My Bookstore

by Ronald Rice

  IAN FRAZIER is the author of 10 books, including the nonfiction Great Plains, On the Rez, and Travels in Siberia, and the comic novel The Cursing Mommy’s Book of Days. His work often appears in The New Yorker and other magazines.

  Mindy Friddle

  Fiction Addiction, GREENVILLE, SOUTH CAROLINA

  Book touring can be lonely for authors. You’re on the road after being sequestered at your writing desk. For months you’ve been perfectly content to hold imaginary conversations with characters, only to be thrust now into the world of commerce, blinking like some soft, startled creature from under a rotting log. You grip your signing pen and smile. Your extroversion muscles have grown slack with disuse, but you’re expected to chat with real humans and display some charm, not to mention field questions with wit. (Most authors will tell you the number one question they’re asked at their book signings is, “Could you tell me where the restroom is?”)

  So when I discovered an event on my book tour that worked—ravenous readers, attentive listeners who buy your book!—it was cause for celebration. The event is an author series called Book Your Lunch, and it’s the brainchild of bookseller Jill Hendrix, owner of Fiction Addiction, an independent bricks-and-mortar bookstore in my hometown of Greenville, South Carolina. Book Your Lunch is a fantastic way to bring readers and a wide range of authors together—from mystery writers, to award-winning novelists, to nonfiction and cookbook authors. Fiction Addiction sells tickets in advance, and the featured author reads from her work, or gives a short talk, followed by a Q&A session, a delicious lunch, and then an on-site book signing.

  I was lucky to be included in the birth of Book Your Lunch, to be in the delivery room, as it were, as this exquisite event was brought forth into the world. It all started nearly three years ago when I sat down with Jill to brainstorm. I’m a writer. I love brainstorming. Jill wanted my thoughts on how Fiction Addiction could create successful author events. She was then prepared to fashion my ideas into an actual plan with spreadsheets and a win-win business model. We talked about the Moveable Feast, Litchfield Books’ wonderful literary luncheon series held Fridays at a variety of restaurants in Pawley’s Island, South Carolina (another bright spot on my book tour). Might Fiction Addiction tweak and tailor such a luncheon series to an author event in our own community? We listed potential names—puns are my specialty—and came up with Book Your Lunch. Once Jill made sure the domain name was available for a website, Fiction Addiction’s inaugural luncheon series was born.

  In 2010, when Picador published my second novel, Secret Keepers, in paperback, I had the honor of being a featured author for Book Your Lunch. I looked out onto a roomful of people—and I wasn’t even related to most of them. I had to use a microphone, a sure sign of a successful reading, as far as I’m concerned. Fiction Addiction sold a pile of my books afterward, and as soon as I inhaled my free lunch, I had one of my most enjoyable book signings ever.

  Now, two and a half years after it began, more than fifty Book Your Lunch events have been held, an average of two luncheons per month. Fiction Addiction has increased sales of books thanks to Book Your Lunch—and weathered the economic downturn just fine, thank you. A number of authors have stopped in Greenville, South Carolina, for the first time and cultivated new readers. (Author Dorothea Benton Frank gets the prize for the most books sold at one luncheon—250 audience members, and 300 books sold!) Word has spread. Publicists and authors now regularly contact Fiction Addiction about appearing at Book Your Lunch. Imagine that: readers, publicists, authors, an independent bookstore—all happy! I call that a win-win-win-win.

  MINDY FRIDDLE’s novel The Garden Angel was a National Public Radio Independent Booksellers’ pick. Her most recent novel, Secret Keepers, won the 2010 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction.

  David Fulmer

  Eagle Eye Book Shop, DECATUR, GEORGIA

  I’ve spent time in independent bookstores on three continents—or is it four? A few have been famed: City Lights, Gotham Book Mart, Shakespeare & Co. Others I’ve visited are less legendary, but no less an experience, like Partners & Crime and the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City and Faulkner House Books in New Orleans. I almost got into a fistfight in one and was cornered by a predatory female fan in another. Don’t get me wrong; we’re talking decades here. It’s not like every bookstore experience is a walk on the wild side.

  I’ve had my longest and happiest history with Eagle Eye Book Shop in Decatur, Georgia, which is a contiguous part of the city of Atlanta, where I live. It’s been a narrative in and of its own, with my role shifting from customer to published author to writing instructor. And I was a dad all along.

  This began one morning as I was walking from ChocoLatté, one of my coffee joints, to visit Sukru, the computer doctor who has saved my book files a half-dozen times. I passed Eagle Eye and stopped. The facade spanned two normal storefronts. Had this place been here before? How did I miss it?

  When I got to the computer shop, I found the patient still on the table with its electrical guts on display. Sukru was muttering in Turkish and I figured he’d be happier with me out of there, so I wandered back to the store.

  I found neither another hole-in-the-wall nor an antiseptic waiting room. The first thing I noticed was how roomy, light, and airy a space it was. I trolled long aisles and found books for every brain, thousands of them, new and used and in-between. A children’s section in the corner offered sounds like the gabbling of baby ducks. Then I wandered into a back room that was lined on three sides, floor-to-ceiling, with oddball collectibles. Such as a set of H. Irving Hancock’s Dick and Company series (no, really) from 1911. A heavy tome on shipbuilding in Russian. An atlas the size of a café table, with maps so richly colored they appeared edible. The point is, even among indie stores, this was what you call one of your more eclectic establishments.

  I became a regular. At the beginning, because I needed books for my shelves and for my daughter Italia’s room. I was simply a customer until my career as a fiction author got off the ground. I did book launches there, and that brought out my friends and theirs.

  In other words, I became a truant part of the family. The staff was a mix too. Young and not-so, girls and boys, and a dog now and then. I mean a canine. It was like a cast from a series. I wish I could say more, but these are real people, not cutouts. Every one of them had something interesting going outside the store. You can use your imagination.

  It was at Eagle Eye that I had my closest brush with the notorious rare-book thief who had been making the rounds of the Atlanta stores. As a mystery writer, I was intrigued by this guy’s M.O. Every bookseller in the city knew him on sight, but he still made his scores. One afternoon, he and I were in Eagle Eye at the same time and I didn’t know until after he had evaporated. He was one character and there were others. Independent bookstores invite independent individuals of every stripe.

  I had been teaching a writing program I called Fiction Shop for a couple of years and kept on losing my home through no fault of my own. I made a deal with Eagle Eye to use the Reading Room in back. Like a salon kind of deal. It worked. Interesting people from all over the map showed up. The staff welcomed them, even when it got weird. They still drifted out before, after, and during breaks and spent money. The vibes back and forth were pleasant.

  Well, mostly. One incident jumps out. I had a—how do I say this—challenging student in one of my eight-week classes. She was a little out of control. A chemical imbalance, to put it in recent parlance. Some nights she was a perfect lady. Other times, she was out there, chattering to herself and to others. When it came time to read the exercise I had assigned, she would either freeze or begin rewriting on the spot. She was unaware of the disruption she was causing and was oblivious when I left her babbling and moved on to the next student. During the break, she would disappear, sometimes for a half hour. I had no idea where she had gone.

  The class and I had put up with her for six weeks. On the seventh, she arrived in a manic st
ate. This night, she spoke out of turn one too many times. I barked like a dog on a chain. “Andrea!” Not her real name. “Enough!” (This from someone who chastises students for their use of exclamation points.) Everyone in the room froze, and I heard dead silence from the store. Now I was feeling like a monster for picking on this poor woman. On the other hand, she was carrying those meds for a reason.

  The good news was she didn’t totally freak out and the class ended without another incident. After we wrapped up, I went to the front desk and apologized to the clerk and whatever customers had been on hand for yelling like that with customers in the store.

  Instead, I received a small round of applause. The clerk said, “I can’t believe it took you this long.” Try that at your big-box store.

  The one other piece of the story has to do with the modern family. My daughter has been around Eagle Eye for half of her life. We’ve bought books for her room and books for school. The store happens to be located halfway between her mom’s house and ours and became the weekly pass-off point. Italia loves the place and says she’d like to work there one day. And maybe she will. That would please her dad, too. It’s that kind of place.

  All the above could have transpired only in an independent store. They are by definition unique, bless their souls, with their own rare personalities. Let’s hope this doesn’t go away.

  Because they will be the salvation of books on paper.

  As the author of seven critically acclaimed historical mysteries, DAVID FULMER has been nominated for the Shamus Award for Best Novel, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Barry Award, and the Falcon Award; has won the Shamus Award for Best First Novel and the Benjamin Franklin Award; and has been nominated to numerous “Best of” lists, including New York Magazine’s “Best Novels You’ve Never Read.” He lives in Atlanta.

  Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  Harvard Book Store, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

  One of the changes alumni visiting Harvard generally lament is the loss of many mom-and-pop businesses, and especially of so many independent bookstores. Harvard Square has, famously, long been a mecca for bookworms and bibliophiles (readers and collectors alike), and returning former students in search of memories and mnemonic devices want to know where those storied bookstores from their young adulthood have gone. It’s a fair question. After all, if this capital of learning and erudition won’t support independent booksellers, then who can? Who, indeed?

  I thank the good Lord every day that Harvard Book Store not only remains, but thrives. I have worked in Cambridge for twenty-one years now, and the last decade or so I have lived just a few blocks away from the store. I can walk there in under five minutes, which is very useful when I am doing one of its fabled early-evening lectures and book signings. I have lost count of the number of titles I have purchased within those marvelous book-and-mortar walls over the past twenty-one years, and in fact long before, since I first visited it when taking pre-med classes in the summer of 1970. (Yale thought summer school devalued the brand, until they realized how very profitable it could be!) However, I value Harvard Book Store not only for the books I have purchased there, but for the untold thousands I have thumbed through, considered, shelved… and reconsidered.

  I’ve often wondered how a store that seems to have been made for browsing can make a profit. Seated quite solidly at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Plympton Street, the bookstore’s wall of windows make it possible, from almost any of its aisles, to lift your eyes from the book you are devouring and see the widest variety of residents and tourists silently slipping by on the streets outside. Or, book in hand, you can easily ignore these passing throngs and just by lowering your eyes be transported to any one of the thousands upon thousands of places or periods for which these books serve as portals, or be transformed into as many different people or things you could never otherwise be. This store induces a sense of place—I should say “places,” if I could find the right grammatical construction—that no online shopping experience can even attempt to approximate. And Harvard Book Store, with its generously schooled and learned staff, induces its own sense of place like no other bookstore I have visited—and you might say that, since my undergraduate days at Yale, I have been “collecting” bookstores, on almost every continent and in many, many countries.

  On its corner across from the gates of Harvard Yard, Harvard Book Store creates a sense of community as well. It is a study in multiplicity and mixing, a place where Harvard students, faculty, and staff commingle with Cambridge residents and tourists from seemingly every part of the world. Harvard Book Store is situated on Massachusetts Avenue immediately next to another Harvard Square institution, Mr. Bartley’s Gourmet Burgers (which has given me the great and privileged honor of having a burger named after me), and two storefronts down from the legendary Hong Kong Restaurant, where many a greasy midnight meal has been enjoyed by more than five decades of inebriated undergraduates. Its Plympton Street neighbor, the Grolier Poetry Book Shop, is perhaps the block’s most “civilized” resident, Harvard Book Store’s genteel aristocratic cousin. In the midst of these other ventures, Harvard Book Store is central to the fabled identity of Harvard Square as a place not just for writers and scholars, but for anyone who loves to learn, for thinkers of all stripes. Sometimes I wonder which I enjoy more: sitting at the counter at Bartley’s and hearing the Book Store’s activity through their shared wall, or smelling the tempting aromas of Bartley’s indefatigable grill as I browse the bookshelves on the other side!

  Wandering the aisles of the store upstairs, or perusing the phenomenal used-book collection in its basement, gives one the most profoundly comforting feeling that we are, in the end, readers, and that each of us fortunate enough to wander up and down these aisles is a participant in the vibrant world of ideas housed by this magical and magnificent place.

  And the history of Harvard Square itself is palpable there, inscribed. On a brick wall across Massachusetts Avenue that winds its way around Harvard Yard are plaques, literally framed by ivy, for Robert Bacon (Harvard class of 1880 and the 39th secretary of state) and Theodore Roosevelt (also of the class of 1880 and the 25th president of the United States). Just down Mass Ave, at the intersection with Quincy Street and Harvard Street, is a park dedicated to Josiah Quincy, the fifteenth president of Harvard University. And immediately across the street from the store is a tiny park dedicated to Sen Lee, founder of that very Hong Kong Restaurant. An immigrant to the United States, Sen Lee came from China in 1929, at the age of 13. Here he attended public schools, fought in World War II, started a laundry, and opened up the restaurant in 1954. This one corner is a microcosm of the histories of Harvard, the City of Cambridge, the Colony and then the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the United States, and our marvelously various world, but also the life of the mind itself. And there could be no better companion to this history than Harvard Book Store, situated squarely at the center of the Square.

  Harvard Book Store has been especially kind and generous to me as an author these past two decades, and I hope its extraordinary staff knows that it delights me beyond words (if such a place exists) every time I am invited to read on the store’s cozy left side, or whenever I see one of my books as one of their staff picks, or if a title of mine is lucky enough to make their “Select Seventy.” If all politics is local, as Tip O’Neill so masterfully observed, so, I suppose, are all honors. And nothing is more gratifying to me as a writer than the warm embrace of readers and booksellers at this store that I haunt in order to imagine.

  HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and American Research at Harvard University. He is the author of 16 books and has made 12 documentaries, including the PBS series, Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., which examines the histories and family genealogies of a number of well-known personalities. He is the recipient of 51 honorary degrees and numerous awards, including the MacArthur “genius grant.” He
was named to Time’s “25 Most Influential Americans” list in 1997 and to Ebony’s “Power 150” list in 2009 and its “Power 100” list in 2010. The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader, a collection of Professor Gates’s essays, was published in 2012.

  Peter Geye

  Micawber’s, ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA

  When I was a kid, my grandma used to take me shopping on my birthday. We’d catch a bus and head downtown, where I’d spend my allotted ten dollars on some bric-a-brac from the dime store’s toy aisle. Oftentimes, after I’d made my selection, she’d spirit me to the top of the IDS Tower for a hot chocolate and cookie or take me to the restaurant inside Dayton’s department store for lunch. Those were wonderful times. Some of the happiest in my memory.

  The thing is, for all the years and all the gifts (I’m sure we went every year from the time I was 6 or 7 until I was a couple of years out of high school), I can only remember one present. This would have been the year after I graduated from high school, when I was working hard at becoming the Serious Literary Fellow I was then intent on becoming. We went to Baxter’s Books, and for the same ten dollars I’d so often blown on forgettable toys, I bought Thoreau’s Walden and Dante’s Inferno. They were Signet Classics, as the spines on them advertised. I brought them home, read them piecemeal over that summer, and for the first time in my young life felt like I was becoming who I wanted to be. They were the first books in my personal library, or the first books I’d selected myself, with earnest intent. I still have them on my shelf.