by Ronald Rice
Before I finish this little story, another disclaimer. I have been a “Joe’s Pick” three times. It has not affected my view of my favorite bookstore, but it certainly was gratifying in a creative way. The fact is, selling a book there was my introduction to the store. If I had not written books, I probably would never have visited my favorite store, because it is forty miles from my home. Would you travel forty miles to buy a book?
LARRY KANE, known as the dean of Philadelphia television news anchors, has been one of the nation’s most respected TV journalists for more than 43 years and has recently marked his 51st anniversary in broadcasting. Kane is current host of the Voice of Reason program on The Comcast Network. He is also a special contributor for CBS’s KYW Newsradio and is a consultant for NBC Regional and National Sports. He is the author of four books, including Larry Kane’s Philadelphia, a regional best-seller. As the only broadcast journalist to travel to every stop on the Beatles’ 1964 and 1965 tours, Kane authored Ticket to Ride, with a foreword by Dick Clark, and Lennon Revealed, a New York Times and Los Angeles Times best-seller in 2005. His books have been printed in nine languages around the world. His most recent book is Death by Deadline, a murder mystery novel that examines the challenges facing local TV news.
Laurie R. King
Bookshop Santa Cruz, SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA
Books run through the veins of any vibrant community. I knew this long before I became a writer (can it be twenty-two books ago?), but it came to me afresh recently as I sank into research for a novel set in 1929 Paris.
After the Great War, American soldiers who had spent a leave in Paris found that a part of their hearts and minds remained there—as the song says, “How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm…?”
More pragmatically, these young men also discovered that the exchange rate of the early twenties meant their dollars would support them a lot longer—and a whole lot better—next to the Seine than alongside the Hudson or the Ohio. Maybe even long enough to produce a novel, or a collection of poetry, or a roomful of paintings.
So the Lost Generation converged on the Left Bank, where rooms were cheap and wine was plentiful. And once there, it found its heartbeat in a bookstore.
A small American woman named Sylvia Beach had also fallen in love with Paris during the war and manufactured her own excuse to stay: The City of Light needed a shop selling English-language books. (Oh, the perennial optimism of the book-selling breed!) Shakespeare and Company, her bookshop/lending library, opened on the Left Bank—commercial rents being cheap there too—just in time for the trickle, then flood, of English-speaking expatriates. Customers both French and foreign came for the books and stayed for the talk. Ernest Hemingway and André Gide, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Aleister Crowley, Man Ray and Gertrude Stein—all manner of odd pairings met and mingled among the stacks. They bought (or, more often, borrowed) the latest novel, they picked up their mail (those all-important checks from home!), they showed Sylvia their manuscripts. And of course, being artists, they also borrowed money from the bookseller, allowed her to feed them, and cadged stays in the apartment over the shop.
None went further than James Joyce, an unemployed English teacher with a wife, two children, and a book that wouldn’t end. Shakespeare and Company supported him, emotionally, artistically, and above all, financially. Everyone agreed that Ulysses was a work of genius, but it was also a book so unwieldy—and judged so obscene—that no publisher dared touch it. So Sylvia Beach turned her hand to publishing, devoting years of her life to the novel and the author’s endless emendations, bankrupting herself but for the donations of friends, left in the end with nothing except the knowledge that she had brought about one of the definitive works of English literature.
For her, that was enough.
Thankfully, not every bookstore is called to act as midwife to a Ulysses. Not all booksellers are quite so… let’s call it “dedicated,” although the word “nuts” does come to mind. However, all the bookstores I know stand foursquare in the support of literature, and foursquare at the core of a community.
Take Bookshop Santa Cruz.
I met Bookshop a few years after its 1966 opening, when I came to town as a student and wandered into this old brick building on the main street. Neal and Candy Coonerty owned it by then, a comfortable store with delightfully creaky wooden floors and a scattering of well-used armchairs, always occupied. It was the kind of building that seemed to have hidden passages and mysterious caves, like the hills around town. I suspected there were magicians living in the basement. Alchemists, maybe.
This was the first bookstore I had known, since my family, by nature and by the habits of chronic house-moving, almost exclusively patronized libraries. I bought my first hardback novel here when I was 23, James Clavell’s Shogun: The library’s edition was in two volumes, and I could find only Part One. Thank goodness, Bookshop Santa Cruz came to my rescue.
As it has any number of times over the years. This red-brick building was where the treasure of Santa Cruz was kept, where its entertainment waited, where knowledge lurked, where all the most interesting of its citizens were to be found.
Where the city’s heartbeat lay.
I was a regular. I would buy a book and start it in the coffee house behind the store, listening to the wide-ranging, coffee-fueled discussions at the Penny University. I stopped in at the annual birthday party in early November. Over the years, a record of my purchases would trace the course of my changing life: from the world’s religions to vegetable gardening and carpentry, then travel guides, followed by pregnancy manuals and children’s picture books. (Unlike their mother, my kids grew up owning books.) For years, Bookshop was a part of my life, enriching and necessary.
Then came the Loma Prieta quake.
A fist smashed Santa Cruz. On October 17, 1989, at 5:04 in the afternoon, people died, roads split, and buildings came to pieces, including the comfortable brick home of Bookshop Santa Cruz. Its walls trembled precariously. All the shop’s glorious treasures lay in heaps, vomited off the shelves, unreachable behind the city’s red-tag notices. Wrecking balls waited only for the highways to reopen. All around, the shocked community boiled its tap water, picked glass shards from its carpets, went to bed in the dark, and tasted fear with every aftershock.
The city’s heartbeat faltered.
And Neal and Candy looked at each other, set their shoulders, and with that blessed, mad optimism of their breed, declared that Bookshop’s annual birthday party would go ahead. It was the town’s first glimmer of hope since the earth shook. Shortly after the party, when the temporary retail tents rose up in the downtown parking lots—the official name of “pavilions” never really caught on—hundreds of staunch and grateful friends turned up to rescue Bookshop’s treasure, donning hard hats, carrying the books to safety, cleaning them of dust and wounds. By the end of November, in a community hounded by unremitting chaos and dreary news, Booktent Santa Cruz opened for business.
We shopped in Booktent for three long years, scouring its sparse shelves for Christmas and birthday gifts, searching for kids’ stories we didn’t already have, investing in books on canning and cats—anything that would help Bookshop survive. And when the new store opened at last, again the community stepped forward, this time in triumph, to carry books from the dim, shabby tent to the startlingly bright, modern, and spacious new store.
Santa Cruz had its heartbeat again.
The second incarnation of Bookshop Santa Cruz opened two months before my first book was published. In the years since, I have done quite a few readings there, bought (and signed!) countless books, used the store as the site for any number of pre-dinner or pre-movie meetings, and downed gallons of latte in the adjoining coffee house. These days I shop the children’s section with a small grandson, and although I’ve lost my interest in books on vegetable gardening and canning, I do buy plenty of hardback fiction.
Those of us who remember the original dark wood and creaky flo
ors, who watched—and rejoiced—as Bookshop Santa Cruz rose from the rubble, do not take the place for granted. We value the store, we come to the events, we make it part of our lives. Where there was once devastation, there is now a vibrant community, filled with life and ideas, with books running through its veins.
Bookshop Santa Cruz: where people come for the books and stay for the energy.
Just like Shakespeare and Company, ninety years ago.
LAURIE R. KING is the author of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, Pirate King, and Touchstone.
Katrina Kittle
Saturn Booksellers, GAYLORD, MICHIGAN
My “hometown bookstore” is 437 miles away from my house.Saturn Booksellers in Gaylord, Michigan, is my go-to, all-time-favorite bookstore, the kind of bookstore I dream about as a book lover and as an author. It’s the kind of bookstore I no longer have in my actual hometown of Dayton, Ohio. We have all the big chains in Dayton, where I can get any book in print, but not all the other essential things I crave in a bookstore.
What do I crave? Most important: passionate booksellers. Jill Miner and her crew are some of the most with-it, smart, spot-on hand-sellers I’ve ever encountered. And I should mention here that I lucked into experiencing Saturn Booksellers because Jill Miner nominated my third novel for the Great Lakes Book Award for Fiction in 2006. She introduced me for my acceptance of the award at the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association convention, and when we sat down for dinner, she said, “We need to get you to my store. How can we make that happen?” That’s one of the (many) wonderful things about Jill—she makes things happen.
Within a year of that dinner, I walked into Saturn’s embrace for the first time. From the sidewalk sign that demanded “GET IN HERE!” to the chalkboard walls and the coffee shop in the log cabin built inside the store, there was nothing cookie-cutter or chain about it. Jill showed me the press for my event and some fun marketing that included chocolate bars with my book cover on the wrappers (is that genius, or what? Not to mention one of my favorite combinations: books and chocolate). Jill said they’d all been hand-selling the book like crazy and they were confident of a crowd for my reading, but the rows and rows of waiting seats made me feel queasy. I wandered the aisles, the intriguing displays, the staff recommendations, checking periodically on those seats… which were not filling up. I thought, Well, even if the event is a bust, I’ll get some great shopping done.
I took photos of the signs that threatened “Unattended children will be given an espresso and a free puppy” and “Be Nice or Leave” and of the “Insane Asylum Entrance” sign over the door to the Employees Only area… then obsessively checked my watch and those (empty!) chairs again. Every author has experienced the humbling three-people-in-the-chairs reading. I worried about being a disappointment to Jill after all her efforts to spread the word on my book. The store had a steady hum of customers, but they all bought their books and left, so I fought the impulse to hide in the bathroom and braced myself to give a good show to a handful of people.
At ten minutes before the event’s start time, I got myself a drink in the log cabin coffee shop—and, by the way, that coffee shop? Di-vine. They’ll customize your order there with the same skill they use to individualize book recommendations. The baristas happened to be experimenting with a smoothie and offered me a sample. I accepted a mango-coconut-rum concoction that seriously jeopardized my ability to form words.
When I turned around, wincing from my smoothie brain freeze, I blinked at the scene before me: Every seat was full. The booksellers were adding more seats. And more still. They packed so many readers into the bookstore that I could reach out and touch the front row—they were practically in my lap! People stood in the aisles, sat on the floor, and huddled shoulder to shoulder.
Jill Miner and her staff know how to throw a good author event. I say throw because the events feel like parties… and, as when you’re in the hands of a great hostess, every last detail is taken care of—such as stopping all coffee-shop orders during a reading. Any author who’s ever competed with the grinding of beans and the pounding of barista scoops knows what a thoughtful, gracious gesture this is.
The attendees of these events tell you a lot about Saturn Booksellers. Many of the people are loyal, die-hard fans of the store, willing to take a chance on whatever Jill and the Saturn booksellers recommend. The Q&A session after the reading was a rowdy, fun good time. Half of the audience had already read the book thanks to the store’s buzz, so the discussion had real depth. I wanted to swoon, I was so smitten.
After the event, as I signed stock and kept laughing with the funny, smart booksellers (seriously funny—any one of these women could host Saturday Night Live with ease), I told Jill I needed her help. I’d finished my airplane book sooner than expected and was without anything to read at my hotel or on the plane the next day. The store went silent. All those booksellers turned to me with sharp, invigorating focus. I could tell in a heartbeat: They loved their jobs and they took my question seriously.
Jill asked, “What did you read lately that you loved?” She and the other booksellers listened, and, based on my answer, they made their brilliant suggestions. I left that night with Whistling in the Dark by Lesley Kagen and Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos. I’d never read either of those authors before. Now, not only are they among my very favorites, they have also become my cherished friends. All because of Saturn.
I shouldn’t have been so surprised. That’s what good booksellers do. They should be knowledgable. Even if they haven’t read it themselves, booksellers should have knowledge about current titles. But, alas, the following true experience from a chain store had become what I was used to. I once dashed into a so-big-it-feels-like-a-warehouse chain store to grab a copy of Eat, Pray, Love as a gift for a friend. I was on a tight schedule and didn’t see the book up front, so I found a bookseller (no easy feat) and asked if she could point me in the right direction. The girl stared at me, blinked, and asked, “That’s a cookbook, right?”
Um, that would never happen at Saturn.
I’ve done readings at Saturn Booksellers four times now. That standing-room-only crowd was no fluke. Every one of my events there has repeated it. I look forward to returning with the release of my new novel. I look forward to it the way I’d anticipate a reunion with old friends… which is exactly what it is.
KATRINA KITTLE is the author of four books for adults, most recently The Kindness of Strangers and The Blessings of the Animals. Reasons to Be Happy, her first book for tweens, was released in October 2011. She lives, runs, gardens, and teaches in Dayton, Ohio.
Scott Lasser
Explore Booksellers, ASPEN, COLORADO
Skiing, glamour, glitz, food, culture, natural beauty—there’s plenty to love about Aspen, but nothing better than Explore. It is the town’s crucial establishment, the store that feeds those hallmarks of the Aspen Idea: mind, body, and spirit. Put another way, you can’t have a world-class town without a world-class bookstore.
I first visited the store in 1983, my first winter in Aspen. I was teaching skiing seven days a week, waiting tables another four nights. At least once a week, on a night off, I’d go to Explore. I was saving up money for college and usually couldn’t buy anything, but stepping into the store was entering another world. It made Aspen a place where I could put down roots. Back in that pre-megastore era, Explore stood out for its inventory, a whole Victorian house filled with books, arranged with attitude. Categories like Literary Fiction, Nonfiction, and Children’s Books got their own rooms, whereas Popular Fiction found itself crammed in a corner by the stairs, where until recently they sold coffee.
It was sitting on those steps that I gave my first public reading. (Climb those stairs today and you’ll find Art, Music, Sports, and a restaurant with a liquor license—that is, heaven.) The reading occurred about a month after the issuance of the Rushdie fatwa, at an event organized at the store to support the author. I stood at the back of the room and listene
d to the organizer say that Mr. Rushdie and freedom of expression would be best served by reading briefly from his work. Then she picked me out of the crowd and said, “Scott, why don’t you start us off?” I moved forward to the stairs, where I was handed a worn copy of Midnight’s Children; I spent the next fifteen minutes mispronouncing Indian place names, though no one seemed to mind. The people were there for Rushdie.
At its heart, a bookstore should stand for what’s best about a community. On that day, Explore did. On every day, in fact.
By now you’re probably thinking it all sounds too good to be true. In these Web-based, electronic-reader times, surely this store has perished.
It has not, but the story, as you might guess, is complicated.
For decades Explore was owned and operated by Katherine Thalberg, who not only created this marvelous store but also was active in politics of the anti-meat, anti-fur, left-wing variety. (Her dogs were often found on the floor, chewing on carrots.) Ms. Thalberg died of cancer too young, and the store fell to her three daughters, who wanted to sell the building for market price and have it remain a bookstore. This being Aspen, market price was in the $4 million range. There was something close to a panic in town when everyone realized that Aspen might lose Explore. Without it, Aspen would no longer be, well, Aspen.
But four million bucks! Who would make such a crazy purchase? None other than billionaire Sam Wyly, the George W. Bush backer/Swift Boat supporter. Only in Aspen. There is no way that Mr. Wyly bought Explore to make money; he must just like the bookstore. After all, he’s changed almost nothing. To make the story just a bit stranger, the new manager’s name is John Edwards, but not that John Edwards.
