My Bookstore

by Ronald Rice

  Still, knock wood, P&P continues to thrive by dint of a smart, enthusiastic staff and fiercely loyal customers. In the summer of 2010, Carla and Barbara, then both 74, announced an intent to sell the store after more than a quarter-century in business together, not least because Carla was sick; she died of cancer that October. Her surviving spouse, David Cohen, and her surviving partner, Barbara, could not have chosen better, more committed new owners, Bradley Graham and Lissa Muscatine, both old friends and colleagues of mine from our days as young reporters at The Washington Post.

  Even as Brad and Lissa adapt to the new world of e-books and e-readers, Politics & Prose remains nothing less than the bricks-and-mortar incarnation of traits we cherish in Western civilization: learning, tolerance, diversity, civility, discourse, inquiry, lyricism. For those of us lucky enough to live down the street or around the corner, it’s a port in the storm, a daydreaming hive, a bastion. How fortunate we are to be patrons, browsers, espresso sippers, guest speakers, neighbors. And when you finally finish that novel or memoir or meditation on the body politic, wander in for a little self-indulgent browsing. If you love words, it’s the place to be.

  RICK ATKINSON is the author of six books of narrative military history, including The Long Gray Line, An Army at Dawn, and The Day of Battle.

  Jo Ann Beard

  Oblong Books & Music, MILLERTON AND RHINEBECK, NEW YORK

  Approximately four in the afternoon, Rhinebeck, New York, dentist’s office, me in the chair trying to manually control my gag reflex. So far he couldn’t even look in there with his mirrored stick. I tried all the things I had learned to do over the years in order to get my teeth worked on, from breathing through my nose (useless) to touching the tips of my fingers to each other (thumb to thumb, index to index, etc.) to making an orb shape (more interesting than breathing through the nose, but still useless) to holding one leg straight up in the air (difficult) and finally the other leg too (exceedingly difficult and thereby helpful, except disconcerting to the dentist, who asked me not to). Once when I was about eight a hygienist ignored the gagging and wound up thrown up on, though most of it went on me. When I told the Rhinebeck dentist this, he left the room and came back with something that had never been tried on me before: nitrous oxide.

  Reader, it worked.

  When I first moved to Rhinebeck it had a new age bookstore that also sold pendants and amulets, oil by the vial, and handmade instruments. Across the street was another bookstore that sold potboilers and Christian literature. They sat facing each other for a number of years until one became a real estate company and the other became a real estate company. If you wanted a book, you had to drive to another town.

  On fine upstate weekends, you could even drive the twenty miles over to Oblong Books in Millerton—an airy, wide-windowed Main Street shop with a cunning indoor walkway that led across a backyard and into the children’s department, which had extended into the next building, around the corner. I fell in love there, not just with the store, but with the fellow who took me to see it and bought me a book about the Hudson Valley.

  Reader, I fell in love with all three.

  Although I once lived in a house where whippets were kept on hand the way others might keep Band-Aids, I was so tethered to my own anxious reality that I had never experienced nitrous before. No need to belabor it here, but suffice to say I finally understood those long-ago friends sitting on our hoary old cat-scratched sofa responding to Gilligan’s Island like it was Fellini. When the dentist pulled his tools out of my mouth, I kept the clip in my nose, inhaling the gas until he finished puttering and rolled the tank backward out of the room. Apparently I was the last appointment of the day; the lively flamenco guitar that had been playing over the buzzing drill was nowhere to be heard and it seemed that lights were being switched off. At which point the hygienist stuck her head in and said, “You’re okay to go, right?”

  Reader, I was not.

  So instead of pelting along the side streets, the way I usually did, I drove in a stately manner right down the main thoroughfare in Rhinebeck, feeling as though I was holding on to the steering wheel (I was) while the rest of my body bobbed gently against the ceiling of the car, like a Mylar balloon. According to the speedometer, I was going seven in a thirty. Thus the honking.

  Weekenders from the city have overtaken Rhinebeck in their migration up the Hudson, bringing with them a CVS to replace the local drugstore, where the pharmacist had kept a checkerboard set up for the old-timers who wanted somewhere to go and gripe in the afternoons. The village also lost its rambling, slope-floored hardware store and its low-ceilinged IGA grocery, and the local diner had upped their breakfasts to dinner prices. We suddenly had our own spa, a shop that sold only things that were chile-pepper-related, and another that sold nothing but one kind of candle in different sizes and colors. The colors changed with the season, of which there ended up being three before it closed. For a while we had a shop that sold only things made by bees.

  I lived either twelve miles on the other side of town and it usually took me six minutes to get there, or I lived six miles and it usually took me twelve. If you aren’t sure which, you aren’t fit to drive, and should make a spontaneous right-hand turn into the parking lot of a store that wasn’t there a week ago.

  Reader, you guessed it.

  There’s possibly no better place for a stoned writer to find herself than a bookstore, if you don’t count eating establishments, and I made my way through the aisles for what—in bookstore time—must have seemed like hours. When the owner asked if he could help me, I thought for a long time about it while he straightened shelves.

  “Not really,” I finally said.

  Others came and went, conversations were had, purchases were rung up, it’s possible glances were exchanged. But they let me sit there, my new local bookstore—a regular-sized woman on a child-sized chair, with an incomprehensible picture book on her lap.

  Reader, it had to do with rabbits.

  So, just when everyone needed something good to happen—it was September of 2001—Oblong Books & Music extended their reach from Millerton and opened a smart, creative, and ambitious business in our boomtown. It was smaller then than it is now, the children’s department once again claiming enough space that the back was extended to accommodate it and to create room for the readings that are held each week. Instead of packing the aisles to listen, the crowds now have space for everyone to sit, and to enjoy reading-wine and reading-cheese afterwards. Dick Hermans, the owner, handed it over to his daughter, Suzanna Hermans, in 2007, and it was she who expanded the store and its reach into the community of local writers and readers.

  Dick Hermans was the one who, right around the time both the nitrous and the Novocain were wearing off, asked me again if he could help me find anything. I was wandering in the music section, flipping through CDs and listening to them click in that satisfying way, something I hadn’t done since Tower Records folded. Flamenco guitar music? I asked.

  Reader, he had it.

  JO ANN BEARD is an essayist and fiction writer. She is author of the novel In Zanesville and of The Boys of My Youth, a collection of autobiographical essays, as well as essays and articles published in magazines, journals, and anthologies. She has been the recipient of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

  Wendell Berry

  Carmichael’s Bookstore, LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY

  I am hardly a materialist, but I am not an immaterialist either. The material, tangible presence of the things of this world is important to me, and I understand its worth increasingly as human experience becomes increasingly immaterial. A “text” existing only on a screen and in the mind is not, to me, a book. To me, it is not enough that a book is thought realized in language; it must also be language further realized in print on paper pages bound between covers. It is a material artifact, a thing made not only to be seen but also to be held and smelled, containing language that can be touched, and underlined with an actual pencil, with mar
gins that can be actually written on. And so a book, a real book, language incarnate, becomes a part of one’s bodily life.

  One’s bodily life, furthermore, is necessarily local and economic. And so to the life embodied in books must be added the life of bookstores. One can order a book from some distant place and receive it by mail. I confess that I sometimes do that, and so I know by experience that to do so is to forsake one of the most decent and significant literary pleasures, and it is to subtract from the purchased book what may be one of the best parts of its own life. I still own books that have remained alive and dear in my thoughts since I was a boy, and a part of the life of each one is my memory of the bookstore where I bought it and of the bookseller who sold it to me.

  Also, to order a book is to “buy a pig in a poke”—and so to submit oneself to the possibility of a bad deal. The book one receives may be so poorly made and so ugly as to be overpriced even as a bargain. If you are a book lover, if you care about the quality of books as made things, the value of your life is reduced by such a book.

  And so when I am in Louisville, Kentucky, I like to visit Carmichael’s Bookstore. Sometimes I go to buy a certain book. Sometimes I go with no purpose but to see what books may be there and to visit a little while with the people who work there. The place has the quietness, the friendliness, the smell, and the tangibility that a bookstore ought to have. It is a fair incarnation of the manifold life of books. To go there and find a book I didn’t expect or didn’t expect to want, to decide I want it, to buy it as a treasure to take home, to conduct the whole transaction in a passage of friendly conversation—that is in every way a pleasure. A part of my economic life thus becomes a part of my social life. For that I need actual people in an actual place in the actual world.

  Long live tangibility! Long live slow communication!

  WENDELL BERRY is the author of more than 50 works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry and has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the National Humanities Medal. Berry’s latest works include New Collected Poems and A Place in Time, the newest addition to the Port William series since 2006.

  Jeanne Birdsall

  Broadside Bookshop, NORTHAMPTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  Every writer needs her own personal bookstore. When our struggles with sentences make us lonely and cranky, where better to spread the gloom than a place dedicated to a product we may or may not ever finish, especially if we keep leaving the house when we should be working? Besides, reading is the best excuse for not writing—thus we are always in dire need of books, lots and lots, piles and more piles. There can never be too many books.

  To get to my own bookstore, I walk down my street, cross two parking lots, and slip around the corner. And there it is—Broadside Bookshop, with a striped awning outside, and inside floor-to-ceiling shelves on every wall plus extra shelves placed enticingly here and there, full of books that pull at me like sirens on the rocks, if one can think of essay collections as sirens. Yes, I say, as long as they are written by the likes of E.B. White and Anne Fadiman. Or the mysteries across the aisle from the essays—these are certainly sirens, particularly the British ones. Reginald Hill! Sophie Hannah! Or the biographies cheek-to-cheek with the mysteries, or the NYRB Classics tucked in behind the essays, or the fiction section, naturally, because who isn’t in thrall to fiction?

  When I manage to survive all that, there is still the wild allure of Broadside’s children’s section. Copies of my own books are there to be admired—one never tires of that—or to console for lingering too long on the shelves, sad and unsold. On my more shameless days, I sit on the floor to sign my books, hoping that a curious child or its parent will ask if I’m the author and I can answer yes, I am, then bask in the sunlight of their amazed praise. Unless the praise isn’t lavish enough or, worse, they confess to preferring Kate DiCamillo’s books to mine, and then I wish I’d stayed home to watch old episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

  The people who keep Broadside running smoothly are a brilliant and charming bunch, all of whom know a great deal about books, and just as much about handling the local writers who wander in too often. They do a lovely job of tolerating me and for that I adore them, especially… but no, I can’t pick and choose. Let me say, however, that a certain employee—I’ll call him Steve—once sang “Putting It Together” to me from behind the register, and for that I’ll always be grateful. Thank you, Steve.

  And thank you, Broadside Bookshop, for being my very own. Here’s to books, forever and always. Amen.

  JEANNE BIRDSALL writes for children. Her New York Times best-selling novels about the Penderwick family have collected many honors, including the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, and have been translated into 22 languages. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and spends too much time at Broadside Bookshop, around the corner from her home.

  Rick Bragg

  The Alabama Booksmith, BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

  First, before I proceed, this has to be said. There are no cats here, and I am so grateful for this I could just bust. No tabbies, no blue-eyed Himalayans or snooty Siamese or butt-naked Egyptians. I do not mind cats in the wider world and appreciate their contributions in rodent eradication, and have even tolerated them on my lap for long seconds at a time, because women love cats like peach ice cream. I just do not believe cat detritus and paper products are good things to have in proximity to each other, and anyone who has ever tried to read a Cannery Row or Lonesome Dove that smelled of a neglected litter box would agree with me, unless of course their wife was a cat person and then they would almost certainly lie about it like, well, a dog. The hard truth is books absorb cats, but there are no cats in the Alabama Booksmith in Homewood, Alabama, and that is almost enough, in a literary world lousy with people who think having a damn cat in the stacks or on the counter or lolling in the window is somehow quaint and almost by God required, to proclaim it a great bookstore, at least until someone lets in a calico. I do not think that will happen. Everybody who knows proprietor Jake Reiss knows he don’t have no time for cats, and usually even for lunch. Now that I have that off my chest, we can move on.…

  He has the whole world pretty well fooled.

  Listen to this description of Jake Reiss, from his local paper, The Birmingham News:

  “Now, a big night for the proprietor… is going home to his Southside townhouse, popping a frozen Lean Cuisine in the microwave, pouring himself a glass of cabernet sauvignon and sitting down at the kitchen table to read one of the 200 or so books he will devour over the course of a year.”

  The fact is, while he would not want the whole world to know it, the man likes to shoot some dice.

  Some men hunt. Some men fish. Some men buy million-dollar motor homes with horns that play the first bars of “Rammer-Jammer, Yellowhammer.” Some men, though none I know, attend the opera. Jake Reiss, for relaxation, likes to feel them rattling bones, and let ’em go.

  Who else but a gambler would turn his attentions from a lifetime success in the tailoring business and, in his fifties, without even shouting, “Come on, baby needs a new pair of shoes,” open a bookstore?

  The odd thing is, he won. He won, in this time of woe, in this age in which children seem mostly interested in playing games with their thumbs, when reading is a quaint notion from the dusty halls of antiquity, when public funding for libraries is being scraped to the white bone, Jake Reiss is winning, because he is making a dollar by making good books and authors available to people who love to read and love the people who make it a pleasure, and because, late in his own life, he fell in love with books himself. He really is a voracious reader—all kinds of good stories—and, in part because so many people said it couldn’t be done, found a way to make the old-fashioned notion of it all, of books on paper, pay the light bill and a damn sight more. Maybe the reason I say Alabama Booksmith is my favorite is because Jake Reiss gives me hope that my craft will endure. I guess that is as good a reason as any, and more poignant than that
stuff about cats.

  Some people here in suburban Homewood, people with no gray in their hair and no concept of a world without smartphones, think Jake has always been in the book business, has always been a kind of free-spirited bibliophile with two inches of gray ponytail jutting from the back of his head, who sits surrounded by signed first editions of Pat Conroy and has Salman Rushdie on speed dial. But he used to be respectable. He used to run a tailoring house for some of the most influential people in the South, men who had to at least look respectable, CEOs and government men and high priests (football coaches). He made suits for Bob Hope, and for senators. He still likes to tell me, “I could build a suit that would even make you look good.”

  I guess the reason I have wasted so much time talking about the proprietor instead of his shop, his wares, is because Jake Reiss is the store. He does his own heavy lifting. He flings book cartons around like a young man. He hauls a thousand pounds at a time to readings and book events in his somewhat worn, magenta-colored Chevy van from the Reagan administration (the first one, before he and Nancy were regularly consulting the spirit world), always taking twice as many as any sane person would think he would need. But Jake is a gambler, and you never know when someone will need an extra 700 copies of a book in an auditorium that seats 215.

  The bookstore itself, at the risk of hurting his delicate feelings, looks a little bit like the place in Piedmont, Alabama, where my mama used to go have her fortune told. Let us just say the Homewood Historic Commission will never come knocking at his door. Overhead, for Jake, is the moon and stars above. He has prospered in the book business for more than two decades, moving from a place in the somewhat tonier Highland Avenue section of Birmingham to this current location, this unassuming (a kinder word) wood-frame building off the highway that is a little tricky to find even on your third trip here. It is a throwback to an older time, or at least that is how it first appears. The ceiling is low, even on a short man, and the floor gives a bit. The shelves are made of honest wood and go floor to ceiling with history, the classics, poetry, mystery.