by Ronald Rice
So, how this ends is, my author and I go up to New York not so long ago to see Kaplan get the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community at the National Book Awards ceremony. It was a black-tie affair, but because I am barely apparent unless my author seems to be mumbling to himself, I went in my dressing gown and slippers. Being unseen, I could take as many glasses of champagne from the trays circulating as I wanted, and I will admit that I was a little hammered by the time Kaplan walked up to get his kudos and talk about his devotion to what he described as a “very fragile literary ecology.”
But I remember very clearly watching and thinking, Forget about fiction—in real life, sometimes good guys do finish first. And, by the way, the real-life bombshell who was sitting by Kaplan in his glory that night had this uncanny resemblance to the gal who came so worried to my office all those years ago. Like I keep telling my author, this would make a hell of a story.
LES STANDIFORD is the author of 20 books and novels, including the John Deal mystery series and the New York Times best seller Bringing Adam Home: The Abduction that Changed America. He is the director of the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami, where he lives with his wife, Kimberly. He met his pal Mitchell Kaplan, former ABA president, more than 30 years ago, when Books & Books was still just a gleam in Kaplan’s eye.
Nancy Thayer
Mitchell’s Book Corner, NANTUCKET, MASSACHUSETTS
One day you wake up and everything has changed. The electric typewriter is passé. The computer rules the world. A new children’s wing is built onto the island library. The fast ferry arrives in Nantucket in just one hour. But I thought I’d have Mimi with me all my life.
Mimi Beman owned Mitchell’s Book Corner, on the corner of Main Street in Nantucket. The first time I met her, in 1986, she terrified me. The bookshop owners I’d known before were demure and hesitant. Mimi came at me like a great powerful righteous force. She was opinionated and loud. I’d enter Mitchell’s, and she’d bellow, “We’ve got the new Elizabeth George!” Other times she’d slip me a reader’s copy of a brand-new first-time author. “I think you’ll like it. Try it,” she’d say, out of the side of her mouth, like a spy. She was always right.
She did this with all her regular customers.
Mimi had enormous amounts of energy. She rose at four or five in the morning and read until eight, when she had to go open her store. It seemed she’d read every book ever printed, and she had the remarkable facility of remembering each person and which author they favored. She loved matching people with books. She loved this island. She loved the young people who were her staff, and I know she was a mentor in many ways to so many young women who worked for her, my daughter among them.
For an author, she was a godsend. She gave fabulous book signings, treating the author like a star. She always had a book-themed bouquet of flowers on the table, along with fresh water and a small box of exquisite chocolates. She was wonderful with consolation; she was magnificent at celebration. Whenever the library presented a speaker, Mimi was always there with a big box of the writer’s books and cheerful, encouraging words for the writer after the talk, whether the writer sold ten books or none at all. New writers came into her store and Mimi took the time to read their work and provide her judgment and expertise. And, always, her honesty.
If you wanted an opinion from Mimi about anything, you’d get it, and you’d get it loud and clear. Once a person who thought he was a celebrity wanted the newest Harry Potter book the night before it was officially out. When Mimi refused, he said, “Do you know who I am?” Mimi said, “Yes, I know who you are, and you’re not getting the book until tomorrow morning.”
Mimi was not an electronic blip on a computer or a voice on a machine. Mimi was a friend right there in her store, ready to listen to you rave about a new writer, or to tell you in no uncertain terms why you wouldn’t like a certain writer. She boomed, “I’m so glad you’re back! How was your winter? Did your son get into Harvard? Did your knee operation work out?” She listened to your answer, and she cared. She truly cared. She knew all the town news and she couldn’t wait to share it with you.
Mimi was the high school teacher who turned our lives around with a few choice words of advice. She was the Brant Point lighthouse guiding us toward pleasure on a gloomy afternoon. She was the mother who introduced us to Beatrix Potter and the old-timer at the bar who told us an outrageous off-color joke. She was a neighbor walking down a small-town street on a summer’s afternoon, glad to stop and take time to chat with rich and poor, old and young. She was a wholehearted welcome on our loneliest day. She was there, and we knew we could go into Mitchell’s and find her there, a reliable provider of comfort, wisdom, humor, and happiness, every day of our lives.
Mimi died in March 2010 at the age of 62. She was an iconic literary champion, a touchstone to reading, and as we enter into a faster, electronic, less personal world, we are at a loss without her.
NANCY THAYER is the New York Times bestselling author of Summer Breeze, Heat Wave, Beachcombers, Summer House, Moon Shell Beach, The Hot Flash Club, The Hot Flash Club Strikes Again, Hot Flash Holidays, and The Hot Flash Club Chills Out. She lives on Nantucket.
Michael Tisserand
Octavia Books, NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
A day or so into the New Orleans Flood of 2005, I found myself on the phone with my wife’s father. He’s not somebody I normally would choose for unburdening, but it was no time for choosiness. My voice breaking, I cataloged the losses: jobs, schools, the chance to see our friends’ faces. “It’s all gone,” I said, fighting back panic. “It’s not all gone,” he replied, speaking with the matter-of-fact tone of a scientist, which he is, and of a Latvian immigrant with childhood memories of displaced persons camps, which he has.
It was both the shortest and most reassuring conversation I remember from those days. Still, in the weeks when the road home was a closed highway off-ramp, despair remained a threat. Anxieties multiplied. The future involved more guesswork than planning.
I recall this now in an attempt to explain just what it felt like to walk through the door of Octavia Books on a Saturday evening in November 2005, just shy of three months after the frightful storm and the criminal levee collapse that we call “Katrina.” Octavia was the first bookstore in New Orleans to reopen, and on this night there were hundreds of people crowded into a small, rectangular, shelf-lined room. The occasion was a reading for Why New Orleans Matters, a book-length treatise that was written in a white heat by my friend Tom Piazza.
There were reunions that night, both planned and unexpected. Tears poured even more copiously than the wine. My primary memory of the reading itself was a blistering passage about former first lady Barbara Bush, who had visited a shelter in Houston and commented that the evacuees on the cots “were underprivileged anyway,” so it was all “working very well for them.” I will never forget, nor will I ever want to forget, the feeling of standing together in that packed, humid, book-filled room, at one in that moment in our grief and anger.
That same night, I also met up with Bruce Raeburn, a Tulane University jazz historian. At Octavia, we hatched a scheme to dive into the flooded house of the jazz musician (and underappreciated author) Danny Barker. Although Barker had died several years earlier, his family had kept the house and its belongings intact, and we knew it was filled with priceless mementos and papers, now rotting in the Katrina muck. As we made our plans, I could hear other rescue missions being plotted all around us. Some, like ours, involved houses. More were about identifying and trying to save fragile psyches.
Nights like these would be repeated in the weeks and months to come, often with similar intensity. As more Katrina-related books appeared, readings at Octavia became something of a ritual. Chris Rose, Douglas Brinkley, Jed Horne, Josh Neufeld, Anderson Cooper, Dave Eggers, writers with the Neighborhood Story Project, and dozens more made their way to the wooden podium in front of short rows of foldi
ng chairs, and each took a turn leading the service. That Louis Armstrong song, the one with the line about friends shaking hands and really saying “I love you”? That was our hymn.
This is why Octavia Books is my bookstore.
Octavia is a relatively recent addition to a city where, I’m happy to report, independent bookstores are the rule, not the exception. The husband-and-wife team of Tom Lowenburg and Judith Lafitte opened their shop in 2000. I knew of Tom from his years with the local activist organization The Alliance for Affordable Energy, and although he and Judith are sweet and soft-spoken booksellers—complete with a shop dog bearing the musical-theater name of Pippin—there is an unmistakable aura of activism around the place. I’ve been at after-hours community meetings at Octavia, and Tom recently helped defeat a ridiculous piece of censorship-related state legislation. He’s also a self-taught expert on the survival of local businesses in a big-box world.
Octavia is by no means the only New Orleans bookstore to recommend. I’m also partial to Maple Street Book Shop, where I once danced with the owner during my first-ever book release party; to Garden District Book Shop, especially for hosting an inspiring evening with George McGovern; and for Faulkner House Books, which occupies the same room where William Faulkner hashed out his early career with his neighbor Sherwood Anderson. Faulkner House is also home to the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society, which sponsors the local Words & Music festival and much more. Also essential is Vera Warren-Williams’s wonderful Community Book Center, where I once picked up a copy of the biography of Civil Rights pioneer Ruby Bridges. I gave it to my daughter, then in first grade. She wrote to Bridges, and Bridges replied with a letter that now is a family treasure.
We also have more than our deserved share of wonderful used-book stores, from musty French Quarter shops to the newer Blue Cypress Books. There’s also a place I can’t name, because my kids just call it “books, books, books” after a sign in its window. It stands across the street from Hansen’s Sno-Bliz, which for more than seventy years has purveyed the city’s finest sno-balls (shaved ice drenched in syrup). Our family tradition is that I wait in line for the sno-balls while the kids get to peruse the books, books, books. On a recent trip, my 10-year-old ended up with a strawberry sno-ball layered “lasagna-style” with condensed milk, and a book claiming scientific proof that space aliens exist. That was a very good afternoon.
New Orleans is a city of neighborhoods, and Octavia Books is named for the street on which it resides, which in turn is named for Octavine Ricker, the daughter of one of the many nineteenth-century scoundrels whose names still tag our city (nearby Leontine Street is named for Octavine’s sister). The store is surrounded by mostly modest shotgun houses; one house around the corner offers a blinding lights display each Christmas. (Rick Bragg once opened a reading by noting that the lights display is the most impressive neighborhood institution, bumping Octavia Books to second place.) The neighborhood surrounding Octavia contains numerous bars, a yoga studio or two, and food joints like Hansen’s (twelve blocks away), the tile-walled oyster palace Casemento’s Restaurant (sixteen blocks away), and Domilise’s Po-Boy and Bar (just five blocks away).
The mood at Octavia has changed in recent years. There used to be a Katrina table at the front of the store. I would habitually stop and check out each new title. I don’t even know if it’s still there, or if it has been reconstituted back to “books of local interest” or some such thing. Lately, I’ve noticed that more than one local author has started out a reading there with the sort-of disclaimer, “This isn’t really a Katrina book.”
We no longer cry when we step into the store. We buy books; we don’t plot rescue missions.
Yet it is impossible to forget what Tom and Judith gave us when we needed it the most. I was reminded of this at another reading at Octavia, this one on August 28, 2008. Just a few days earlier, Hurricane Gustav had formed off Haiti, and it was making its way across Cuba and into the Gulf of Mexico. We expected to evacuate the next day, but that evening I called Octavia to find out if a scheduled appearance by Tony DiTerlizzi, who cocreated The Spiderwick Chronicles, was still on. It was. While my wife packed our suitcases, I brought our two kids to the store. DiTerlizzi presented a master class on how to differentiate between dragons of Asian mythologies and those of European mythologies. My own kids took their turns at the easels to imagine their own dragons. The symbolism was not lost on the parents in the room, as we prepared to flee another monster storm of yet-unknown proportions.
That evacuation was, thankfully, brief. I don’t know when the next one will take place, or how long it will last. We live in New Orleans, and so does Octavia Books. Whatever happens, I fully expect that we’ll go through it together.
MICHAEL TISSERAND is the author of The Kingdom of Zydeco, Sugarcane Academy: How a New Orleans Teacher and His Storm-Struck Students Created a School to Remember, and Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White.
Luis Alberto Urrea
Anderson’s Bookshops, NAPERVILLE, ILLINOIS
I didn’t get to grow up with a local bookstore. But my daughter did. When I was a kid, there was not only no bookstore in the ’hood, but no library, either. It wasn’t until we left the barrio close to the border and got to a little dull suburb that I found the joy of a regular bookstore.
It was one of those little storefront shops behind the supermarket. Down from the barbershop where the old barbers were ignored by the hippies and trimmed the same granddads’ crew cuts every week. Next to the coin-op laundry.
The bookstore was one of those shops with a cute name—Book Nook or Second Time Around or Sally’s Re-Readers. It was chock-full of used paperbacks, and you could buy them for a few cents, or you could trade Sally two books for one unread one. Heaven! My mom unloaded so many unwanted paperbacks there that we had a card full of credit in the little plastic box. I discovered John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books there, thank you very much. And Elmore Leonard.
Nothing fancy, but magic in every dusty sneeze-inducing coffee-stained moldy section. Sally even had a raggedy shelf of profoundly unwanted poems. Yevtushenko! I tell you, this was a revolution to have a Russian lurking around behind Von’s market.
I moved to the Boston area in 1982, and it was an orgy of bookstores. I went from zero to sixty in four seconds flat. Bookstores in Cambridge, Somerville, Waltham, Boston. I went two hours on the Red Line and the Green Line just to get to a bookstore off the beaten track. I was making up for lost time, I guess.
No wonder, then, that I became a writer. Everything about books was sacred and fun and self-indulgent—and every book was a new addition to my own self-made Ph.D. I had a Ph.D. in basement shelves.
It came to pass that I published a bunch of books, and they ended up in other peoples’ favorite bookstores. I went on tour, visiting these great shops all over the country. I realized even then, when some people in Indiana knew of this new book awesomeness called Borders, that it was the independent booksellers selling my work. These smaller stores in neighborhoods were the only way a guy like me could connect with readers who did not know me or care all that much about my subject matter. I learned this new phrase they used: “Hand-selling.”
I got better at it. My original one-client or zero-client book signings started to generate, oh, six, seven, even eight rabid fans. Stampedes, I tell you! And the hand-sellers acted as if it was a great evening and gave me tea and sold me haiku books and weird European books about talking fish. But they always invited me back. We have come a long way, those of us who have survived these hard years. A lot of those cherished spaces are empty now, and I wish everybody had grown up in a book desert so they would have cared for their neighborhood stores better.
And then I moved to Chi-town. It wasn’t part of my life plan. My family was like a fairy-tale gone sideways. I was trying to get us all back up to the Rockies, where I had lived among some sweet bookstores and sweeter mountains. But my attention was caught by the University of Illinois, which offered
me tenure if I would bring my writin’ ways to the city. Yowza! A job they can’t fire me from? I’m there.
We gravitated to Naperville. Thirty miles closer to the Rockies. (I’m doing things more gradually now.) It’s a little gem of a town—a river, as they say, runs through it. A fat wild turkey seems to think itself sheriff of our street and patrols the houses, scolding parked cars that irritate its pin-sized mind. And downtown, that cool little downtown I never had, with old cowboy buildings and sparkling lights in the trees on the main street, there was this bookstore. Anderson’s.
Went in. Loved it. Hung out there a lot. Was deeply proud when it won awards for general awesomeness. Hung out with Becky Anderson at various literary events around the country. Got to go to the thousands of book signings they sponsor and use my evil influence to go down to the basement to meet the literary heroes hiding down there before their readings. Thank you, Becky.
But this story is not about me. This story is about my daughter. She first entered Anderson’s as a toddler. Can you imagine what that meant to me? My baby girl stumbling around, chewing on books and playing with the wooden train set they had in the front of the store.
It began at Anderson’s. It didn’t take long for our girl to turn from the huge stuffed animals and trains to the bright shelves. Books! She found books. She liked scary monster books, though she called them “cary mongers.” And, at 18 months, had the bug bad enough that she’d listen to us read the stories, memorize them, and then hold the book and make believe she was reading them back to us. Out loud. Perfectly. Thank you, Becky.
