Meeting and Making Mutual Friends

"Isn't it all about me?" Not always, girl!

New England is a long way from Michigan, and I’ve never been closer to the former than New Jersey (which doesn’t count at all, I’m sure). Neither has New England been part of my dream life, a place I’ve longed to see. My parents made the trip once to see the famed New England autumn and were appalled by the traffic and the difficulty of finding overnight accommodations, not having booked ahead. My father’s conclusion was: “Michigan is better.” And October 2024 in Michigan was certainly one of the loveliest ever. But this is all beside my point, which is that A Memory of Vermont as a book title would not necessarily draw me in, except for the subtitle, Our Life in the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop. Now that’s more like it! 

My outdoor winter world, as of a day ago --

Poet Walter Hard’s drugstore, following a tradition begun by his own father, featured a table of books, so when Walter and Margaret’s daughter wanted experience in the book world before graduating from college, her idea was to have her own summer bookshop in their little town of Manchester, Vermont. As a bookseller and reader, I am always interested to learn how someone else got into the business. What happened with Ruth’s seasonal shop was that after she graduated and went on to a career in publishing, her parents continued the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop. Her father even sold the family drugstore to have more time to devote to his own writing (a decision that shocked many in the town), and he and his wife, besides their other writings in poetry and prose, collaborated on a travel book called This Is Vermont. 

Well, there she is again!

As I read their story, which inevitably includes many other writers and mention of many books, what strikes me over and over is all the connections books make in a reading life – connections to other writers and other books. Walter Hard, for example, was asked to write The Connecticut for the “Rivers of America” series, and only just the other day I finished Hodding Carter’s The Lower Mississippi from the same series, having been led to Hodding Carter by Albert Murray, after having been led to Albert Murray by some other author’s book, though now I forget which book or author. And imagine my delight to learn that Ruth Hard, in stocking her original Johnny Appleseed Bookshop, carried all of Mary Webb’s books then in print, having fallen in love as I did with Precious Bane after reading about that book in yet another book, so that when I read of Ruth's love for Precious Bane, I feel I am meeting a friend with whom I share something important.

In their winter caps....

And then Hendrik Willem Van Loon himself pays a visit to the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop and inscribes his book on Rembrandt to Margaret (after she procures 10 copies of the remaindered volume for him and one for herself) with a wonderfully detailed drawing of Rembrandt in his studio! Van Loon! The first of his books I had a chance to obtain was his Geography, found at a yard sale in Leland one summer long ago, so long ago that the author’s name was then still unfamiliar to me, but the art on the pages captured my eye, and I was very happy years later to have in my own shop, for a while, a first edition of his The Story of Mankind, the very first Newbery winner (1922), written for children and so popular with grownups that a paperback edition had to be issued issued for adults.

The trees in their winter white....

My favorite Van Loon, though, has to be Lives. In Van Loon's Lives, the narrator and a relative decide to give a series of dinner parties with the most interesting guests they can think to invite. Following a brilliant decision that invitations do not have to be limited to the living, the first guest they invite is Erasmus. For each social evening planned, there is discussion of the menu and what aspects of “modern” life might most interest their guest or guests from the past. What intrigues the guests is not always what the hosts expected! But again the charm of the illustrations -- ! For instance, Descartes with his cape blowing in the wind! I have always wondered if this book might not have been the inspiration for the old television show, Steve Allen’s “Meeting of Minds.” 

 

Reading books and finding in them mention of other familiar books and authors, as well as encountering titles and names one is inspired to seek out, is only one aspect of the meeting of minds that takes place in reading, but I find it endlessly enchanting. 

 

In the more than three decades of my own bookshop, I too have met many interesting and delightful people from all walks of life, not only writers and other booksellers but people with backgrounds and callings very different from my own. Sometimes in the morning before we began our days in Northport, the Artist would muse, “I wonder who we’ll meet today.” For me, there has always been the additional question, What books will find their way to me today? Other minds, many connections, old friends and new.

Homeward bound

As you can see from the images in today’s post, winter has arrived at last Up North. I drove to Traverse City on Tuesday morning through the most beautiful scenes imaginable: sun-kissed, snow-laden branches glistening bright, blinding white against ominously dark masses of clouds. I’d been in my bookshop on Sunday and Monday, both supposedly days off according to my winter schedule, but there were still a lot of holiday visitors in town on Sunday, and I had deliveries to meet on Monday. Tuesday, then, was my first chance to get to Traverse City to pick up the new order of book bags, and Sunny and I made it to the dog park in Northport by noon, where we saw several of our mutual friends. Nice!

I thought I might be snowed in on Wednesday, but my plow guy had come, and the winter storm warning was from 7 p.m. on Wednesday to 7 p.m. on Thursday, so I went to Northport, picked up mail, bought some groceries, and opened my shop for four hours. One in-store customer and one phone order made my being there worthwhile. Now, will Thursday will be a snowed-in-at-home day? 

Back way into the village on Wednesday

Coming down the hill

Our beautiful village tree!

Postscript: All right, that is the bookish part of my life, but what of the rest? Here in the dark of Thursday morning, I am sitting up in bed with my dog leaning up companionably against my side, the wind “howling” (it doesn’t really howl; there must be a better word for the way it wraps itself insistently around our old farmhouse), and the furnace blower coming on at intervals, thinking about my life and the lives of others. 

As for people I meet in my bookshop (a big part of my life), the first batch of holiday greetings I rushed to the post office contained an egregious error. I had reported a visit by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin as one by Michigan Senator Carl Levin! Impossible, since Levin died in 2021! All I can say in my (feeble) defense is that both are on my “good guys” list, and I have been, after all, since January 1967 a “Michigan girl.” Senator Durbin, please accept my apologies!

And yet -- there they are together, connected, in my bookshop!

Widow brain? Lack of focus? The perils of haste?

I talked to a dear friend last night whose husband died on Thanksgiving Day, a week ago today. One week into widowhood, she is in no hurry to clear away his piles of books and papers and says that being in their home, surrounded by the life they made together, is a consolation to her. I had a letter from another dear friend on Tuesday who thinks I am “brave.” I am not brave. I get up in the mornings and do what has to be done and arrange for little treats for Sunny and me, e.g., dog park on Tuesday, potato chips on Wednesday, and look around at the beautiful world and feel gratitude for my life. 

At the same time – Tuesday’s drive to Traverse City, for instance, one of the most beautiful mornings I have seen in my entire life: Every moment of that lovely morning, drinking in its loveliness, awed by the world’s beauty, I also felt the pain of the Artist’s absence. He was not seeing it. We were not sharing it. Joy and sorrow commingled, the bitter and the sweet. Life is, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “a dappled thing,” no less lovely for its mixed and paradoxical nature. 

And yes, I am taking today, Thursday, as a snow day, staying home and off the roads.

A Dog in a Paris Bookshop

W  O  R  D

 

Sometimes I play around with possible book titles. Certain words, I find, have an irresistible quality to them, bait on hooks we can hardly keep ourselves from biting. A few such are:

 

    light

    sun

    journey

    path

    road

    sea

    ocean

    river

    lake

    woods

    forest

    mountain(s)

    desert

    city

    village

    country

    west

    north

    south

    way

 

East of Eden, okay, but is ‘east’ an irresistible word? Does it have romance in it? What do you think? Anyway, you see what I mean about magic words?

 

Numerous new releases and fairly recent book titles feature other words that have magic for many of us, telling me I am certainly not alone in being drawn in by them. I've noticed a lot of books with these words in their titles:

 

    Paris*

    dog

    bookshop

 

Hence the title for today’s post, because – well, didn’t it draw you in? I don’t know of anyone who has used this exact title, but I offer it to anyone ready to write the book, and my plea has an addendum: You must, please, include lots of details about Paris and the bookshop and the dog, because as lovers of Paris and dogs and bookshops (please let there be used books, and let the dog be of mature years!), we your readers want a generous literary getaway and can never have too much of what we love.

 

(*Two of my all-time favorite books set in Paris are nonfiction, and neither one is new. Elliott Paul’s The Last Time I Saw Paris tells of his time on the tiny Rue de la Huchette in the years leading up to World War II, while Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon, essays originally published in the New Yorker magazine not all long ago--in my sense of time--, introduce the reader to places and experiences that few tourists would uncover for themselves. Both these books give a quirky alien insider’s perspective on Paris insolite.) 

So once more I ask: Where, where, where is the Paris bookshop dog story? And could the dog have been Pierre’s dog in another life?

What words are irresistible magic for you in book titles? Because I know my list is only a beginning...

Practical matters: Dog Ears Books is generally open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 to 5, but will close early today (June 8, closing at 2 p.m.) and may have to fudge on a few upcoming Tuesdays, but whenever the bookstore is open, David Grath's gallery next door is also open. It's the 30th anniversary year for the bookstore and the last summer for the gallery, so please don't miss visiting.

 

 

Who Doesn’t Love a Mirror?

Christine threw the library books on the bed with a slam. According to Cousin Henrietta, there lay the cause of the whole trouble.  

“Books! Why don’t you take an interest in something else for a change?” 

- Stairway to the Sky, by Marguerite Dickson

It’s hard to tell much about a very old hardcover library book without a dust jacket, especially one with an unfamiliar title, but this time I recognized the author’s name, so I looked inside, where — luckily for me — some librarian in the mid-20th century had pasted onto the half-title page the front flyleaf of the original dust jacket, giving this tantalizing information about the story: Stairway to the Sky was a book recommended for (presumably girls) ages 12-18, and the central character a young woman, gone to live with cousins in Brooklyn, who wants nothing more than to be a writer. When she has the good fortune to be offered a job in a small Brooklyn bookshop, her Cousin Retta is not pleased! Here’s a bit of dialogue from the second chapter:

“Ruffles,” she said. “Dinky little ruffles. It’s not my idea of suitability, since you ask me. What kind of place is this you are going to work in, anyway? And haven’t you got a proper blouse to wear?” 

“Oh, it’s just a bookshop, a little bookshop, tucked into a corner of one of those old brick buildings on Fulton Street just before you get down to Borough Hall….”

-- “Just a bookshop, a little bookshop, tucked into a corner”!

Only last week I re-read once again Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop, a novel set in Brooklyn and published just after World War I, a story I’ve been reading and re-reading ever since my parents received it, along with its predecessor and companion novel, Morley’s Parnassus on Wheels, as Book-of-the-Month Club selections when they were reprinted in the 1950s. Every proprietor of every shop that deals in secondhand books has read Morley, I’ll wager, and I sometimes suspect he bears heavy responsibility in the afterlife for getting us all into this business in the first place. That is not to cast blame, of course. More like expressing gratitude.

Authors love bookstores, too!

Going back now, though, to Marguerite Dickson’s Stairway to the Sky, published in 1950 and also set in Brooklyn, I wonder — were the Fifties a Golden Age of Bookstores in America? Of Brooklyn bookshops? 

Mid-century was certainly some kind of golden age of books for teens, both boys and girls. Adolescent novels back then did not plunge their young readers into dystopic realms — a dark future just around the corner — but kept to the mundane, fascinating, burning questions of school, dating and career dreams, always with a satisfyingly happy resolution by the time the last page was reached. In the case of this novel of Dickson’s, surely our heroine, Christine, will get a grip on her emotions (and her hormones, unmentioned in the book) and realize that she can never be happy with take-over Hugo, who keeps insisting that she give up not only her bookstore job but also her writing dreams to settle down in the suburbs as his stay-at-home wife! 

I suppose it’s only natural that so many women who have written books for girls often wrote about girls who wanted to grow up and write books. Think of Jo in Little Women as the prime example. (Was she the first?) Remember how she tells Laurie she cannot marry him because he would come to hate her “scribbling”? Writing girls are plentiful in teen stories, while writing boys seem concentrated more in adult-level coming-of-age novels. Bookstore girls and boys, on the other hand — how many of those do you remember? I was surprised and delighted the other day to discover Dickson’s Christine!

And is it only my imagination, or has there been a recent resurgence of novels set in bookshops, movies with bookstore themes or at least key scenes set in bookshops? Any number of nonfiction books about small town bookstores around the world? Can it be, as the Age of Terror induced by the Online Behemoth dies down somewhat and people rediscover their neighborhoods again and the treasures right in their own backyards, that we are entering a new Golden Age of Independent Bookstores? 

Naturally, I’d love to think so. Be that as it may, happy Independence Day to you!

P.S. As for that fabled bookstore aroma, you can find the explanation here in a post by my good friend, retired bookseller Helen Selzer — I wish Helen would return to writing her blog. I miss her thoughts on books and movies. Helen?

(Thank you, Bill Coohon!!!)

Book Review: FIRST IMPRESSIONS

First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, 
and Jane Austen,

by Charlie Lovett

NY: Viking, 2014

Hardcover, $27.95

On sale October 20, 2014

Like a wary horse led toward a new and unfamiliar horse trailer – i.e., suspiciously, nervously -- that’s how I approach modern fiction claiming inspiration from Jane Austen’s work. My mind is not closed but is definitely guarded. At the same time, I’m also prepared to be won over. That’s it, though: I’ll be passing judgment on every page with a standard set 200 years ago by Jane Austen herself. How could it be otherwise?

Charlie Lovett did not win me over on the first page or even in the first chapter of First Impressions. I found fault with his adjectives and even his verbs.

Her first impression was that he was the picture of gloom—dressed in shabby clerical garb, a dark look on his crinkled face, doubtless a volume of dusty sermons clutched in his ancient hand.

But Jane Austen herself is the main character in that and every other chapter, so Lovett has given himself quite a challenge. Attempting to imitate Jane Austen! It is all too easy for words to fail: he who attempts and she who critiques had best tread carefully here. And so I read on.

After only four pages of his fictional Jane and her fictional and purely invented friend and mentor, our modern author shifts to the present day, introducing us to young Sophie Collingwood, and you’d think Sophie would seem easier to accept than first-chapter Jane, but maybe I’d allowed my skepticism to deepen over the previous four pages, because I did not immediately cotton to Sophie, either. Reading ostentatiously as she walked along, looking down on the strange young man for being American and casually dressed but then speaking to him of her father in a manner seemingly designed to invite the development of a relationship -- that is Sophie as we first meet her. “Sophie rolled her eyes. ‘He likes to shoot things.’” Is she trying to give Eric the brush-off or encourage revelations? Maybe she’s not sure herself, and maybe our first impression of Sophie will not be a lasting impression.

Back to Hampshire, 1796, in the third chapter, the Reverend Mr. Richard Mansfield gives the fictional Jane the first suggestion of many to follow as to the development of a story she has in progress.

“I only felt that if Sir John Middleton were a more affable sort – the type to throw parties or host picnics – your younger characters might be thrown together with more frequency.” 

 “I confess I had not yet given much thought to the character of Sir John,” said Jane. “But I think you are right. And it should not take much rewriting to set him on a course to host picnics and balls aplenty.”

Now the horse is asked to walk up the ramp to the trailer, and this horse plants hooves squarely on solid earth and digs in! Stiff legs, ears laid back! Jane Austen needing literary guidance from an older man? One whose own writing is pedestrian in the extreme? What kind of liberties are being taken here with one of my favorite writers of all time?

The structure of First Impressions is two stories, however, one historical fiction and the other modern mystery. Eventually the two will intertwine. And fortunately my second impression of Sophie was more favorable than the first, the revised view beginning where Lovett starts cashing in the promise of “old books” in his subtitle. Sophie’s Uncle Bertram, I learn to my great delight, was a book collector. Soon Sophie finds a job in a secondhand bookshop! She gets to know a customer whose passion is early printing, and this intrigues her (though she’s never been interested in the printing aspect of books before), as her family is descended from an early English printer. She learns to question her own first impressions of everyone and everything.

There is a lot in this book for bibliophiles. My part-time bookstore helper, Bruce, will love the beginning of this chapter (page 79):

Almost without thinking ... Sophie had walked to Cecil Court, a short pedestrian lane between Charing Cross Road and St. Martin’s Lane that was lined on both sides with bookshops. Cecil Court, with its rows of tall glass windows framed by green painted woodwork and filled with displays of every type of book imaginable, was the heart of London’s secondhand book trade. The world seemed to move more slowly here....

And Sophie’s Uncle Bertram, expounding to her on the beauty of rare books:

“If you mail a rare stamp it becomes worthless. If you drink a bottle of rare wine, you’re left with some recycling. But if you read a rare book it’s still there, it’s still valuable, and it’s achieved the full measure of its being. A book is to be read, whether it’s worth five pounds or five thousands pounds.”

Because that’s the kind of collector Bertram was, a reader rather than a trophy hunter. It’s impossible not to love him, so I was grateful to have so many encounters with him in flashbacks, despite his death early in the novel.

Death? Uncle Bertram? Did he fall, or was he pushed? Is Sophie’s imagination running away with her, as did young Catherine Morland’s in Austen’s Northanger Abbey?

Whatever will be discovered later on, Sophie’s impression that Uncle Bertram’s death is suspicious constitutes a mystery for her. The second mystery has to do with a couple of very specific 18^th-century books and the relationship between the fictional Jane Austen (remember, this is a novel Lovett has written) and her aged mentor. Sophie is determined to solve both.

Jane’s mentor, Richard Mansfield, is mirrored in Sophie’s life by her Uncle Bertram and later, in lesser fashion, by the bookseller, Gusty Boxhill. Sophie’s loving relationship with her sister Victoria mirrors that of Jane and Cassandra. Eric and Winston, Sophie’s “suitors,” seem to have no parallel in the fictional Jane Austen’s story. Are we to believe and trust either one of them, or do the older men hold all the truth and devotion cards?

For me, the modern chapters of this book worked better than those with Jane Austen, although I enjoyed brief two-century-old glimpses of the fictional printer. As for the mysteries, they felt contrived, and I could have done without them, whereas the world of old books, bookshops, bookselling, printing history, and primary source research had me spellbound. But this is, as always, a subjective response: I am a bookseller, and I live in a world of books. It’s also no small matter to me when a writer undertakes to re-invent one of my favorite authors.

The bottom line, though, is that First Impressions is an entertaining book and makes enjoyable reading. It will be irresistible to Austen fans and bibliophiles, and mystery readers and book club members will enjoy it, as well. The discussion possibilities are endless.

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