by Ronald Rice
Do you know what changed as a result?
Not much. Which was good.
I got to know the names of some nice folks who’d helped me before. I got to meet some folks I hadn’t met previously. And somehow or other, over time, I found myself talking music with Erik Barnum, Northshire’s sales floor manager. It turned out that not only are both Erik and I frustrated folk musicians, but we also share a soft spot for the late and very great songwriter, fiddler, and Mississippi steamboat pilot, John Hartford.
Which brings me back to the banjo, and the night that I showed up for my first reading at Northshire.
It was the end of my tour for Finn, a book set on Mark Twain’s Mississippi River. And no sooner did I sit down with a group of readers for a pre-event discussion than the music over the PA system shifted to Hartford’s 1976 album, Mark Twang. To me there’s no music more peculiarly American, no better sound track for the work I’d tried to accomplish in Finn. And there it was. In the air all around us. Because a very fine bookseller had been paying attention.
As I said, I had arrived at Northshire.
Again.
JON CLINCH is the author of Finn, Kings of the Earth, and The Thief of Auschwitz.
Mick Cochrane
Talking Leaves Books, BUFFALO, NEW YORK
All of us, not just writers, are susceptible to our surroundings. There are plenty of places that make me feel tense, lonely, and glum—hospital waiting rooms, most fast-food restaurants, all malls, especially the Mall of America. And there are a handful of places that make me feel safe and relaxed, unguarded—like myself, but maybe more interesting, more optimistic, more open to possibility.
The late A. Bartlett Giamatti, who, like me, was a student of literature, an academic, and a passionate baseball fan, eloquently described over the course of his writing career the special appeal and enduring lure of three very different, largely imaginative places, three versions of paradise: the garden found in Renaissance literary epics, the free and ordered space of the university, and the green world of the ballpark. While I have spent as much time as anyone, I suppose, in classrooms and in the bleachers, there is for me still another place Giamatti never mentions, a place I seek out frequently for refreshment and renewal. It’s not an academic building and not a ballpark; it’s a bookstore, and not just any bookstore, it’s my bookstore—Talking Leaves Books.
Jonathon Welch, the store’s cofounder and owner, explains that the name derives from the way those unfamiliar with books characterized their unusual power: “Book pages were seen as ‘leaves’ that ‘talked,’ imparting wisdom and knowledge and spirit.” The store’s motto is “Independent and Idiosyncratic Since 1971.”
The store is an expression of who Jonathon is, who we are, we his loyal customers, members, those who love and frequent the stores, Talking Leaves Nation. Today in the windows of the store there are posters and flyers announcing local concerts, readings, and other cultural and political events. In the spring of 1989, soon after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie, at the same time the chains were pulling his novel from their shelves, there were copies of The Satanic Verses in the windows of Talking Leaves. The meaning couldn’t have been clearer: Independent and Idiosyncratic—and Fearless.
Just inside the front door for the past couple of years, there’s been a life-sized Stephen Colbert cutout, a maniacally cheerful-looking cardboard greeter. He still startles me a little when I come in—he is just so, well, life-sized—and he makes me laugh. There’s no corporate radio playing; most days, it’s NPR or maybe some deep tracks from Fats Domino or Bob Marley, whatever Ken and the other clerks are feeling that day. There is sometimes an animal in the store, a cat curled on a chair in Philosophy.
Talking Leaves has great literary magazines, a cool collection of buttons, and postcards, but it’s all about the books: 50,000 in the Main Street store, give or take. There’s no danger of it turning into a technology or toy store, thank goodness. The store’s mission has always been to stock books you won’t find at the chains, books you won’t find anywhere else. It’s light on Nicholas Sparks and the various Chicken Soups for the Soul, heavy on literary fiction, alternative voices of all kinds, anything deeply original, challenging, quirky, and marginal. There’s not a single copy of anything by Ann Coulter, but there are more volumes of poetry than I have seen anywhere else—Buffalo has always been a tremendous poetry town—a great wall of contemporary poets, Addonizio to Zagajewski. The self-stated goal of Talking Leaves is to make available life-changing books, books that “open us up to new worlds, or illuminate more clearly our own,” books that “stretch and deepen our vision and our comprehension of the universe and its creatures, cultures and ways.”
Talking Leaves—both the original Main Street store and its newer second location on Elmwood—is in the heart of our magnificent, scruffy, big-hearted, sometimes brilliant and sometimes blundering, too-often-misunderstood city. The 6,000 or so members come from every zip code in western New York: from the East Side and the West Side, from the waterfront condominiums and from university-district apartments, from every suburb, Cheektowaga to East Aurora. It is one thing we can agree on—we all love Talking Leaves. The mayor and the editor of The Buffalo News are members; so are my son’s baseball coach and most of the writing students I teach at the college. The popularity of the current Sabres goaltender and the Bills quarterback ebbs and flows, but every time I have ever pronounced Jonathon Welch’s name into a microphone at a literary event, it was greeted with enthusiastic applause.
Talking Leaves may be the only place on earth I’ll ever be a regular, and I confess that I love it. Jon and his wife, Martha, and most of the people who answer the phone in the store know my voice, and I know theirs. Jon knows which books I want to read before I do, and he sets them aside for me.
Talking Leaves is there for me when I need it. Last November, when I came into the Main Street store right at closing time, in desperate need of a copy of The Gambler—a Dostoevsky emergency!—Jon walked me over to not one but two different editions and offered a brief, lucid overview of the different translations.
Jonathon Welch is one of those people I feel as if I’ve always known. I have no distinct memory of meeting him anymore than I can recall being introduced to my own brother. I am pretty sure that the first time I bought a book from him was soon after I moved to Buffalo from Minnesota in the 1980s: It was a copy of Gary Gildner’s wonderful memoir The Warsaw Sparks, about the poet, on a Fulbright in Poland, coaching a baseball team. The reading was at the Polish Community Center, as I recall, on Paderewski Drive, and Jon was there, as he is at scores of readings and book signings each year throughout the city, with a carton of books and his credit-card machine. Wherever three or more are gathered in literature’s name, it seems, Jon and Talking Leaves are there also.
Jon’s office is as full of books as any professor’s, crowded with enough paper to alarm, I suspect, a fire marshal. There are stacks of finished books and galleys and catalogs piled floor to ceiling. His phone rings constantly—customers, sales reps, writers interested in doing readings and signings. The back of his left hand is usually covered in blue-inked notes to himself, and there are Post-it notes everywhere.
But no matter what, Jon makes time for me. He welcomes me. He tells me about the new Stewart O’Nan novel I am going to want. He lets me know what his friend Morgan Entrekin at Grove Press is up to. He explains to me what World Book Night is all about. He asks who is visiting in my college’s writers series so he can mark the dates. He is like the best professor you ever had: He never looks at his watch; he makes you feel smarter than you are; he embodies, he inhabits, a kind of passionate commitment you aspire to.
Jon and I, I like to imagine, have a lot in common. We’re both Midwesterners, he from Wisconsin, me from Minnesota. We’re both fathers, both politically 99 percenters, both a little skeptical about the way technology is changing the way we relate to one another. We both love writing and storytelling an
d books in ways so profound it would be impossible to put into words. Each in our own way, we’re both educators, book evangelists. I am a novelist, and Jon is an artist, too, a great one. I believe that with all my heart. What John Gardner says about the true novelist’s vocation applies equally to the true bookseller’s: It “is not so much a profession as a yoga, or ‘way’ of being in the world, an alternative to ordinary life-in-the-world. Its benefits are quasi-religious—a changed quality of mind and heart, satisfactions no non-novelist can understand—and its rigors generally bring no profit except to the spirit. For those who are authentically called to the profession, spiritual profits are enough.”
Talking Leaves, Jon’s bookstore, my bookstore, our bookstore—Talking Leaves is his creative masterpiece, his own vast, teeming, inclusive, and open-ended epic poem, his Leaves of Grass, brave and untidy, fiercely independent and original, a clean, well-lighted place on Main Street, open six days a week. It is our very own retail Arden. It is a magic island, where we may both lose and find ourselves.
MICK COCHRANE is the author of two novels for adults, Flesh Wounds and Sport, and two novels for young readers, The Girl Who Threw Butterflies and Fitz. He is Lowery Writer-in-Residence at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, where he teaches writing, directs the creative writing program, and coordinates the Contemporary Writers Series.
Ron Currie, Jr.
Longfellow Books, PORTLAND, MAINE
A confession: I am not a good literary citizen, in the sense that I’ve never cared much one way or the other about bookstores. For a long time I found myself looking around at the posture of communal support and gratitude displayed by other authors toward their favorite booksellers, and I wondered why I was so deficient, in this regard, by comparison. I didn’t get all that excited by the notion of independent enterprise, didn’t understand why it was such a big deal. More often than not I bought books through Amazon, and for the usual reasons: It was cheap and spared me the trouble of talking to people, and I could transition from book shopping to masturbation much easier than at a brick-and-mortar store.
As is standard practice these days, I blame my upbringing. Not my parents, but the community in which I was raised, which never really had an independent bookstore. During my childhood I got books primarily through the library, or else book fairs at school, the kind where the teacher would pass out those flimsy newsprint book catalogs and you chose the books you wanted (or could afford) and then waited in bittersweet anticipation, for six weeks, until they magically showed up one day and were distributed in class.
God, remember when we had to wait for things? What a sublime pleasure, now forever lost to us.
So anyway, then as a young man I transitioned, out of financial and geographical necessity, to buying only used books at a store here in town that opened, serendipitously, during my late teens. It was a somewhat dingy basement operation, and though I shopped there a lot and made some great finds, I never developed anything resembling appreciation—let alone loyalty—for the place. This was due in large part to the fact that I instinctively disliked the proprietor—he seemed stuffy, and a bit pretentious, and was mustachioed in a way I didn’t care for, and always gave the impression that he suspected I was a shoplifter, even though I bought hundreds of books from him over the years. Once I tried to haggle with him over a signed first edition of Going After Cacciato that he was asking way too much for, and not only did he refuse to budge on the price, but did so with an air of dismissiveness that made me want to pull his fingernails out. This was the final straw for me—I haven’t been in there since, though I do occasionally hear the clarion call of the hidden gems I know are sitting in all those stacks and stacks.
And so, you know, I moved on to my Amazon-and-masturbation routine, which seemed amenable enough and never put me in a position where I was one moment of lax-impulse-control away from assaulting somebody.
But then, shortly after my first book came out, I met a guy named Chris Bowe, the co-owner of Longfellow Books in Portland, Maine. He’s a shortish, intense dude, originally from one of the myriad hardscrabble communities outside Boston, which as everybody knows are sort of breeding grounds for shortish, intense dudes. He loved my book, and he wanted to do whatever he could to make sure the world loved it too.
The thing about meeting Chris was, I’d never talked to anyone else about books in quite that way. Not agents, or editors, or even other authors. Chris transitioned from one writer to the next, one title to the next, at a breakneck pace, spouting cigarette smoke and equal passion for the writing he loved and the writing he loathed. Here, for the first time in my life, was a bookseller. And though Chris would prove to be an exceptionally dedicated and passionate example of that particular genus, what I learned from him was that booksellers in general, more than probably any other demographic, live for books, both aesthetically and practically speaking. And also that, when a good bookseller loves what you write, he will sell the living shit out of it. He will force it on every person who walks through the door, and push them toward the checkout counter before they have a chance to protest that they only read books about dogs and/or vampires. He will sell his own mother into white slavery in order to ensure cash flow to keep your book in stock. He will make you sign hundreds of copies, and he will move every last one of them. Moreover, he will do all this for the right reasons: because it builds community, and puts authors in direct contact with their audience, and makes everyone intensely happy—in short, because it’s plain good business, in both financial and human terms.
So this was the first part of my education, regarding what booksellers are, what they do, and why they’re important. The second part came when I did my first reading at Longfellow. At that point in my career I’d had more than a handful of appearances at the chain stores, with mixed results. Sometimes the staff was prepared and attentive, and other times they made an announcement over the store PA five minutes before I read, then left me to police the crowd myself (one particularly bullshit moment came when I had to stop mid-reading, walk away from the lectern, and politely ask a woman yakking on her cell phone nearby to shut the hell up). Nothing like this at Longfellow. First off, they’d managed to bring in a group of more than fifty people, and this on one of the first nice summer days we’d had after a very long, very cold, and very wet spring. As any author whose name is not Michael Chabon or Neil Gaiman can tell you, fifty people is a packed house. Moreover, these folks were not there on a lark, or because they happened to be in the store browsing at the time—they were already fans of mine, having been force-fed my books by Chris and company well before the date of the reading. On the first nice Friday evening we’d had all year, and with a large street festival with live music and beer gardens going on literally just outside the windows, these people had willingly, happily crowded into the store’s small reading space to listen to me. And that, frankly, had very little to do with anything I’d written, and much more to do with the relentless efforts of Chris and the Longfellow staff to force them to pay attention to my work.
At the appointed time, Chris took the floor and, with the same fierceness and conviction he’d displayed in our conversations, held forth about my books for those assembled. He said, as though it were a foregone and obvious conclusion, an inevitability requiring only time to be proven true, that they had the privilege of seeing a writer (namely, me) at the beginning of a long and important career. “This is like getting to see early Vonnegut,” he told them. And then, when he was finished flattering me well beyond embarrassment, he yielded the lectern, but not before—and here’s the coup de grâce—making certain there was a fresh, cold can of Pabst Blue Ribbon there for me to sip through the reading.
And that was it. After this I would do, and have done, anything that Chris and Longfellow asked of me. I’ve signed more books than I can count, participated in benefits and holiday sales promotions and library events sponsored by Longfellow, talked with book clubs set up through Longfellow, and chatted at length with reader
s in the store when I’m browsing as a civilian and one of the staff brings someone over to say hello. I’d clean the toilets, probably, if they asked me to. Perhaps most important: I now buy almost all my books at Longfellow. Because now I get it. I get that booksellers are vastly more important than I am. I get that my contributions are meager compared to the daily trench work they put in. I write the stuff, sure, but they press its clothes and fix its hair and give it a swift pat on the butt and send it out into the world. Booksellers like Chris Bowe are the great beating heart of contemporary American literature, and without them, there’s very little point to anything I do.
RON CURRIE JR. is the author of God Is Dead, Everything Matters, and Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles. He’s received the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Addison M. Metcalf Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Maine.
Angela Davis-Gardner
Quail Ridge Books & Music, RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
Nancy Olson, the beloved owner of Quail Ridge Books & Music in Raleigh, North Carolina, reads, on average, four books a week. Four thousand people receive her recommendations in a regular email newsletter. Nancy’s mission as a bookseller these twenty-eight years has been to transfer her passion for books to her customers. “I want to stuff the books down their throats,” she laughs.
