Bookstores, Libraries, Paperbacks, and Hope

Bookstores and Libraries Together

I have written more than once on this blog about how I see booksellers and librarians as colleagues, not competitors. Today I want to take a different angle and look at the places themselves and how they operate in our communities. Again, I don’t see it as a competition. Both, in my view, fulfill essential functions, some but not all of which overlap—which is why both are essential. 

 

Both bookstores and libraries provide books to the reading public, hold author events (often collaboratively), and offer breathing space away from life’s hustle and bustle. A bookseller, like a librarian, is happy to answer questions and to make recommendations (although I am not the swiftest when asked on the spot for a recommendation). Our missions and our realities overlap.

Bookstore event

Library event

Coming back to add something about audiobooks. Library patrons (anyone with a library card) can order audio books through Libby. I believe those are free to borrow. Bookstore customer-friends can buy audio books through Libro.fm and choose a specific participating indie bookstore’s portal, e.g., Dog Ears Books.

A library’s advantages over those of a bookstore are probably obvious. As a local tax-supported institution, a library can loan its books out with no charge. People who worry about accumulating books need have no concerns on that score, either: they simply read borrowed books and return them. In Michigan, moreover, if a local library doesn’t have a particular book a patron wants, the book can be borrowed from another library in the state, and in Leelanau County our township libraries provide many other township contacts and services besides books.

Julie, our lovely librarian in Northport

It may be harder to see at first glance what a bookstore can offer that a library cannot, and a shop specializing in used and rare books will obviously be different from one stocking and selling new books exclusively, but I do see a few ways that my business has an edge over publicly funded libraries, and maybe—I’m not sure here; what do you think?—a lot of it boils down to eccentricity.

 

I don’t have to answer to a boss or a board of directors or local officials or even, except to the extent that my business must be profitable to remain in existence, public demand, which means I can give shelf room to authors whose popularity peaked 100 years ago (they are here to be rediscovered by younger generations), to books in foreign languages (despite Americans’ resolute devotion to monolinguism, as if there were something unpatriotic in knowing anything other than Yankee English), and to beautifully bound classics (for readers who like to see volumes permanently available to them on their home shelves and not just ephemeral words on the screen of an electronic device). Being “my own boss” allows me to curate a collection in line with my personal values, taking a long view on what’s worth reading, rather than having to de-acquisition books that popular culture considers past their shelf life. 

One of the few librarians I found difficult (he was not trained as a librarian, I should make clear) once justified putting a major philosophy classic and a major literary classic in the books-for-sale section on the grounds that “they’re just old books.” Yes, they were, and important ones, too. And to be fair, I have to say that the librarian in question needed shelf room for books his local public wanted to read. His was not a research library. Whereas, if I think a book has value (in the broad sense, not the narrow monetary sense), I can keep it on the shelf year after year, waiting for the person who recognizes its importance.

There’s more. Having grown up in the era of the nuclear arms race, I always tend to think apocalyptically, and so I can’t help wondering sometimes if e-books don’t constitute a danger to printed books. I am not thinking about sales figures but about the continued existence and availability of important works into the future. Think about the way that digital storage formats change over time. Quickly! Add to that the possibility that digital texts can be altered before delivery. I see part of my mission as preservation. 

 

If the Internet vanished tomorrow, do you have a good dictionary in your home? A copy of the U.S. Constitution? A book of maps? Plays, poems, novels? I started to use the names of playwrights and poets and novelists in that last question but then deleted them, as there is no way to list all whose work deserves to be preserved. 

So when I put on my shop door the sticker reading “Bookstores Save Democracy,” I mean no disrespect to libraries, which also serve to save democracy. Our missions are completely compatible.

 

Disappearance of MMPs

A comment on a recent post asked me if the coming elimination of paperback books by publishers would have an impact on my business. What’s happening is that so-called “mass market paperbacks,” the kind I refer to as “grocery store books,” are being phased out, not the better bound “trade” paperbacks. Trade paperbacks (which are much easier to hold open and read and may take the place of hardcover books as first releases, as they are much less expensive) will continue to be published. 

 

Robert Gray wrote on “Shelf Awareness” this Thursday that he had a “curious double response” to the news that new mass market paperbacks would no longer be published. Years ago their affordability seduced him, and yet he could not remember the last time he had bought one. 

 

I remember when a new bookstore came to the town where I grew up. It was on the main downtown street, all the books were new, colorful paperbacks, and all hovered around a price of 35 cents. My first purchase was a red (I remember the cover) 35-cent paperback copy of Catcher in the Rye. A few years later, when I purchased at the university bookstore a paperback copy of James Joyce's Ulysses, it was a larger format and carried a whopping price of $2.95. That book, with tape-reinforced spine, is still in my possession 60 years later.

One problem with cheap paperback books, other than cheap paper, was that their glued binding did not hold up well over time, which accounts for the prices of collectible paperback books with original covers intact, the illustrated cover often accounting for most of the value of the book.

Hope: Life’s One Essential? 

I was told there are only three essentials in life: someone to love, someone to be loved by, and hope for the future. I have been mulling over that wisdom and have provisionally concluded (willing to listen to arguments) that hope is the most essential. Because, think about it: if you love and are loved but have no hope for the future, won’t you be tempted to follow the example of Stefan Zweig and his second wife, who committed suicide together? Yet even alone, even downright miserable, if you have hope for the future, that hope can include the possibility of finding someone to love. --But then (I go on to reflect), love, once known, never really vanishes, does it? To have a future, however, demands that we hold onto hope.

But what do you think? Or should I ask, how do you feel?

 

 

Note to customers: I have restocked Blood Brothers, by Elias Chacour, with David Hazard. Talk about hope! Wow!

Spring WILL come again!

Turn, Turn, Turn

Not AI-generated! Completely unedited!

Peak Autumn Color

People kept asking if the turning fall leaves had reached peak color, and I kept saying, day after day, no, not quite yet. There was still a lot of green left. Late Saturday afternoon’s sunshine, though, invited me for a little drive after work, and Sunday’s rain, because it put the kibosh on dog park fun, tempted me farther afield in the car. You can see more of those Saturday and Sunday scenes on my photo blog, and take a look at the Lake Leelanau Narrows on Wednesday morning, while you’re there.

When did we turn the color corner? In Leelanau Township, I’d say it was overnight from Sunday to Monday. Monday! What a perfect fall day! On Tuesday came the rain and wind. Black walnuts thumped and clattered to ground, windblown leaves tossed restlessly, yellow popples shimmered and gleamed.

My stepdaughter (Artist’s oldest child) and her husband came up on Monday, and Tuesday evening we went to the Happy Hour for dinner. I kept saying that Tuesday felt like Saturday and asking why. “Because we’re here,” she said, “so it feels like a weekend.” Also, we agreed, because it just seems that peak color should land on a weekend for all those travelers and visitors hoping to catch it.

Re-reading

At least a couple times a month I pull an old favorite book off the shelf. As October races past, after having read for the first time Le premier homme, by Albert Camus, and Medicine Walk, by Richard Waganese, I turned once more to Elliot Paul’s The Last Time I Saw Paris, the closeup portrait of a Parisian neighborhood and its denizens and how they are storm-tossed by events in the larger world.

The years Paul lived in Paris were the fraught years between the two world wars when the wounds of France and Germany were still festering, both between the two countries and within their borders. My many readings of this book have made almost personal to me the anguish of that time, as the author shows growing tensions of people living on one small street of shops and residences in central Paris, but with every reading, also, something jumps out at me that hadn’t jumped out before. Elliot Paul’s portrayal of his years in France does not spare the corruption or “backwardness” of French politics or society, but he is also put to the test to explain his own country to the French, and never more so than when Sacco and Vanzetti are put to death, news that set off demonstrations across Paris by workers sympathetic to the condemned. 

 

It was no new thing to the French to have undesirables railroaded and executed on one flimsy pretext or another. But, somehow, they had hoped it was different in America, and so, in my innocence, had I.

 

-      Elliot Paul, The Last Time I Saw Paris (1942)

 

His neighbors, Paul reports, were kind to him on the sad occasion and did not hold him accountable for what they saw as his country’s miscarriage of justice.

Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker, age 32, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler, age 29, were immigrants from Italy and avowed anarchists. That much is fact. In 1921 they were tried and convicted of armed robbery and murder, numerous requests for appeal were refused, and they were put to death by electrocution on August 23, 1927, continuing to insist on their innocence.

Were Sacco and Vanzetti guilty? The court said they were. Some believed Sacco was guilty, Vanzetti innocent. In 1925, another prisoner in the same prison as Sacco, Celestino Madeiros, member of the Morelli gang of robbers, claimed in writing that it was he, not Sacco, who was guilty of the armed robbery and murder of the two payroll guards, and in 1927 Felix Frankfurter, later to become a Supreme Court justice, wrote that “every reasonable probability” pointed  to the Morelli gang and away from Sacco and Vanzetti. History, while not taking a definite stand on guilt or innocence, agrees that the defendants did not receive a fair trial, that they were condemned for their beliefs and their status as immigrants rather than for anything they had done or not done.

 

 

Another Four-Letter English Word

To HATE: to dislike intensely, passionately; to feel aversion or hostility toward. 

Most of us growing up in the U.S. in my generation were told as children that hating is wrong. We were even told often that we were mistaken about our own feeling. “You don’t hate your baby sister,” a parent would say patiently, if we were lucky. No, we were jealous, worried that the baby would take all our parents’ attention, etc. That wasn't hate. Later, did another child at school hate me? Or was that child jealous (for some reason) or even, if a member of the opposite sex, attracted but confused?

In the Christian Gospel of Matthew, Jesus counsels against hate and sets a high bar for those claiming to follow a God of love: 

 

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor^’ and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.

 

Last Saturday across the United States of America protestors demonstrated against the current administration in joyful, high-spirited pro-democracy rallies. The president and his Cabinet members insisted ahead of time and continued, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, to claim that these were “hate America” rallies, peopled by Marxists and other extremists, including “Antifa” (which the president thinks is an organization). It was also claimed, entirely without evidence—because it was a false claim—that George Soros and other “leftist billionaires” had funded the demonstrations, paying people to attend.

HA! They would like that to be true, but it is not.

I know those demonstrators, not only in Traverse City, but in Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Marquette, Chicago, Joliet, Seattle, New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. They were my friends and neighbors. They were my bookstore customers. They were my family. They carried hand-made signs. And yes, some of them made negative observations on the president, because “No Kings” was the theme of the day, everyone having decided ahead of time not to fragment the message with a variety of issues, because the bottom line is we do not want anyone in power running roughshod over freedoms guaranteed us in the U.S. Constitution.

Demonstrators were out on Saturday because they love this country! There were many American flags. The protests were peaceful. Counter-protestors were safe, too.

Republicans (I do not call them “conservatives” because they are not) who decry “hate” coming from the president’s opposition would be well advised to look to the president himself. “I hate my opponent! And I don’t want the best for them!” Words from the president of the United States. As for his king-in-the-plane social media cartoon, enough has been said about that. The image spoke for itself. 

Hate pours down from the top, coming from the same source since the campaign of 2016. It takes a lot of resolve not to respond to his words and actions with reciprocal hate but with determination and hope and resolve for a better future. Because there is, too, the image of the East Wing of the White House under demolition, after the president’s earlier assurances that the structural integrity of the building would be preserved. Now, it turns out, he never thought “much” of the building. It was “very small,” he says, way too small. Not the first time he’s promised one thing and done the opposite. All presidents have made changes, you say? Redecorating and even remodeling are not demolition. The demolition image is a metaphor, a friend said. Sadly, yes.

I attended Saturday’s rallies all over the country in spirit. In my bookstore, my colors were on display for everyone to see. 

Hostility, aversion, passionate dislike? Yes, I feel it. What do I hate? 

I hate the militarization of American cities, the setting aside of due process, the attempts to gag the free press and allow only government propaganda as “news.” I hate the storm trooper actions, under orders from the administration, that tear men, women, and children out of their beds and zip-tie them for hours before deciding that some of them have done nothing wrong and can be allowed to return to their ransacked apartments. 

I hate the lies. 

I hate the desecration of the White House, the attempted destruction of unions, and the executive demolition of long-established social safety nets and environmental protections. I hate the killing, by my country and therefore in my name, of unknown people from other countries in open waters with no evidence presented against them and no trial to determine guilt of any kind. I hate having my own government violating the First Amendment here at home.

I hate the lies. 

I hate the way Americans have been encouraged by a would-be dictator (“Vote for me, and you’ll never have to vote again”) to turn against each other and see their own neighbors and family members as enemies.

I hate the lies.

He would never have been put in the White House if he had told the truth all along. No one can support the current administration and the rule of law. To support one demands opposing the other. 

 

Did you mark your calendar yet?

The date is November 12. It’s a Wednesday. The time is 4 p.m., so it won’t interfere with any evening meetings or keep anyone away from dinner or up too late at night. We will have a special guest speaker, with a new book, in the gallery next to Dog Ears Books. I’ll tell you all about it when November arrives.... 

 

But first, Halloween!

A couple of young moms in Northport have been going around town to get those of us in the central part of the village on board for trick-or-treating. I’m on board. Whether or not I’ll be in costume is an open question, but I’ll be there at the bookstore door from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Friday, October 31, and I hope Halloween 2025 will be as much fun as past Halloweens on Nagonaba Street years ago. Here are some trick-or-treaters from 2004. Yes, 21 years ago in Northport!

Out With the Old, In With the New

"Table!" is an agility command that translated well to this forest stump.

Since winter arrived (or this season's version of winter, anyway, which hasn't been all that wintry in terms of snow), Sunny and I go out a couple times a day for half an hour to an hour on what I call a walk -- she does a lot of running, which I’m happy to leave to her -- and New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day were no exceptions. Before I get into those days, though, I want to back up in time. If you read my 12/28/23 post, you already know that Sunny was invited with me to the home of friends for Christmas Day dinner and that she behaved very well (i.e., amazingly well, which is to say, she amazed me!). My reason for turning back so far in the 2023 calendar is not to repeat myself, but to focus on one of the ornaments on our friends’ holiday tree. You might not see it if you didn’t look closely. 

So much to notice on one tree!

But here is the dragon.

There, you see? I don’t recall the artist’s name who made this ornament (Marjorie would have to remind me), but isn’t it perfect for my first post of the new year, the Year of the Wood Dragon? (I would have put it at the very beginning, except that Sunny thought she deserved top billing.)

 

A day or two later, I had another invitation that included Sunny, and while I wouldn’t have time to get her out for a lot of hard exercise before we went to the home of these friends, our hostess promised a walk on the beach – and, as I say, a “walk” off-leash for Sunny means she gets to run -- and run she did! She had a glorious romp, and sunset was glorious, too! Dinner conversation was so lively that Sunny didn’t start barking until she noticed her reflection in the windows. 

Barbara leads the way.

Happy girl!

Glorious sunset --

So not only did I have an unusually social week, but so did my dog, and that made me happy! 

Without any big plans for ushering in the new year, I asked friends if I could bring them cheesecake on New Year’s Day afternoon, and they graciously agreed. Then, out of the blue, I had an invitation to a New Year’s Eve party that was scheduled to run from 7:30 to after midnight, hosted by old friends I hadn’t spent time with for quite a while, so while I have never been much of a “party animal,” I resolved to attend and enjoy myself. 

 

Driving the back roads of the township after dark, I was visited by ghosts of years past, remembering Basil S. back when he still did car repair at his place; Louis R., an old Barb’s Bakery regular; Ellen B., who drove her big car much longer than she should have been driving. Driving out of my way at one point and, turning around, seeing cattails in my headlights, I thought of Ellen going off the road and into the swamp, where she stayed overnight until someone discovered her. (That must have been before cell phones.) I remembered the parents of my host of the present evening, too, and sitting next to his mother at a New Year’s Eve dinner years ago….

Old trees make way for the young.

Now we – my host and hostess, her brother and sister-in-law, and I – are the old folks. There was a moment in the evening when the younger people fell silent while we oldtimers belted out Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” but otherwise we were the quiet generation, and that was fine. I looked around the living room at everyone gathered there and felt a surge of tenderness for all, tinged with a bit of melancholy, of course (because in years past, the Artist and I attended this NYE party together), but I was happy to be there, even at that.

 

I’d spent most of the day on Sunday making a big pot of hoppin’ john and a pot of rice to go with it so on Monday afternoon took a couple containers up to my neighbors, as well as, later, a container of each with the cheesecake to my Northport friends. Another good visit, comparing notes on one another’s lives past and present and our hopes (mine very modest) for the year to come.

 

(Two nights coming home in the dark! Really, I guess, it was all the same day, first at 12:30 a.m. and then around 6 p.m.)

 

I finished out my 2023 reading year with two books of fiction, both first novels by authors I hope to see more from in future: from Detroit, Shifting Through Neutral, by Bridgett M. Davis, and from Idaho, Winter Range (a novel set in rural Montana), by Claire Davis.

 

On the last day of the year, I began what will be the first title on my Books Read 2024 list, a memoir by Susan Straight entitled The Country of Women, and I cannot say enough about this author. I did say a bit back on November 2, but since then I have read another of her novels (Mecca, her most recent) and have been devouring her memoir, a long love letter addressed to her three daughters, telling them everything she knows about previous generations on both sides of their family.

Now, with Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new novel, The Waters, coming out in only days, something that strikes me, despite their different worlds, is how much Campbell and Straight have in common. Both of them are content to live in what “sophisticated” people on the East and West Coasts (or even in the higher echelons of academia in any part of the country) would probably see as poor, backwater communities. Straight was asked in one of her writing classes why she kept turning in stories about working-class people, and Campbell’s fiction has been labeled “rural noir” or “grit lit.” I just shake my head. These women are both brilliant writers, and they make, of their overlooked neighborhoods and neighbors, fiction that rings true and important for the same reasons that any fiction rings true and important: the characters are people whose lives are fraught with challenge, who are sometimes (not always) noble even in failure, families that are, as much as any other, Americans, all of them together making up not a melting pot but a rich, many-flavored stew -- vivid characters who come alive on the pages and live in our minds and hearts after we close the books. I should probably add that Straight and Campbell’s works are also noteworthy for portrayals of strong women. So whatever your gender or orientation, if you are weary of the women in Henry James or Ernest Hemingway, or if you simply want literature that includes more layers of complex and diverse humanity, make 2024 the year that you discover Bonnie Jo Campbell and Susan Straight. 

 

Make it also, please, a year of enchantment, if you can. Pick up a pencil or paintbrush or a flute or guitar, go for a walk in the woods or on the beach or just around the block, and leave the to-do lists in a desk drawer. Get lost, if only in a dream. Explore, if only with a paper map. 

We won’t always be here. Don’t overlook the wonderful in ordinary life. Today we are alive, and that is beautiful.

Home, Sweet Home

Postscript: 

 

I’ve gone back mentally over my holidays and decided they definitely deserve a higher rating than I’d been giving them. When people asked, I was saying, “Not bad.” Well, the time was much better than “not bad.” 

 

From the people I fed to the people who fed me, from the bookstore customer who brought his tools to put one of my bookcases back into working order to friends who invited my dog to their homes, from quiet hours cooking in my “Paris kitchen” to outdoor rambles in the countryside that has seen so little snow that I haven’t had to have my driveway plowed a single time yet. Messages of holiday greetings to and from distant loved ones. People who found their way from faraway to Dog Ears Books. My own reading at home. Those peaceful, dark country roads with occasional outdoor holiday lights on homes passed. The dog park and the beach. My little Charlie Brown tree on Waukazoo Street and my much tinier tree at home. And so much more!

 

My holidays were good. As for this new year just begun, it’s a wonderful life, and I don’t want to waste it, so my friends, let us be light to one another.

"When it's cold outside / I got the month of May...."

Post-postscript:

Interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell here.
Interview with Susan Straight here. 

Many more to be found online -- just search for the authors by name.

Autumn Vacation Hours

 

[Late note: This should have been titled "Hours of Autumn Vacation," as the title I gave it sounds like bookstore hours, and that's not what it is. It istime stolen away from bookstore and housework and yard tasks to immerse myself in balmy autumn hours.]

It’s Sunday, and the sun is shining bright, and all over northern Michigan colors are popping. The Artist and I will be working outdoors this afternoon, preparing for a family visit and clearing the deck for visiting on Monday, rain or shine. Actually, the forecast for Monday is rain, with sunshine and clear skies to return on Tuesday. Whatever future days may bring, however, today’s post is a showcase for sunny days and the stunning colors of fall.

Friday, while Bruce manned the bookstore sales counter for me, I took the opportunity to take care of a couple errands down in Suttons Bay and then – oh, sybaritic escape! – took what remained of my New Bohemian Café chai latte and my dog and the novel I was reading down to the beach just north of the marina and sat there reading and looking up from time to time to note a sailboat out on the water or gulls huddled on the sand. Once in a while a gull would take wing and scream or laugh; other than that, the day was quiet and peaceful. 

I drove south and west in the county to see what I could see. Every prospect pleased. Back around the old homestead, asters in their stunning colors put a song in my heart. I was home, but I felt, just then, for a while, as carefree as if I were on vacation.

Not that my ordinary commute to Northport or time in the bookstore is a hardship. Here is some color from Leelanau Township and Dog Ears Books.

This morning, though, I vowed to pay full homage with my camera to the wonders of green ash leaves in autumn. While we have lost many mature ash trees in Leelanau County (perhaps the majority), enough remain to give some idea of the range of their subtle fall colors.

 

[Second late note: I haven't given you any idea at all of the range of colors of ash leaves. These all look yellow to brown. Where are the reds and purples?]

Going out to photograph ash leaves, I came upon an oddity that might have puzzled a newbie botanizer looking to identify a wild vine. Here is what I saw, and what do you say about it? 

If you realized that the wild grapevine had twined around the scarlet-leafed Virginia creeper, you are correct.

But pictures above show only the beginning of the northern Michigan fall color palette. Everywhere, overall, there is so much! 

Our eyes drink and drink, and still there is more! Lovely, lovely October in Michigan! What good medicine you are for our weary souls!

 

On Saturday afternoon a friend who dropped by the bookstore remarked on the soft, mild air we had enjoyed on Friday evening. “It reminded me,” he said, “of when I jumped ship in Caligari, Sardinia.” Oh, yes! Oh, yes! Wonderful, the associative leaps memory can make – and the delightful surprise of such a remark to the ear of a listening friend! 

 

Thank you, October! We needed you!