Opinion
OPINION: Bookstore Memories
David Rodeback | Guest Contributor
A teenage son and I were at Powell’s World of Books in Portland, a recurring pilgrimage. I was browsing in Fiction when his distress call came.
He was half a building away, lurking in his favorite subsection of History. He had filled an entire basket with books to buy, and he needed help.
To his credit, he already knew he needed two kinds of help. He needed time to reduce his selections to a manageable stack of several. That took him most of an hour. Then he would still need more funds than he’d saved for books. He solicited and quickly received contributions from bookish family members, and he came away with a heartwarming but reasonable stack of books.
I like to listen to people in bookstores. I’ve overheard one sort of conversation many times, especially at used bookstores. The child in it can be a first-grader or a teen, and it goes about the same.
The child says, “Can I get these four?” Or “I’m ready to go. I have my seven books.”
The parent, perhaps secretly delighted, replies, “I said to choose two.” Or “I don’t know that you’re going to get all those.”
The child doubles down. “But they’re all so good!” “I really wanted twice this many.” “I’ll read all of them!”
This conversation is almost as reliable as a romance novel. It nearly always has a happy ending: the young reader goes home with books.
It’s the moments, not just my own, that have me mourning the approaching demise of American Fork’s HideAway Books, a local gem that has graced our community for seven years. Its vigorous end-of-life liquidation will wind down before summer.
I’ve read that about two-thirds of U.S. small businesses survive their first two years. About half survive their first five. I don’t know how many indie bookstores survive the first two years after a Barnes & Noble opens nearby. Anecdotally, American Fork’s results are not good.
Seeking happier thoughts, I asked HideAway’s owner, Heidi Rowley, to share some favorite moments in bookselling so I could share them here.
“In my first summer in business,” she said, “I did a summer reading program with a small group of kids. They had weekly reading goals. One boy was going on a long family vacation, so he got his reading goals done early and came in to show me.
“When he was leaving, he gave me a hug and said he would miss me and the store while he was gone. He was six years old.
“It was the first time I think I truly understood that I was doing more than running a business. I was creating a space to make the love of reading feel alive.”
One highlight came every October. “I love Halloween on Main Street,” Rowley said. “For each of the past seven years, we’ve handed out more than 2,000 books at Halloween. It’s great to see kids excited and surprised that they get to choose a book to keep. We’ve even had kids plop right down and read their books before going on to get more candy.”
One of her favorite memories happened at a grocery store. “I was standing in line, and a small child in front of me looked at me, eyes wide, and asked, ‘Are you the bookstore lady?’”
“I said yes. He smiled really big and said, ‘I love the bookstore!’”
Like that Powell’s episode, most of my own grown-up bookstore memories involve children, usually my own. Here’s one that doesn’t.
One of my favorite book stores anywhere opens twice a year, for several days in May and several more in October. If you ever get a chance to experience the Friends of the Tompkins County Public Library Book Sale in Ithaca, New York, take it. They sell hundreds of thousands of books each year.
I remember getting in line before dawn for the first day, with bookish friends. I remember returning on the last day and paying $20 for a box full of classic literature for a family member.
My favorite triumph involved my graduate work in Russian literature. In vain, I queried bookstores and libraries from California to Moscow, looking for a recently-published Russian language biography of a favorite author I was studying, Vasily Grossman. I gave up. Then I found a copy in the Russian language section at the Book Sale.
I have library memories too. Bookstore and library memories have two important prerequisites. First, there must be a bookstore or library. Second, you must go there, not just virtually.
In other words, there’s no point in having librarians or bookstore ladies if we don’t visit them where the books are.
Locally, I’d rather HideAway Books stayed for seventy years. But seven years is a lot of memories for a lot of readers. And maybe we locals will get another Main Street bookstore to call our own someday.
David Rodeback has lived in American Fork since 1998. He blogs on topics that aren’t politics at BendableLight.com.
