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

by Wendy Welch

  I waited until the door closed to start sobbing. That’s when the extent of her kindness became clear: a box of tissues waited beside the teapot.

  That day in Ceridwen’s Cauldron reminds me again and again that a little kindness travels a long, long way, while meanness never taught anyone much of anything except how to reciprocate with more meanness. Quakers believe people should be allowed to walk the path toward truth without others setting themselves up as traffic police. If, as the book of Ecclesiastes says, eternity has been placed in the hearts of humans by God, maybe we have to find it for ourselves for it to mean something.

  Jack and I have seen firsthand the gracious goodness that comes from people of dissimilar views remembering that we love and are loved by God. Tony who pastors the Presbyterian church just a block down the street came to us with a plan; he wanted to host a monthly gathering called Let’s Talk, and thought Tales would be an ideal location. “The bookstore, with so many viewpoints side by side on the shelf, is the perfect venue for bringing people with different ideas together,” he said.

  The group that formed has few ground rules, the two most important being mutual respect and one-word topics; discussions have covered suffering, happiness, citizenship, and evil. I thought of the Wigtown shop owner—who never told me her name; in my mind she is Ceridwen—often during Let’s Talk, but particularly on the night when a grinning man asserted that the Holocaust was God’s judgment on the Jewish nation for rejecting Jesus as the Messiah. In the moment that followed, our friend Witold, Polish by birth and tolerant by nature, blinked once. A man whose father was a concentration camp survivor half rose from his seat. The silence lasted only a split second, but tension crackled and the very air seemed to be pushing on us—until Tony asked, in a mild tone, “That viewpoint is difficult for me to understand. Why do you think this?”

  The man lost his grin and dissembled a moment before mumbling that he didn’t really think that, he’d just wondered if we’d heard the idea before. It turned out that he’d thrown his verbal grenade not as a discussion point, but in hopes of getting a rise out of the assembly. What he got instead was a gentle voice making just enough space for him to set things right. Which he did.

  Why do people like to fight about the worst possible angles of theological reasoning and argue minutiae into the ground? Isn’t it better to give each other what Ceridwen gave me—a little space and a lot of kindness?

  A couple of years ago, Jack and I started attending that nearby Presbyterian church. I’d been helping with their food bank and lunch delivery program, and liked the women I met there: Virginia Meador and Norma Siemens, matriarchs who kept half the town’s social programs functioning with their volunteer hours, and Grace of the perfect trouser pleats and bad mummy jokes. They often invited us to attend, and eventually we did. The nearest Society of Friends (as Quakers are officially known) was a two-hour drive, so our second year in Big Stone, we began hosting a monthly Meeting in the bookstore. Of course, this being a small town, “They’ve even started their own church!” came rippling back via grass roots anonymity, but we didn’t mind. It was kind of cute—and a Quaker group isn’t called a church.

  The people at our Quaker gathering bring food to share together after each meeting. The meeting before Christmas, Tony suggested we walk down to the fellowship hall with our lunch and share the holiday repast prepared by their congregation. So the Presbyterians, in sweater sets and suit-and-tie, dished up couscous next to the baked ham and declared it good. The Quakers, in denim overalls and swooshy skirts, ate most of the banana pudding, and thanked its makers. The two groups talked pacifism, social justice, and favorite fishing holes. And there was Peace on Earth, Goodwill to People.

  CHAPTER 22

  The Way We Buy Now (with Apologies to Trollope)

  Tough choices face the biblioholic at every step of the way—like choosing between reading and eating, between buying new clothes and buying books, between a reasonable lifestyle and one of penurious but masochistic happiness lived out in the wallow of excess.

  —Tom Raabe, Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction

  THE FACT THAT MY HUSBAND is a Scotsman often causes people to joke about frugality. The truth is, Jack is not an avid penny-pincher; I am the queen of thrift stores and garage sales. My husband enjoys a good flea-market ramble as much as I do, but he will buy an item new if needed, or sometimes just because he desires it. Me, my hands shake when I try to pay retail.

  Fortunately, what used to be considered parsimony has now become known as the Green Movement. Previously unthinkable as it may have been to recycle envelopes in professional offices, one can observe them in the twenty-first century issuing from New York high-rises, bearing stickers that proudly proclaim their green credentials. The same goes for biking, walking, or busing to work; what used to be weird is now in vogue.

  Jack and I don’t shop thrift stores because we want to save money—although that’s never been something we scorned. It’s more that we figure since the item is already made, the resources for it extracted and expended, then if the bowl/purse/belt/record player/silly little decorative statue is still in good nick, why not use it up instead of starting over? We’d never get a puppy from a pet store or a breeder when so many strays need good homes; why buy a new Crock-Pot if we spot one in a secondhand store? About the only manufactured items Jack and I insist on getting new are big appliances and handmade items.

  I recently picked up a hot-air popper at a thrift store for a dollar, after discovering that microwave popcorn—that delicacy so touted and prized back in the 1980s—is pretty bad for you, while your basic corn kernel blown up by heated air scores high in nutrition, low in calories and additives. (It pays to have friends in public health who can interpret nutrition labels.) Most of my clothing comes from garage sales and thrift stores, as does much of Jack’s. It’s not hard to find things that still look new, have no stains, fit well, and are flattering. Tested those last two criteria in a department store lately?

  And of course we bought reading material secondhand long before we started our own shop. Back in Scotland, a little tearoom lined with shelves in the tiny town of Milnathort served as a treat on rainy Saturdays. We’d browse the used books, donate some of our own, have a cuppa, and meander home to sit at the dining room table, reading the afternoon away until it was time to make evening tea.

  I can’t tell you the number of earrings Jack has bought me at festivals where we were performing, or about the photography, objets d’art, and sometimes even clothing we’ve purchased at these venues, for ourselves or as gifts. Ambling along the booths between sets, we’d do our yearly birthday and Christmas shopping, confident yuppies seeking out unusual things our family and friends wouldn’t have seen (and thus had the chance to buy for themselves) in the box stores and franchised boutiques of America.

  We also went in with neighbors and bought a cow (slaughtered and divvied up into one- or two-pound plastic bags, thank you), which soon filled the garage deep-freeze. A friend and I purchased milk goats and pasteurized our own dairy products. I get eggs from a place at the edge of town, where I can see the producers clucking in the yard when I drive by. And during the summer, we load up on veggies at the farmers’ markets, one just a block from our house on Saturdays, one Tuesday evenings near the college where I teach. Five fruit trees in our back garden—pear, heirloom apple, and peach—round out the diet nicely. (Those trees give for the nation; the summer we moved in, time that could have been spent getting the bookstore ready to open disappeared into jars of fruit butter and stuffing the freezer with apple bites. We even gave about twenty-five pounds of fresh fruit to the food bank.)

  Between the cow, the goat, the chickens, the farmers’ market, and our own fruit trees, we source a lot of local food in the summer; visits to the grocery store drop to filling in staples like sugar and whiskey. One day our friend Marcia joined us for dinner, and as we sat down to vegetarian pizza with goat cheese, we realized that we knew the names of those who
had produced everything on the table, except the flour in the crust. Even the bottle of wine Marcia brought came from Mountain Rose, the local winery.

  Recounting this story at yet another dinner party about a month later, when my husband had made his infamous tandoori beef curry for our friends Mark and Elizabeth, Jack laughed suddenly and stood from his chair. Holding it up, he patted its seat.

  “It gets better,” he said. “Wendy caned the chair seats we’re sitting on, and we bought the frames at garage sales.” The four of us started giggling, looking around the room, pointing out the harp Jack built for me (from a kit) for Christmas; the casserole dish holding the curry, crafted by Fiona; the drawing on the wall of wine pouring into a glass, done by an appreciative customer. The big oak table where we sat—which Jack sometimes called the heart of the bookstore because of its position in the center of the fiction room, where so many special events swirled around it—came from an antique store, bought years ago in far-off Snakeland. I recounted with pride how most of our Christmas presents lay wrapped upstairs, handmade items purchased directly from their makers.

  Then Mark pointed to the bookshelves Jack had built and said, “Okay, a lot of the things in this house, bookstore, whatever, come straight from the hand of the person who made them, right? What about the books?” As our hilarity and jokes about cheapo Scotsmen turned to blank stares, Mark persisted in his point. “Think about it. We’ll each pay more money to have food we trust on the table. But we want to pay less money to have things that are mass produced. Jack bought a harp kit because it was cheaper than buying a ready-made harp.”

  “Aye, but also because it made the harp more special,” Jack interjected, and I nodded vigorously.

  “It means so much more to me to have a harp Jack made than to have an expensive model. And the sound is just lovely. He did a great job on it. Who’s to say one bought from someone else would have been so well crafted?” My voice may have held a hint of smug self-righteousness.

  “That proves my point,” Mark said, smirking. “Some things we get off the highway to shop for—I mean the mainstream marketing highway, you know, buying from Walmart or a big chain store like that. We get off the beaten path because we want them to be special. It may cost more—the food, the materials for these chair seats we’re sitting on (and by the way, Wendy, they’re really comfortable)—but it’s special. And some things we buy because they’re cheaper. The harp’s more of a fluke; it was cheaper, but it was only nicer to build one yourself because you knew what you were doing, Jack.”

  I jumped in. “I just read a book about this: The $64 Tomato. It’s the memoir of a guy who reckons up what it costs to grow his garden—which he does every year because his family’s used to the better food from it—and he realizes that it’s way, way more expensive than buying the same things at the grocery store.”

  Mark took the interruption well. “That’s what I’m saying. How much of how we shop is about making our lives better, and how much is about convenience, or just not thinking too hard about what we’re doing? Which things did you pay more for so you could be happier with them, and which did you pay less for so you’d be happier with them? And”—his long finger jabbed again at the bookshelves lining the room—“I’m not letting you off on this point. What about buying books new, as opposed to buying them secondhand?”

  I blinked at the shelves. So did Jack and Mark’s wife Elizabeth. “I’m not understanding about the books,” I finally said.

  “Authors make things. They make the words that go in the books. We all like handmade things. You’re proud of your handmade presents. You feel like you’re supporting artists. But you’re selling other people’s art in here, and they’re not getting any of the money. How do you justify that?” Mark folded his arms across his chest, then unfolded them to fill his glass with locally produced wine.

  Gobsmacked is the word in Britain for when someone startles you so totally that you can’t speak. Jack and I were gobsmacked.

  At the time of this discussion, I think I summed up with something brilliant like “Uhhhhh.” Don’t be envious; years of storytelling and college teaching converged to make me so articulate on the fly.

  Okay, so let’s unpack this idea. New book stores—by which I mean stores that deal in new books rather than secondhand—encounter a recurrent sore point in the way people buy now. In this era of online shopping, a few bricks-and-mortar establishments I’ve seen even have signs up in the window: FIND IT HERE, BUY IT HERE, KEEP US HERE. They’re referring to that famous practice some shoppers call e-bargain hunting, when a person identifies a book he or she might like from the shelf of a new book store, jots down the title, then hauls out a smartphone to check if the price on Amazon is cheaper.

  Although Jack and I mostly shop used book stores, when we get a rare day out in Asheville, North Carolina, we make sure to stop at Malaprop’s, one of the last large independent (as in, not part of a chain) booksellers in the United States. Careful with money as we are, we see it as a point of honor to buy books there, because we believe in the store, the people, and the concept of local buy, local supply. And it’s the closest independent bookstore to us—a two-hour drive. That’s kind of a warning shot across the bow, don’t you think? When you were a kid, how many independent bookshops beckoned within twenty minutes’ drive of the house? Where I live now, besides our store there is only a Books-A-Million and one more secondhand bookseller within a forty-five minute drive.

  At Malaprop’s one August morning, Jack and I cruised the shelves, picking up and putting down various tomes on travel, anthropology, music, even fiction. On this particular summer day, languid and lethargic, I found nothing that suited me—although I did pause briefly over a memoir about small-town life and work that looked interesting. In the end, I didn’t deem it enticing enough to buy. Jack got a musical biography while I, out of duty more than desire, bought a book of amigurumi patterns. (Cute baby animals to crochet. Old habits die hard.)

  A few weeks later, I happened to be cruising the famous McKay Used Books in Knoxville, Tennessee. McKay is actually a local chain store for secondhand books and music, started by a husband and wife who were so successful they expanded to four locations. Stopping by my favorite section, narrative nonfiction, I spotted the book I’d eschewed at Malaprop’s, priced at seventy-five cents. Well heck, I hadn’t been willing to take a chance on it for fourteen dollars, but this fraction of a dollar was a no-brainer. I tossed it into my filling cart with nary a second thought.

  It turns out I didn’t much care for the book and set it aside after a few chapters. This little anecdote can be read (no pun intended) two ways. Perhaps I dodged a $13.25 bullet, because the title wouldn’t have pleased jaded-reader me no matter what; this interpretation makes me a wise shopper taking no chances. Or perhaps, if I had paid more for it, I would have tried harder to like the book. Did expectation diminish with price? No one, me included, will ever know.

  What I do know is that not everybody can afford those choices; people on minimum wage, welfare, fixed incomes, and so on have to be careful with their money. No one faults necessary frugality. Jack and I can afford (four years on from the terror of debt and humiliation) to pay more in support of smaller retailers, so we usually do, test-case memoir notwithstanding. We recognize that independent shops depend on local customers; had I been more drawn to that particular memoir, I would have bought it in Malaprop’s because I liked being in Malaprop’s. It’s akin to sitting in a restaurant; the price you’re paying isn’t for the food—the least cost of being there—but for the service, the seating, the ambiance. That’s why you get to complain about stuff; you paid for it.

  New book stores are brain food stores. (So are secondhanders, but our retail concerns about sticking around are the wee bit different.) Thus, if you’re lucky enough to have a cool little bookshop near you, I’m sure you do your part to keep it there, even if it means a thirteen-dollar gamble now and again.

  Back to Mark’s point, though. He broug
ht an itchy rubbing awareness of how our bookstore fit into the wider world of reading, echoed a couple of years later when I’d actually written a book and my agent sold it. Suddenly I was an author, someone who would make money (or not) by the number of times the book retailed as a new object.

  Elizabeth came over one day soon after I learned the book you are currently reading would be published. She kept me company as I did a long overdue deep clean of the upstairs rooms. When I told her about the more-than-expected advance headed my way, she teased, “Well, you can stop shopping at thrift stores now.”

  Still in a daze, I blurted the first thing that came to mind. “I didn’t write it for money.” Which was true.

  She responded instantly, looking me in the eye. “I know you didn’t. You wrote it because…” Her voice trailed into a question.

  We stared at each other for a moment; then Elizabeth crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows. “You wrote it, because…” One hand untucked to roll in a “here’s where you talk” gesture.

  Do you know, I hadn’t thought about why I’d written it? It just had to be done. Like that old cliché about climbing mountains: because it was there.

  Why do writers write? After all, it’s dangerous. As Patricia Hampl, an author whose wordcraft I admire, said, “You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.” Carolyn Jourdan, author of the sweet and funny memoir Heart in the Right Place, cautioned me at a luncheon, “Get a psychiatrist to read your book before you publish. You have no idea what you’ll be telling people about yourself until you see it in print, and then it’s too late.”