by Ronald Rice
Kris did not remember me from my earlier era of browsing at Left Bank, and there was little reason why she should. After that initial purchase to launch my publishing career with Writer’s Market, there were few times that she actually waited on me, although I noticed her working whenever I came to the store. In truth, I was both in awe of her and intimidated by her back then. We were roughly the same age, and while I had accomplished little in life at that point, she had accomplished much, not only sharing in the ownership of a bookstore but contributing significantly to the vitality of our town.
On the day of my reading, when I officially met her, she refused to sell me a copy of my book, insisting that I take it with the store’s compliments, and she asked me how many people I thought they might expect that night. I counted up the members of my extended family and the few friends I had kept up with since I left St. Louis and delivered a high-end estimate of forty to fifty. She showed me the space where I would be reading, where later they would roll several sets of bookshelves to the back of the store and set up chairs in the area between children’s books and my beloved “Belles Lettres.” She showed me the podium they used (of the pulpit sort) and asked me if I’d like to stand behind it with my book opened to see how it felt. I sensed that she could tell I’d not had much experience reading before an audience and that she was introducing me to any details she thought might make me feel at ease. When she finished familiarizing me with the setup, she offered to call some newsstands to see who still had copies of USA Today. It was late in the afternoon by then, and she was worried I might not find one. All the while, I had been keeping her from finishing her work with the rep from Random House, but she made me feel as if I was the most important matter of the day.
When I returned for the reading a few hours later, there were over 150 people filling the store. More shelves had been rolled aside, more chairs set up, and still people stood on the sides and in the aisles. People from my childhood, people from my siblings’ childhoods, people even from my parents’ childhoods. There were people from my parents’ neighborhood and people from their parish. Teachers from my grade school, high school, college. People I didn’t know who were there with people I did. Connections and reconnections were made that night that still astound me. The best man at my parents’ wedding came with his wife. He and my parents had lost touch over the fifty years since they’d been married. The man came especially to tell my father that they, too, had lost a son to suicide. And most moving to me, friends of my younger brother came, young men and women now in their thirties whom I had not seen since his funeral when they were 15.
There will never be another night like that. I imagine it will always remain the biggest night of my life. And it was the beginning, too, of a closer, more personal relationship for me with Left Bank, and with Kris, and with her partner Jarek Steele, who is the newest of the store’s co-owners.
I have learned a few things about bookselling from them. I have learned, for instance, that if a book is published “quietly,” as mine was, with not much publicity and only a handful of reviews, it can still find its way in the world, thanks to the kind of “hand-selling” that is the strength and specialty of good booksellers. My book would have had a much shorter life were it not for Kris’s promotion of it. It became a BookSense 76 pick and gained the notice of other independent booksellers, whose collective attention resulted, three years later, in a paperback version, something the publisher had not previously planned on bringing out.
I have since moved back to St. Louis and have become a regular again at Left Bank Books. They now have a second location downtown, but by habit (and proximity to my house), I still tend to frequent the original store in the Central West End. I admit I no longer dawdle in the doorway reading notices and announcements. I’m in my fifties now, and for better or worse, the need to fill my days and nights with things other than those with which I’m already familiar feels less urgent.
Unlike in my twenties, I tend to buy more new books now than used. Still, I find myself drawn to the “Rare Books and Collectibles” section in the rear of the store, with its two glass-fronted antique bookcases and the wooden bench that sits between them. There is not much turnover in the inventory on those shelves; selfishly, this pleases me. I like to look at (but can’t afford) the first-edition or near-first-edition copies of Twenty Years at Hull-House by Jane Addams, Tambourines to Glory by Langston Hughes, Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, all seven volumes of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, a children’s book called Betty, Bobby, and Bubbles, George Orwell’s 1984, J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, and my favorite, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, with an inscription that reads: “J, if this book is good, I’m glad; we will discover an unknown (to us) author together.–R.”
I feel happy for J and R whenever I read that. Certainly they found Woolf’s novel good, and were glad, and went on to discover many other unknown authors together. I feel happy, too, when I pull from the bottom shelf of “Rare Books and Collectibles” the copy of St. Louis author Constance Urdang’s book of poems The Picnic in the Cemetery, signed by the writer and inscribed to Erika, presumably a resident of either the East Coast or the West: “For Erika, From MidAmerica,” Urdang wrote. Her wit makes me smile. As did the words and wit of her husband, the poet Donald Finkel, and the poets Mona Van Duyn and Howard Nemerov and John Morris, and the writers Stanley Elkin and William Gass, and others who gave St. Louis a lot of its literary shine when I was in my twenties, and still do. “For Erika, From MidAmerica.”
As for me, happily once more in MidAmerica, I am pleased to say that when I sit on the bench in “Rare Books,” either browsing or reading or eavesdropping or watching people pass by the bookstore window, I am completely comfortable in the knowledge that around the corner, in “Biography and Memoir,” my second self is also present—the me in person, the me in print. I am confident too that Left Bank is the only bookstore where I could ever claim that double existence. My book is a few years beyond its paperback issue and would be considered well past its shelf life in any other store.
KATHLEEN FINNERAN is the author of the memoir The Tender Land: A Family Love Story. She teaches writing at Washington University in St. Louis.
Fannie Flagg
Page & Palette, FAIRHOPE, ALABAMA
Dear Reader,
As a longtime author and a lifetime lover of books, I have had the opportunity both personally and professionally to visit hundreds of bookstores over the years—large and small, independent and chain-owned. Knowing this, you might guess that being asked to pick out just one bookstore to write about would be hard, but (unlike writing books) for me this is an easy task.
I can say without any hesitation that my very favorite bookstore in the entire world, hands down, is Page & Palette, a longtime family-owned independent bookstore located in Fairhope, Alabama. And luckily for me, it just happens to be about two minutes from where I live.
But first, before I tell you about the store, let me tell you a little something about Fairhope. It is an absolutely charming town located in South Alabama that sits high on a bluff overlooking the beautiful Mobile Bay, and fortunately, unlike a lot of other small towns across America whose local stores have fallen victim to the large shopping malls and closed, Fairhope still has a bustling and thriving downtown area, and if you should happen to visit and walk around Section Street, you would soon learn that the hub of most of that downtown activity is the Page & Palette bookstore. And if you were to go inside, the other thing you might quickly observe is that Fairhope people, visitors and locals alike, just love to read. Why?
Well, other than the fact that they are a highly intelligent and curious bunch, I think it all began in 1968 with one woman, Betty Joe Wolff, and with her love of books.
In fact, Betty Joe just may be the reason we still have so many readers and book buyers today. For as long as I can remember, customers have come in the door and called out, “Hey, Betty Joe, I need a good book—what do you recommend?” And Be
tty Joe, a delightful brunette with bright green eyes and a smile for everyone, always seems to have time to find just the right book for you, whether you are 6 or 70.
For a small store in a small town, Page & Palette has the biggest heart of any bookstore I know. And Betty Joe’s customers appreciate it and are fiercely loyal. Even today, old-guard Fairhopeians wouldn’t dare be caught dead with a Kindle or, God forbid, a book ordered from Amazon.com. I once heard the mayor’s wife say, “Why, I wouldn’t even consider reading a book unless Page & Palette recommended it!”
I personally came to know Betty Joe just by being one of her many customers, and then, in 1981, when my first novel was published, Betty Joe hosted my very first book signing, and I will never forget it. As I mentioned, it is a family-owned store, and at the time, Betty Joe’s two little skinny 10-year-old twin granddaughters, Karin and Kelley, were on hand to help open books and hand out cookies. And now, seven books and some thirty years later, it is still my favorite place to go for book signings.
From an author’s point of view, book signings can be long and tiring, but Page & Palette signings are always special and a wonderful and fun event. You never know what will happen; for instance, when my novel Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven came out, as a complete surprise to me, the store had everyone in town come to the signing dressed as angels, complete with halos, white robes, and wings!
Of course, times have changed. A wonderful café and coffee bar was added to the store, and now some events draw as many as 800 or 900 people, but the feeling is still the same. Betty Joe claims she has retired, but she still comes in every day to visit. Best of all, those two little twin granddaughters have grown into lovely young women with families of their own. Karin and her husband now run the bookstore, and Kelley and her husband own the art store next door. And both continue to carry on Betty Joe’s legacy. So, if you do visit Fairhope and you love books, just go into Page & Palette and browse around the wonderful Southern Writers Section or sit down and have a cup of coffee and a sandwich in the café. I can guarantee you, at some time or another, you will be sure to spot hometown authors like myself, Winston Groom, Mark Childress, Carolyn Haines, W.E.B. Griffin, Jimmy Buffett, or Rick Bragg wandering in and out. And you might be surprised to see, in this day and age, when expediency and convenience seem to rule, that people in Fairhope are still shopping in person for books in an honest-to-God real store, with real people behind the counter to talk to.
Why have the customers and authors remained so loyal all these years? I think it’s because Page & Palette has always been, from the very beginning, from the owners right down to the staff, an effort of love. They care about their customers and their authors, and in a time when more and more bookstores all over the country are closing down every day, Page & Palette’s continued success says a lot. We know they love us and we love them back. It’s that simple.
Sincerely,
Fannie Flagg
P.S. Like I said, you never know what to expect at a Page & Palette book signing. Just minutes before my last signing, poor Karin locked me in the broom closet by mistake and had to call a locksmith to get me out. But the good news is that I did get out and had another wonderful event. I can hardly wait for the next one (neither can my publisher), but then that’s another story.
FANNIE FLAGG is the author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café and several other novels including her latest titled Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! She lives in California and Alabama.
Ian Frazier
Watchung Booksellers, MONTCLAIR, NEW JERSEY
Montclair is a long and narrow suburb of New York City. It is a hills-and-valleys sort of place, with the town mostly in the valleys and the bigger houses on the hills. The commuter train runs through a valley as it has done since 1854—this is a very old suburb, one of the first—and the train’s whistle, often accompanied (at my house) by the rattle of ice cubes in a cocktail glass, marks the end to the suburban day. The hills are what remain of ancient mountains called the Watchung Range. Watchung is pronounced WATCH-ung, a fun word to say, like “Watch it!” but with an “ung.” It’s the kind of Jersey word you can imagine the Sopranos saying, but I don’t think any of them ever did, though parts of that show were filmed here.
I am a writer who usually works at home, but when I do go into the city Watchung Plaza is where I get the bus or the train. The plaza is a modest one, with a flagpole in memory of the town’s World War I servicemen and a few benches and a bus shelter and some hedges and a lawn. Along one side of the plaza stands a row of businesses, including a Chinese restaurant called Wah-Chung. Once I asked the people in the restaurant if, by coincidence, “Wah-Chung” meant something in Chinese, but they said it didn’t. Watchung Booksellers occupies a corner of the plaza; the store has been there or in a location nearby for sixteen years, three years longer than we’ve lived in Montclair.
It’s only a small exaggeration to say that we moved here because of the independent bookstores. Montclair used to have five of them, and now it has two—a regrettable decline, but two independents is still not bad for a town of 34,000. Watchung Booksellers quickly became my favorite. If I return from the city at night when all the stores on the square are closed, I notice the lights in the windows of the bookstore as I come down the train station steps, and I walk by to see what books are on display. The pleasure of leaving noisy New York and disembarking in this peaceful place settles in as I take a moment while the cars that have come to pick people up from the train drive off. I appreciate this good bookstore somehow even more at this late hour, when it is closed and empty of staff and customers and it sits there quietly diffusing its warm, intelligent light.
As someone who makes a living by writing, I feel a kinship with Margot Sage-EL, the store’s owner. Writing books, and trying to sell them, seem equally ill-advised ways to spend one’s time. Of course you do it for love. Robert Frost once wrote, “Only when love and need are one/And the work is play, for mortal stakes/Is the deed ever really done/For heaven and the future’s sakes.” Like a poet writing to make the rent, an independent bookstore exists at that heart-quickening juncture of love and need. I always take encouragement from the lights in Margot’s bookstore because they tell me that, at least so far, our mutual and sometimes dicey enterprise is succeeding.
I go to the bookstore to buy—will writers be the last remaining purchasers of books? I don’t think so, to judge from the crowds I often find at Margot’s—and to examine the author photos and the paper stock and judge the all-round quality of production. You must actually touch a book to discover that. When I publish a book of my own I do readings there, as does my wife when her books come out, as do others of our writer friends in Montclair. The readings are held in a part of the store not much larger than a one-car garage. If the audience exceeds about a dozen and a half, some must sit in an overflow area among bookshelves where they can’t see the author or vice versa. To me that is the best kind of crowd, and when I go to readings there I don’t mind being in the zero-visibility section myself. That’s part of the reason I became a reader, and a writer, in the first place—to be off in a corner and yet part of the grand adventure of literature.
In the bookstore I am in this bricks-and-mortar shared place on Watchung Plaza in the town of Montclair, not adrift in some cyber Nowhere. A very wise writer I know said recently, during one of those inescapable modern discussions about books and their future, “A book is public.” I can’t exactly explain why I think that is a brilliant observation, but I know “A book is public” is true just the way I know when a joke is funny. A book is public because it takes what is inside a writer and brings it out for readers so they can make it part of what is inside themselves. No writing exists until that transfer occurs. Writing exists not in the writer only and not in the reader only, but in a shimmering plane midway between the two; and the region where the encounter occurs is the book. A book is a physical thing and physical occasion like a person met by chance on the street. You can
summon a book out of cyberspace and read it on your e-reader, but that experience is too private for the exchange to really count. To read a book is to possess it physically and hang out with it. At some point you should be seen with it in public as if it were a friend you’re proud to have or a scar you’re not too modest to show.
At Watchung Booksellers there’s a daily rhythm to the life of books. Kids are running around—a bookstore like this is where kids are first brought into the wider world of reading—and there are the sounds of conversations about books, and the humming quiet of the browsers, and the crisp tearing and folding of gift-wrap paper at the counter, and it smells like books, with that fresh, subtly seductive smell. Independent bookstores such as Margot’s collaborate with writing in an intimate way that makes cyber bookselling seem merely retail. They are where the public aspect of the book, its real publication, plays out. I often travel the country to promote my books, and sometimes when I’m doing a reading a person in the audience will ask me what I think will happen to books and bookstores in the future. My answer usually is, “Well, we’re all here right now, aren’t we?” Books imply the future, but we write them, and we read them, and they begin their public existence, not in some unknown future but right now. Watchung Booksellers is, valiantly, a place where all of us who love books can be right now.
