; we’re just dancing as fast as we can while smiling.

  But Tony was right about one thing: even on days when it all seems to be going pear-shaped (that’s Scottish for everything going wrong) we still know we’re blessed beyond reason to be doing what we’re doing.

  And, despite the moments of madness like the one above, we are a quiet place to change pace for a few moments. I can’t tell you the number of customers who come in and say they’re waiting for their wife/husband to pick up something at the pharmacy, their daughter/son to get a haircut down the block, their friend who is exercising at the gym next door. Waiting, they stroll around our shelves. They’re not going to buy anything; they just want to be in a cool (or warm) place with quiet music and friendly people. They know they’re welcome. Sometimes people sit at the tea table, not checking e-mails, not using their cell phone, just sitting, legs stretched out in front of them, letting their eyes flick over the shelves, little half smiles on their faces. They’ll point to a book and say, “I read that in college/the army/the year I got married. It changed my life/was the stupidest thing I’d ever read.” And I swear to you—Jack and I have watched this often enough to document it—their breathing changes. It slows down. Their shoulders relax. Their eyes get soft.