by Ronald Rice
My second summer on Nantucket, let’s call it the summer of 1994, when I was on the island not to visit, but to live, I would ride my ten-speed (that’s a bike) to Bookworks several times a week. I had no job other than to write, and writing was hard and often discouraging, and since anything was preferable to actually writing, I did a lot of reading and a lot of biking and a lot of browsing. That summer, I read Lorrie Moore’s short stories and then proceeded to become maudlin and discouraged, because there was certainly no way I could ever write anything that good. I would stand in the literature section at the H’s and try to visualize a slender volume with my last name on the spine—Hilderbrand—between Hemingway and Hillerman. Standing and visualizing was preferable to actually writing the volume that might someday be placed there.
Years passed; things changed. I attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (where I frequented Prairie Lights, but only once a week at the most; I had serious writing to do). Shortly after I returned to Nantucket and shortly after I, yes—hear me roar—had my first novel, The Beach Club, accepted and published, Nantucket Bookworks was purchased by a young woman (my age) with small children, a woman named Wendy Hudson. In one of life’s awesome synchronicities, Wendy’s growth as an independent-bookstore owner mirrored my own growth as a novelist. We became friends, then good friends, and now she has a treasured seat in my inner circle of confidantes. It is impossible to say if we are better matched personally or professionally.
We all know that a bookstore is just bricks and mortar—even Barnes & Noble has managed to accomplish that. A good bookstore is a welcoming space with staff picks and the occasional reading and signing. But I would argue that a truly great bookstore depends on the people who work there. When Wendy took over Nantucket Bookworks, she magnetized a staff that is unparalleled in their friendliness and knowledge. It would be impossible to pick a favorite, and yet a favorite I do have.
Dick Burns looks like the mad professor in Back to the Future. He has a sonorous voice that is probably best suited to reading T.S. Eliot aloud. He knows a lot about books, but so do most bookstore employees worth their salt. Dick is singular because his sensibility is my own. His opinion has become valued and treasured. A few years ago, he recommended John O’Hara’s old and all-but-forgotten novel Appointment in Samarra, a book that instantly became one of my top three favorite novels of all time. Dick and I talk about Alice Munro and Marilynne Robinson like they’re our neighbors—sometimes we’re reverent, sometimes we’re catty. On one rarified occasion, I was able to do Dick a favor. We were both reading Tom Rachman’s novel The Imperfectionists. This was a book we had both been anticipating greatly after the front-page article in the New York Times Book Review. I bought it first and read it first. Dick was reading it also, and he was dismayed to find that the copy he had bought was not a first edition. I offered to switch books with him—he could have my copy, a first edition, and I would take his. Never have I seen someone so delighted! And certainly never have I seen someone so delighted by a first edition. But that’s the thing: To Dick, books matter. They are not to be downloaded and deleted. Books are loved and treasured. It is this love, this appreciation of the written word, that suffuses the air at Nantucket Bookworks.
In closing, I will say this: I am not a political person. I have never campaigned for anyone; I have never marched on Washington. I don’t care if you return your cart to the front of the supermarket or leave it to block the parking spot for the next person. I don’t care if you buy a tomato out of season or dismiss organic milk as too expensive. But I would implore you to buy your books from independently owned bookstores. Places like Nantucket Bookworks, and people like Dick Burns, have a quality that is hard to find in the world today. They are authentic.
They make the world safe for budding writers on ten-speed bikes with big dreams.
ELIN HILDERBRAND is the author of 11 novels, including Summerland, published in June 2012. She has lived on Nantucket Island year-round for 19 years and is the mother of three children. Elin is passionate about running, NFL football, cooking, travel, and good Champagne. Her favorite novelists are Jane Smiley, Richard Russo, and Tim Winton.
Ann Hood
Island Books, MIDDLETOWN, RHODE ISLAND
The first bookstore I ever walked into was a Waldenbooks at the Warwick Mall in Rhode Island. And I, a bookstore virgin, fell immediately in love. This was somewhere around 1971 or ’72, long before books could be bought online. Until that moment, the only books I’d read came from libraries or the backs of my classrooms, so I did not know the difference between chain bookstores and independent ones. I only knew that past the greeting cards and magazines and the cute, green-eyed boy at the cash register, hundreds of books waited for me. For just a few dollars, I could own a paperback copy of The Outsiders, take it home, underline my favorite parts, turn down the corner of the pages I wanted to go back and reread. No one was waiting for me to return it. No one cared what I did with it. The book was mine.
My taste in books back then was confused, eclectic. I could not differentiate between highbrow and lowbrow, so I bought with abandon. Anna Karenina one week; Hawaii by James Michener the next. For my cousin Gloria-Jean’s birthday, I bought my first hardcover book: Love Story, and read it half open so as not to break the spine before wrapping it and handing it over. The sounds of the mall faded as I stood before all of those books, touching their spines, staring at authors’ photos, reading first lines and jacket copies. Years later I would understand that this was how love felt: Everything faded in the face of it.
Eventually, I grew up and moved to Boston, where on weekends I would walk up Washington Street to an enormous Barnes & Noble and spend hours roaming its aisles. My reading taste had not really improved much, though I discovered Stephen King and John Irving there. I worked as a flight attendant for TWA then and I liked fat books, books that would get me through my constant jet lag, flight delays, and bouts of loneliness. So I bought Les Misérables and Doctor Zhivago along with more James Michener and Harold Robbins. One rainy afternoon, as I was leaving the store, I spied a hardcover copy of E.E. Cummings’s Collected Poems on sale and added that to my stash. For a few years, that was one of about a dozen books that lined my bookshelf, along with a few saved from college and other collections—Edgar Allan Poe, Ogden Nash—bought on sale at that B&N.
Eventually I moved to New York City, and wandering the streets of my Greenwich Village neighborhood I happened upon a tiny bookstore called Three Lives. I almost didn’t go inside. How many books could it possibly have? But the windows boasted signed copies and a promise of a reading by Deborah Eisenberg and Laurie Colwin the next night. Until that moment, I had no idea that either of these marvelous things occurred, that authors signed their books and went to read from them at tiny bookstores.
Inside was just as curious. Tables piled with books I’d never heard of, written by writers I’d never heard of. Travel books and cookbooks and poetry all had their own little nooks. The best sellers that Barnes & Noble kept in racks up front seemed hardly to be in evidence here at all. As a lifelong reader, a lover of books, I had no idea how to choose one in such a bookstore. In fact, I fled.
However, I did return the next night, undeterred by a cold driving rain. Late, I entered the crowded store with its smells of books and steam heat and wet wool and was pointed to a spot on the floor where I should sit—right at the feet of the two writers. As each of them read from their short-story collections, I stared up at them, mesmerized. It was easy to follow the others there and buy those two books. But too shy to have them signed, I quickly left, tucking the bag under my coat to keep the books dry.
How could I have known on that long-ago night that someday I would be one of those writers that stands at the front of a crowded bookstore and reads from her just-published book? How could I have known then that across the country—the world!—small independent bookstores like that one helped readers choose what to read next, brought communities together, gave writers the
opportunity to visit and sign their books? That night I knew only that despite all the hours I’d spent in them, my Waldenbooks back home and the cavernous Barnes & Noble in Boston had not given me the thrill that this one short hour had.
Since then, I gave up my TWA wings and began to publish books. In those twenty-five years, I’ve visited more bookstores than I can count, and every time I walk into one of them, I get that rush of first love again. Yet Island Books, technically in Middletown, Rhode Island, but close enough to Newport for Newporters to take credit for, rises above all of them. There are prettier stores. Fancier ones. Bigger ones and more intimate ones. Its aisles are a bit crooked. It’s tucked into a tiny slip of a strip mall. And it is perfect.
For me, Island Books has everything a bookstore should have. The owner, Judy Crosby, knows books and loves books. In fact, whenever I read there, she presses her most recent favorite into my hand, telling me I need to read it. She sends me books for my 7-year-old daughter, Annabelle, if she reads one that might suit her. And if Judy isn’t there, or even if she is, Pat will be behind the counter, quietly running everything. What other bookstore staff, when you go to read there, has just read a short story you wrote or your op-ed in The New York Times? And cut it out and made copies for everyone? What other bookstore knows you prefer chardonnay over pinot grigio and always has some waiting for you?
Fans of Island Books are loyal and possessive. Once, when I mentioned I had just been there, a woman frowned and told me, “But that’s my bookstore.” Give a reading there and it will be standing room only. Even if they’ve never heard of you, they will come because Judy invited you and they trust her. She and Pat move the shelves around and bring in seats. They bake cookies and serve cheese and crackers and wine. In warm weather, they set up the snacks outside under little lights, and everyone lingers. Because Island Books makes you want to linger there.
Here is a good example of how wonderful Island Books is. One afternoon I got an email from the coordinator of an event I was doing the next evening. Bring along some books to sell, the email told me. But writers do not have books to sell; the twenty complimentary copies we receive go to our parents and friends and disappear pretty quickly. How was I going to get a few cases of books in twenty-four hours? I sent my own desperate email to Judy. The idea seemed preposterous: Could I “borrow” as many of my own books as she could spare? I held my breath. For as amazing as Judy and her bookstore are, would she really let me take a few cases of books without buying them, trust me to collect the right amount of money, and then bring them back to Middletown, which is about forty minutes from my house?
By now, you already know the answer. Of course she did. I sold those books and we sat together doing the accounting. I signed whatever others she had in the store. And then, instead of going right back home, I lingered. Because that’s what you do there.
ANN HOOD is the author of 13 books, most recently the best-selling novels The Knitting Circle and The Red Thread.
Pico Iyer
Chaucer’s Books, SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA
There are books in piles all along the narrow aisles, and other books in towers on the top of every shelf. There are books laid out on tables and set out in the window, and books in special cases in the middle of the store, offered as “Staff Favorites.” There are books from many years ago, long out of print, and books that more corporate shops would long since have sent back to be pulped or remaindered. There are seven editions of Moby-Dick, all at embarrassingly low prices.
Around the books are greeting cards. Above the cards, stunning and unexpected, are nine framed photographs—a bangled woman in a golden sari, an old man’s eyes under a turban, a woman brushing the empty steps above the ghats in Varanasi—taken by the shop’s owner, Mahri Kerley, on a recent trip to India. There are books you won’t find in the public library, and a whole room, as large as a regular bookstore, for children’s books—and toys and games—where a kindly woman will guide you toward just the perfect work for the 13-year-old brother of a goddaughter in faraway London.
A longtime friend from Asia gift-wraps even the smallest paperback so that it looks as if it just came from a temple in Kyoto. Another vibrant pal who sets up Graham Greene mini-displays on the main table tells me about what she learned at Kenneth Rexroth’s knee (when writing of an old love, write only of what you loved in her). Another, when I buy a Nicholson Baker volume, tells me he’d love to know what I think of it, because his father was a conscientious objector during World War II.
One of the youngest workers, a small, elegant man barely out of college (he had earlier told me about a very obscure book on Werner Herzog), now presses into my hands a copy of Thomas Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew. “You should try this,” he says. Many, many of my more literary writer friends have tried to sell me on Bernhard, and none has succeeded. But when someone from Chaucer’s suggests it, how can I turn away?
I buy two of the Austrian novelist’s books and promise to come back to tell the other man at the cash register, who reads everything, how they compare with W.G. Sebald.
A bookstore is, at its heart, like any of the novels you may choose to buy in it. The shop itself is just the title page—you can find any work you want, after all, in many other places—and its holdings are the table of contents, the portal to the real experience. What ultimately makes the place sing, and live in you forever, is something else, much deeper: the characters you meet in it, the emotions that arise in you there, the sense of patterning—and being without pattern—that turns the story of a bookstore into the story of a life. What I recall, when I step out of an expedition to a bookshop, is not so much the works I’ve just acquired as those two chiming enthusiasts behind the front desk who pressed on me Geraldine Brooks’s March, because they recalled I’d loved Ahab’s Wife, or the former graduate student in literature who led me to the Food section to find Eat, Pray, Love and so let me fall into the pages of M.F.K. Fisher.
Is it any wonder, then, that Chaucer’s, “my bookstore” in Santa Barbara, has been my sanctuary, my talisman, my spiritual and social and literary home and inspiration for thirty-seven years now, ever since I was gobbling down Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books in my teens? (Now I return to Chaucer’s to acquire them for my goddaughter’s brother.) It is my de facto office, my classroom, my place of worship, my site for dates, and (not unrelatedly) my ideal location for getting lost. All of this is a way of saying that it’s not a shop so much as an old friend’s home, a place where thousands of us feel welcomed, woven into a circle, and surrounded by like-minded souls. Over the years, I’ve met the son of the wonderful owner, Mahri, visiting from Vancouver; run into her husband (now deceased) near the signing table; and been to dinner at her house, to find a treasury of books that could almost rival the one she shares with the world in her shop. Sometimes, she even leaves advance galleys of books she thinks I’ll like at the front desk for me to take back home to enjoy.
Chapter 1 of the story that is Chaucer’s might simply describe the place itself and how it looks to the innocent newcomer. She will walk through its doors to find stacks of free newspapers and magazines that focus on matters literary and local, as well as a copy of this week’s New York Times Book Review, offered gratis, if she wants to read about what’s just come out. She will see little notices here and there recording the latest winners of the National Book Critics Circle Award or the Man Booker International Prize; she will encounter calendars from around the world, and audiobooks along one wall, and books in Spanish as well.
Very quickly, too—since the beginning of a book has to offer more than mere facts—she will see that a bookstore is not just a place for books; it’s a place where you store something richer, in the way of memories and companions and collections of photographs too expensive to purchase, encyclopedias too hefty to carry home. It’s a place where I’ve bought haiku cubes at the cash register, and books on Maine Coon cats after I’ve left the store (and seen them in the window as I was exiting).
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br /> It’s a place that is really—like Sir John Soane’s house in London—the concrete external geography of a mind. In every last corner you’ll find some forgotten passion, a whimsical interest, a byway to some larger stream of associations. And it’s only by following a train of thought that you arrive at another, which you’d never expected to come upon. Many books in Chaucer’s are shelved in more than one place, so I go looking for Abraham Heschel and run into The Light Inside the Dark by the Tasmanian Zen poet and wise man John Tarrant. I let someone lead me to a biography of Arthur Miller, and, right next to it, is a gripping account of the Cuban missile crisis. Chaucer’s never remainders books or offers discounts—though it does hold book fairs to raise money for schools and offers standing discounts of 20 percent for teachers—which is a way of saying that it sees the value of books and never treats them as mere goods.
Santa Barbara is rich in elegant little paseos and chic, custom-made shopping streets; Chaucer’s—like those fabled seven-star sushi restaurants in Los Angeles that don’t even have a name and are known only to Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty—sits inside a somewhat featureless shopping mall in one of the city’s less glitzy areas. On one side of it is Glenda’s Party Cove, selling balloons and piñatas, and on the other is a small, locally owned drugstore that still hasn’t been driven out by CVS. It would be hard to find a more perfect location for a place that draws from the festive spirit of one neighbor while offering the medicines for the soul that the other doesn’t always have room to stock.
