by Ronald Rice
Few first-time visitors to Santa Barbara are likely to stumble upon it, therefore, yet for more than a third of a century now, people have been driving from every corner of Santa Barbara County to do their shopping (to see their friends, to pick up their copies of the Los Angeles Times, to hear Salman Rushdie and Buzz Aldrin read, or to get their books signed by sometime Santa Barbaran Sue Grafton) there. The county as a whole is singularly well supplied for books: the Book Den, across from our library and museum of art downtown, is the oldest used-books store in California, and in quiet and privileged Montecito, to the south, a beautifully bespoke and compact bookstore, Tecolote, almost as old, has been hand-selling elegant new books for eighty-six years (and was saved five years ago by local residents, who banded together to buy it when its former owner decided to retire). But Chaucer’s is something unique—town hall and free library and source of local pride—and I usually allow hours for every visit there, because I’m almost certain to run into long-lost classmates, to find a book (by Terry Castle or Sigrid Nunez or Ivana Lowell) that I have to read then and there, in the aisles, or to realize that this is the perfect place, better than any website, to check on the principal parts of the irregular ancient Greek verb baino.
One employee drives 100 miles each way, arriving before dawn each day, to disappear into the back of the store and help buy the books that will save our lives.
Chaucer’s is the first place I go when I return to Santa Barbara from traveling abroad, and—a little embarrassingly—it’s the last one I visit before I leave (to fill my suitcase with books to take to Ethiopia or Easter Island). My friends who work there often see more of me than does my own mother, whose residence in Santa Barbara is meant to be the reason I’m revisiting. I’ve done readings at Chaucer’s, next to its cash registers, and I held my first-ever signing there, almost a quarter of a century ago. I’ve had public discussions, on the nature of travel, at its front table, and I’ve gotten to see T.C. Boyle there, in the audience of a reading by Jane Smiley.
I’ve learned about the seasonal patterns of monarch butterflies from one of its longtime workers, and another has told me about her life growing up in Peru. Often I’ve startled my friends at the front desk by buying copies of my own books there, as last-minute gifts for a dentist or a mother’s gynecologist; sometimes I’ve arranged for strangers to leave books at the cash register if they want me to sign them.
Chaucer’s is where I’ve gone to make phone calls, or to pass an hour or two between doctors’ appointments; it’s where I raced through the life story of Van Morrison and where I order my magazines when I’m out of town. When I’m very far away—in my sometime flat in Japan—I stay up in the quiet autumn evenings, making long lists of all the books I have to collect the next time I’m at Chaucer’s.
I was lucky enough to be born and to grow up in Oxford, England, where every last corner of Broad Street seemed filled with secondhand-book sellers, shops dealing in art books, places offering only kids’ books, and outposts of one of the world’s largest bookstores, Blackwell’s; I later lived in Boston and New York, home to some of the world’s great independent bookshops. As a writer who’s been touring with new books for more than two decades, I’ve come to know some of North America’s most sumptuous independent bookstores, from Seattle to Toronto, from Corte Madera to Iowa City, from Pasadena to Miami.
What I’ve found—and the same is true of books, of course—is that each of them has its own particular color and spirit, yet all are involved in the same enterprise, almost as partners, or players in the same orchestra. A novel, as a schoolteacher in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, reflects, “is about character developed over time.” So, too, is a bookstore.
A book lives, to some extent, off its tension, and in the story that is a bookstore there has been no shortage of conflict in recent times. Every day brings new reasons not to go to a bricks-and-mortar shop, as friends tell you about e-readers and online discounts, while publishers sometimes seem to be racing about in panic like passengers on the Titanic. My literary home in Kyoto, Maruzen bookstore, where I’ve spent much of the past twenty-five years, suddenly, and without fanfare, closed down; the extraordinary Village Voice in Paris, as discerning and tasteful a collection of English-language books as could be found on the planet, recently met the same fate. Every time I return to Cambridge, Massachusetts, or to Berkeley—communities more or less consecrated to the word—I find old friends and classic volumes among bookstores vanished.
A book will arrive on your e-reader at a click, friends tell me, for less than half the price I’m paying. A computer will give you recommendations on what to buy next. There are things it won’t do for you, however, and would think of as heresy. Once, when I was in the Village Voice, I asked the man at the front desk, Michael, for a copy of George Painter’s biography of Proust; it was out of print, he told me, so he’d bring me a copy of his own, for me to keep, free of charge, if I came back the following day (“Paperback or hardcover?” he asked, and the next day was as good as his word).
A bookshop isn’t just about business, in short; it’s about shared passion. It’s a conversation, a spirited exchange, the kind of thing you’d enjoy with that other Pynchonian who has just tracked down another reference to Vinland in old Norse literature. It’s not what passes between hands at the cash register that matters so much as what passes between minds, as that person who sees you buy a copy of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies tells you how she was once diagnosed with cancer, but that not all such dire developments prove fatal.
So just when you expect to turn a page and find Chapter 11 in the history of a brave little independent bookstore that’s swimming against the tide of digital sales and big-box convenience, you find something that defies expectation on the bottom line as well as all the sentences that lead up to it. The penultimate chapter in my story of my bookstore would begin eight years ago, when another small shop selling books on travel—as well as travel equipment—opened its doors downtown. As soon as I went in to explore this new place of wonders, its manager corralled me. He wanted to put this place on the map, he said, to encourage a community of readers, to remind the public of the private delight of books. He was going to organize huge readings, advertise them everywhere, and rent a room in the public library down the street to make them real events.
Would I be a part of this?
How could I not support the books that have supported so many of us, as writers, readers, and just lovers of our city? Without them, I’d be without a livelihood, as well as a reason for living.
I instantly said yes, therefore, and we agreed on a date four months later, when I’d have a new book out. The night arrived, and I came to the fresh, upstart store to find that no advertisements had been organized, no extra room had been reserved, and, in sad fact, the manager had neglected even to get any copies of my new book to sell.
I looked at the customers who’d given up their warm spring evening to be here—they filled several rows of grey folded chairs—and called my inner 911.
“Of course,” said my old friend David, at Chaucer’s, the second he picked up the phone. He would collect every copy of my books he could find in his store, drive them all down here in the next twenty minutes, and, in effect, help a new rival sell the books it had been too lazy even to stock.
The point was not which bookstore claimed the profits, he might have been saying; it was that people should have access to the books they need.
At the end of many a great novel there’s often a coda that puts everything you’ve just read and learned into perspective. So let these be my final words on Chaucer’s, for now.
Several years ago, Borders came to the very heart of downtown Santa Barbara and erected a vast and alluring three-story citadel at the central intersection on our main shopping street, next to a large public parking lot and one of our five-screen cinemas. There were always kids hanging around outside—it stayed open till very late—and there were often mus
icians striking up impromptu concerts, to draw people toward its entrance. There were free restrooms inside, there was a hip counter selling coffee and cakes, there was a top floor full of CDs, which even my book-hating friends began to haunt.
There were aisles upon aisles of magazines, and free computers to guide you to what you were looking for; there were readings and comfy chairs and all the props of an indie store that a crafty major retailer knows how to turn to advantage.
Right across the street from Borders, as part of our most stylish new shopping mall, was a sprawling Barnes & Noble.
The writing was on the wall for little Chaucer’s, we all sensed, off on the wrong side of town, hidden away in a mall, with only Mahri, and no multinational, to support it, a typical casualty of the hard and the corporate times.
In January 2011 Borders closed its doors, forever. Almost the same day, Barnes & Noble across the street also stopped doing business, driven away, perhaps, by Santa Barbara’s terrifying rents and dozens of tourist shops. The Borders near our large public university closed. Chaucer’s, meanwhile, only grows bigger and bigger, to the point where many of us suspect it would devour much of the mall around it if only its neighbors would say yes.
It might almost be a parable, or a Tom Hanks movie, that Mahri and her twenty-six employees are enacting. The little shop stocks more books—150,000 and counting—in its happily crowded space than the downtown Borders did in a space five times as big. Twenty-four of its employees are full-time workers (by marked contrast with the business model in the chain stores), and many have been working at Chaucer’s for more than ten years, thanks in part, no doubt, to the 100 percent health coverage offered and Christmas bonuses. And when the two behemoths closed down, Mahri expressed her regret, because more books are preferable to fewer. After she first opened Chaucer’s, with a modest bequest, as a small paperback shop, in 1974, she and her husband had to dip into their life-insurance funds to keep it going.
The last time I visited Chaucer’s, one of its newest employees—24 years old, from back East, who’d just moved to Santa Barbara to try to become a writer—lit up when I bought a book on Iran. “Oh, you’re the guy who’s into long sentences,” he said, and then we were off on an escalating passion of rhythm and flow and how no staccato works could catch the effects of a Melville or Pamuk or Sir Thomas Browne. My bookstore is the place where I find myself, as well as my home, my passion—and my reason for trying to do what I do.
PICO IYER is the author of two novels and eight works of nonfiction, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, and, most recently, The Man Within My Head, an exploration of the way writers can live inside us. Though based since 1992 in rural Japan, he spends much of his time haunting bookshops from Rio to Bhutan.
Ward Just
Bunch of Grapes Bookstore, VINEYARD HAVEN, MASSACHUSETTS
Someone at dinner was going on and on about Zola, his provocations, his headlong narratives, his fierce and spacious conscience, his embrace of controversy. The novel being discussed was Thérèse Raquin, scandalous when published (in 1867), scarcely less so today. Wonderful descriptions of the erotic life, the more erotic for being clandestine, and the murder that results. The denunciations from church figures and others was so fierce that Zola was obligated to write a preface to the second edition defending himself, which he did with tremendous relish. “The critics have given this book a hostile and indignant reception. Certain righteous individuals, writing in no less righteous newspapers, have picked it up between thumb and forefinger, screwed up their faces in disgust, and thrown it on the fire.…”
Well! Who can resist that? So I took myself downtown to the Bunch of Grapes Bookstore, where Thérèse Raquin was nestled against another Zola novel called The Kill, and that was not all. Next to Zola was the Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua, and a little further up the line all the literary wolves, with their various spellings, Virginia, Thomas, and Geoffrey. I walked out of the store with half a dozen novels, and therein lies the definition of a full-service bookstore of the sort called “independent.”
This sort of thing happens all the time, and if Bunch of Grapes doesn’t have the book they’ll order it. And often on the flimsiest description. My memory is not what it used to be, and what it used to be was not exactly investment-grade so the clerks are obligated to make huge leaps of the imagination and with the same alacrity and good cheer as Zola’s roughing up an archbishop.
I heard about a novel last night. I forget the title.
Who’s the author?
I can’t remember that either, except he was a professor of English somewhere in the Midwest.
Maybe Kansas.
Recent book?
No. Published years ago.
Ummm.
It’s in paperback. I think it’s a New York Review of Books book.
Ah! That would be Stoner by John Williams. Beautiful novel.
That’s the one!
I’ll have it for you by Friday.
Walk into these bookstores, either on a mission (Thérèse Raquin, Stoner) or simply to graze, and your reading life passes before you—the first time you read The Old Man and the Sea in Life magazine, sitting in a chair by the big window in your parents’ house in the suburb north of Chicago, the light failing and you so caught up in the sea and the old man that you could not stop long enough to switch on the reading light—and here, more than sixty years later, through God knows how many printings, the old man lives once more. Scan the shelves and recall the books you put aside after an hour or two, knowing the failing was not the author’s but your own and promising to pick it up later, when you are older and have more patience or perhaps understand the world a little bit better. The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil’s novel, the lovely two-volume edition published by Knopf, rests in my library to this day, a rebuke; one of many. Comforting also to see the books of friends, Kib Bramhall’s meditation on the art of fishing, Jon Randal’s search for Osama bin Laden. Remain in the stacks long enough and your whole damned life passes before you.
WARD JUST’s 16 previous novels include Exiles in the Garden, Forgetfulness, the National Book Award finalist Echo House, A Dangerous Friend, winner of the Cooper Prize for fiction from the Society of American Historians, and An Unfinished Season, winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award and a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize.
Lesley Kagen
Next Chapter Bookshop, MEQUON, WISCONSIN
Like a kid with her first report card, I skipped over to Next Chapter Bookshop with the galley of Whistling in the Dark clutched in my sweaty little hand.
After pats on the back and much oohing and ahhing, the booksellers went back to work doing what they do so well, and I sneakily moseyed over to their best-seller stacks. Glancing over my shoulder to make sure no one was watching, I set the book down next to the big guns, just to see how it’d look. Never for a second entertaining the thought that someday it might earn that spot. Me… becoming an award-winning or New York Times best-selling author? Please. I loved and believed in my book, but knew it took more than a solid story to exist in the rarefied air of those top shelves. Connections matter. Publisher support too. It’s also quite helpful if you’re a gorgeous twenty-something blonde from LA or NYC with a nice chest and an MFA, and not a 57-year-old mousey brunette living in Mequon, Wisconsin, who anticipated the need for a bosoms belt in her near future. Before I’d completed the novel, the last thing I’d written of any consequence was a book report on Helen Keller.
A few weeks later during a lunch chitchat, my editor, who happened to be paying a serendipitous visit to nearby Madison, buttered her roll and said, “I’m curious. If you could make one wish for your book, what would it be?”
I’d given that some thought. As a lover and supporter of independent bookstores, I’d already asked my fairy godmother for a waving of her wand. “More than anything,” I answered, “I’d love the book to be selected for the Book Sense list. Do you think that could… ah�
�� happen?”
From across the table, violent croissant choking erupted, which I took as my editor’s somewhat dramatic but enormously effective way of saying fat chance.
But tables can turn, and a month later, she left this stunned message on my answering message: “I can’t believe… your book… it made the May Book Sense list! How? I mean… wow!”
Lanora Haradon, that’s how. The owner of Next Chapter Bookshop had been holding my hand on a road to publication that had been fraught with potholes. My manuscript had been rejected for representation by well over a hundred literary agents, and only one publisher had made an offer. Despite the detours, Lanora believed in me and the novel and it wasn’t just lip service. Well, actually, it was. Behind my back, the little rascal had been talking up the book with other independent booksellers, had written a recommendation for the Book Sense list, and had encouraged others to do so as well.
When the real books arrived at the shop months later, Lanora rang me up and suggested I get my bum over there. She led a weak-kneed me to a table, thrust a Sharpie into my hand, and returned a few minutes later with two cartons of Whistling in the Dark. There I was… signing my books in my bookstore. Cool customer that I am, I burst into tears. Of course, the launch party for the novel was held at my home away from home. Considering that the story is set in 1959, Lanora thought it’d be fun to serve pigs-in-a-blanket and button candy and, of course, cheapish wine, which works to liven up any era. When she took the podium to deliver a heartfelt speech about the novel, I had to plug my ears. It was too much happy to take in.
