A Bookseller Reads a Magazine

[Images unrelated to today's text]

Part I. A Dark Vision!

I’d slipped a slim, aged paperback into my bag before leaving the bookstore that day, but once home a magazine on the table caught my eye. Amazingly — because while I do read a magazine from time to time, it’s as likely to be two or three years old as the book in my bag is to have been published in some long-ago decade — this issue of The Atlantic was current, and the cover story, “What Jeff Bezos Wants,” dark matter with an insulting, impersonal gravity, pulled me into its force field.

Be it here recognized by all my half-dozen readers that when it comes to online shopping, RESIST! is my middle name. That the online behemoth cannot count my household among its far-flung dominion of eager, satisfied vassals. That unsolicited e-mails from the behemoth’s robots are not simply transferred to the very ordinary virtual wastebasket labeled TRASH in my mail program but summarily relegated to the JUNK! file. 

Such is my storm-battered position on a shrinking island which I hold and defend with my very life. Thank heaven the Artist is right there with me! We have chosen to live in the slow lane.

But now I read on. Does anything in the article surprise me? Statistics of the corporation’s market share, internal memos and “Leadership Principles,” punishment of sellers who do not bow to its will, the fact that it pays no federal tax? Infuriating but not either unknown or unsuspected. Thinking of the Pentagon storing all its files in the behemoth’s cloud is alarming in a surreal, nightmarish, downright dystopian way but hardly astonishing. 

For me, though, writer Franklin Foer hits pay dirt when he reveals the ultimate Bezos goal, which is nothing less than the colonization of outer space, made necessary by the ruin and despoliation of earth, that ruin hastened by the glorious, unbounded consumerism encouraged by none other than the behemoth itself. Because, as we all know, earth and its resources are not boundless. Bezos, no fool, recognizes the fact. And so world domination is for him only an intermediate challenge.

Oh, on and on it goes, but read it for yourself: The Atlantic, November 2019, Vol. 324, no. 5, the Tech Issue. Or here it is in paperless form. 

And if steam isn’t coming out of your ears yet, take a look at what this kind of retail does to communities. Yep, huge tax abatements — huge community investments in infrastructure — thousands of tractor trailers a day — roads the towns can’t afford to maintain — millions of dollars of community debt — temp jobs with no security or benefits — until robots replace even the human temp workers. Ask yourself: Do you want to invest in this kind of future? Because our choices will decide the planet's future.

Intermission

That long magazine article brought painful thoughts and memories to mind, but we were meeting friends in town for dinner, so retreating into gloom was not an option. And as we drove through the darkness, my mental clouds lifted. We’re alive. We’re together. We’re here now. Which served as a reminder that everything is temporary and all lives mortal. 

Part II. A Lighter Side

Back home again, later that same evening, I picked up the magazine again and turned to a different article, this time an interview/sketch with and about children’s book author Sandra Boynton, “The Bard of Bedtime.” I’d vaguely heard of Sandra Boynton before but had never focused on her work. Now, however, I learn that she was a student of Maurice Sendak, and I am intrigued. Says the writer of the article, “Boynton’s books oscillate between orders and disarray, wisdom and nonsense.” Boynton addresses her youngest pre-reader children with respect and is not afraid to use a word like “intone” in her minimalist text. She makes every syllable count. Her animals are really people, and not all people or even all kids are the same. 

I read on and on, carefully, skipping not a single word, and long before I reach the end of the article I have resolved to order Sandra Boynton board books the very next day, feeling much better and also feeling confident that I will have appreciative customers for these books in Northport. I can make small contributions in my little world, and this is where I need to put my mental energy.

Intermission

I don’t have anything special to say here but for consistency’s sake another break seemed indicated. Take a deep breath. Look around. What do you think so far? You don’t need to tell me. 

Part III. Everything Ends

The final piece I read in the magazine that night, three narrow columns in length and taking up less than a single page, was about endings, echoing my thoughts up in that first intermission. It was Ben Healy’s “Study of Studies” feature, this one titled “All Good Things …” Yes, all things will come to an end, but “even endings may be better than expected,” Healy finds, and that’s a good reminder, too. Maybe for some among us it’s even more than a reminder. More like a novel insight, one we need to reflect on for a while. 

In the old days, wars used to end, and that was a good thing -- wars ending. I am still curious and still learning but no longer have an obligation to spend my days in a classroom, and I feel good about that. All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Socrates died. The biggest ego, the loudest voice, the richest man on earth — all are mortal. As am I. As are you. 

My question (again) is, when our lives end, what kind of world do we want to leave behind?

I could say much more about endings as they relate to books and bookstores and all kinds of businesses, but right now I feel the end of this post approaching. Ah! Here it is! What a relief!

Call Them What You Will

These are not rutabagas.

I’ve been told that one late fall when a boat named the ‘Rising Sun,' a boat that had been carrying a load of rutabagas, went down in Good Harbor in a particularly nasty Lake Michigan storm, rural residents near the shoreline in an area now part of Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore lost no time in harvesting the beach.“We ate rutabagas all that winter,” an old-timer reported years later. Lacking variety, certainly, the meals of that lean season were nonetheless filling and nutritious. 

What you call Brassica napobrassica depends on your heritage and where you live. Those Good Harbor foragers called them rutabagas, but the poetically evocative name ‘root of scarcity’ would definitely have been apt, too, as one does not eat rutabagas all winter unless there is not much else available.

Some Finns in the Upper Peninsula call them ‘beggies’ (though I cannot find the nickname online so cannot vouch for the spelling). In the U.P. a pasty is not a pasty without cubed or grated rutabaga added to meat, potatoes, and onions (fruit at one end, for dessert, optional). These are the traditional pasties as the miners’ families brought the recipe from Cornwall. 

Agatha Christie called them mangels in one of her novels, I believe, and if memory serves, Hercule Poirot was hit in the head with one thrown over a fence. I puzzled over that term for years and now find (quickly, online) that the name is short for Mangel-Wurzel. I suppose it’s natural that a German name would transfer to England, imported no doubt by Saxon immigrants. 

Another name for the tuberous root vegetable is swede. Did Norwegians come up with that last? I’ve looked up several details today but am speculating wildly about others. Caveat lector: this blogger has never claimed to be a journalist!

Like winter squash, these large turnip relatives keep well through the winter. Thus in less desperate times, when farm families had plenty of other food put by, stockpiled rutabagas-mangels-swedes, cheap and easy to grow, could be fed to cattle or hogs to get them through the cold season. Hence the name fodder beet. 

Nor are these.

What on earth put rutabagas into my head this morning, when it’s an apple harvest occupying my time away from the bookstore? Procrastination comes in many forms. Why not the form of a rutabaga? Meanwhile, the apple-drying project proceeds in fits and starts, five trays and one day at a time. Little by little wins the race.

Me and Henry Miller and the Michigan Woods

One must come to Eleusis stripped of the barnacles which have accumulated from centuries of lying in stagnant waters. At Eleusis one realizes, if never before, that there is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy. At Eleusis one becomes adapted to the cosmos. Outwardly Eleusis may seem broken, disintegrated with the crumbled past; actually Eleusis is still intact and it is we who are broken, dispersed, crumbling to dust. Eleusis lives, lives eternally in the midst of a dying world. 

- Henry Miller, Colossus of Maroussi

After finally finishing Life in a Mexican Village, by Oscar Lewis, a book I’d begun reading two years ago and set aside for something else and then picked up again -- many times in that long interval -- and then hungrily devouring (though not wanting either to end), one after another, two books I highly recommend, Willa Cather’s My Antonia, written and published over a hundred years ago, and Katey Schultz's just-published and stunning first novel, Still Come Home, I found myself in a somewhat dizzy, head-spinning state of mind (powerful literature can do that to a reader), and I turned for a couple of days to juvenile literature of another era rather in the way one partakes mid-feast of a palate-cleansing sorbet.

I do so love the Moffats! Sometimes I don’t visit them for a few years and then have the joy or discovering them all over again. Dear Janey, the middle Moffat! I am the oldest in my family, not the middle, but I can certainly to Janey’s small but troubling social worries and certainly to her sports cluelessness. I laughed myself silly over the chapter where she “took up” basketball! 

Not long ago a customer in my bookshop was looking for books for a granddaughter, "ten years old but a very good reader, and she likes more old-fashioned stories. Nothing with vampires or the end of the world.” The women shared with me some of the books her granddaughter liked, and I was able to suggest a couple of current children’s books that should fill the bill. After spending some time with Prairie Evers, by Ellen Airgood, and Secret Sisters of the Salty Sea, by Lynne Rae Perkins, the customer happily agreed that they should suit her young reader perfectly. I wonder if that girl has read the Moffat books or others by Eleanor Estes, but she may be aging out of them by now. Well, not that one can ever age out of the Moffats! Once charmed, permanently smitten! And actually, I re-read the books Airgood and Perkins write for young people, too. I find them lots of fun and very good medicine.

The other kid book, Piney Woods, was not a re-read but a first-time read. Like The Middle Moffat, however, it is a story set in a more innocent age, back when a boy could learn to shoot and repair guns and dream of a career as a gunsmith, with absolutely no criminal or terrorist or even political implications implied in the tale. Sigh!

Returning next to grownup books, I didn't focus on a single one and so have been juggling three in the past couple of days and nights: Jim Harrison’s Off to the Side, which I’m enjoying for the second or third time; the Henry Miller quoted above; and Shantyboat by Kent and Margaret Lighty. Note that this last is not the Harlan Hubbard shantyboat story, beginning on the Ohio River across from Cincinnati, but an earlier trip made by a different couple, starting up above St. Paul back in the 1930s. These people, Kent and Margaret Lighty, were more tourists or leisure travelers than the Hubbards, who truly lived off the land and water and bartered along their way and made a whole life of their shantyboat years, but it is pleasant reading, nonetheless. Nothing wrong with simply pleasant reading sometimes, and given the time period of their travels it does offer a window into the history of that era. Shantyboat by Harlan Hubbard, now — that is inspirational reading. But I revisit the Hubbards more frequently so am giving the other couple a turn now at present.

Now, about Henry Miller. Henry Miller is not a member of my personal literary pantheon (though he is a great favorite of the Artist), but in the beginning this particular book had me practically me gasping with admiration for page after page. His descriptions of people he meets in Greece are nothing short of delicious, his long, detailed sentences one mouth-watering course after another! -- Alas! Just as I was ready to elevate this book to favorite status, I reached pages in which the author veered away from description and fell into oracular pronouncement. Page after page, one ringing, tedious declarative statement after another. He was pontificating! Ugh! Luckily, little trick-or-treaters in Northport provided welcome distraction, and I knew that at home there would be apples to peel and slice for the dryer, and that Jim Harrison’s memories and the Lighty couple’s river adventures awaited me again, too. 

The eternity of any particular time or place, I want to say (thinking about the Miller quote again) — perhaps more a subjective phenomenon than a fact of the physical world — never exactly reveals itself but teases each of us from time to time in different places and at different times in our lives. Miller found it in Greece. For me it is in Michigan woods and Arizona mountains.

These old northern Michigan roads have not been here even 200 years, but they have the feeling of history and even eternity about them. Now can you see in the two images below where French immigrant farmers once lived? The lilac bush near the road's edge and that old apple tree are your first clues, and farther back are the two cedars that marked the corners of their old log cabin, long ago rotted back into the earth.

Somewhere in my digital files -- and if only they were logically and consistently organized, I could show you -- are photographs of rocks in the woods used by earlier inhabitants to grind acorns and perhaps corn from their gardens. In the Dragoon Mountains of southeast Arizona are similar grinding stones.

11/20/2019: Never say die! Here they are!

The past is all around us, in every land, still breathing, living on in the stillness or in the noise, whether or not we are paying attention. It's just more obvious in some places than others. As for the broken world part, it's up to us to make what small mending attempts are within our power.

STILL COME HOME: Book Review

The novel opens with a young woman in Afghanistan daydreaming of an apricot:

…She wants the fruit. She wants her freedom. She wants to do everything she shouldn’t. She shoves back her purple headscarf and walks to the open window of her small, second-story apartment. She sticks her torso out and leans, hanging her head upside down. Her hair dangles like a black flag in the breeze. Positioned like this, she won’t have to look up the street at the remains of her family compound. She won’t have to wish she’d died in there three years ago either.  

-- Katey Schultz, Still Come Home

This morning I finished reading Katey Schultz’s new novel, Still Come Home, a story focusing on four main characters: Aaseya, the young Afghani woman in her early 20s; Rahim, her 40-year-old husband; Miller, an American second lieutenant stationed in Afghanistan; and Miller's wife, Tenley, back home in South Carolina. I don’t want to tell you very much about them, because you deserve to meet them as I did, as Schultz introduces them. Let me say only that their worlds and cultures and experiences are light-years apart from each other but that as a reader I was completely pulled into every scene, fully believing in their reality. 

This is a powerful novel. From beginning to end, there is no slackening in the tautness of either the action or dialogue. 

…A headache balls at the base of his skull. He watches the city face into shadows, block by block. Airborne particles of sand catch the sun’s rays, Mother’s Nature’s tracer fire. Within minutes, the horizon appears lit by a throbbing Armageddon. Four tours and it has come to this. The night before Miller’s last mission outside the wife, Chaffen’s voice echoing like a challenge inside Miller’s head: That’s how you’ve got to start thinking, in all directions.

Miller’s mind is fixated on responsibilities to his men and his family back home but tortured also by an earlier mission that went badly. Rahim, hungering for a future with sons of his own, has not escaped his own nightmare boyhood, and his present is confused and cruelly limited. So both men try to focus on tasks at hand and not think or plan or dream too far ahead. Their wives, too, can only meet each day’s immediate challenges and hope, dimly, that the future will be better. 

A poor, scrawny, mute, orphaned or outcast child plays a pivotal role in the story. 

…Flecks of dirt line his closed eyelids, and she can see a few fleas in his shaggy, dark hair. His lips are chapped, his earlobes bitten and red. Scuff marks fall in a line down his torso, likely from belly-crawling over rocks or wriggling through shrubs. At the bottom of his shorts, each leg pokes through the opening of fabric like a tent pole.

Such a frail and unlikely survival — so far! — in this country torn by endless war! We fear for Miller and Rahim and Aaseya but especially for Ghazél as the story’s tension amps up page by page. Does this child have a chance?

Describing the most barren landscape, Schultz’s lyrical sentences convey the love its inhabitants have for their home:

Rahim darts across the road, taking his weapon off safety, then leans his side against the embankments from shoulder to ankle, blending into the land as seamlessly as a scattering of dirt. The desert is amazing like that, the way it stretches and folds across the country like the broad, sloping belly of a giant. The way it holds almost everything a man could ever need, including his shape, until they’re practically one.

But maybe you think you don’t want to read a novel about war in the Middle East. 

Perhaps Afghanistan is the last place you think you want to envision with your mind’s eye. 

It’s too alien, too faraway, too nightmarish. 

What I’m telling you is that those “reasons” count for nothing. It is not only the American soldier and his wife back home with whom you will feel kinship but also with Aaseya (from the book’s very first page), Rahim, and Ghazél, and this story will bring home to you the truth of universal humanity like nothing else I’ve read for a long time. 

*. *. *

Katey Schultz visited Dog Ears Books in 2013 to read from her book of short and short-short stories, Flashes of War. Among her many awards, Schultz was awarded a Gold Medal from the Military Writers Society of America for that earlier work. I’ve been anticipating more from her ever since, and Still Come Home has exceeded my high expectations. Her connection to Michigan, in case you’re wondering, is through Interlochen Center for the Arts. 

Where Is Your Head Today?

Sumac at the height of its glory

“Where’s your head at?” was once a sort of jeer, not a real question, a variation on “What were you thinking?” which, of course, implies that you were not thinking at all. What I intend here is a real question, translatable as: What’s occupying your thoughts? What perhaps are you obsessing over (and wish you weren’t)? Are you focused or feeling dreamy, or is your mind jumping from one thing to another like a grasshopper being chased by summer’s approaching end? Or maybe you’re fortunate enough to be taking in the natural world moment by moment, like a dog miraculously blessed with full color vision. How wonderful that would be, wouldn't it? To have the full range of color added to the marvelous range of olfactory sensations we humans can only dimly imagine!

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a blog post. Well, for this blog, anyway. I’ve done three new posts for my photo blog, “A Shot in the Light,” and one for my catchall blog, “Lacking a Clear Focus.” I’ve also read half a dozen books (see sidebar for titles) and hosted another signing in my bookstore. My sister and her husband visited from Illinois, and our grandson and his best buddy traveled up from Kalamazoo. (Those were good visits.) And I went on active duty for a friend for three weeks while she was in hospital and then rehab, feeding her cats and declumping their litter boxes daily. 

Historian Larry Massie from the Allegan Forest

Larry's appropriately book-themed tie

Grandson Dave! Sarah's human nephew! Sarah loves company!

And all along there has been the glory of fall color, starting with the staghorn sumac (top of post) and now encompassing maples and beeches and popples and even early-turning tamarack. This past Sunday was simply glorious, but it's recorded only in my brain's fallible memory, not on my camera's digital storage card. Camera in action again today, under grey, rainy skies.

On Monday I stirred my stumps (isn't that a hideous expression?) and got busy with long-delayed kitchen and food-related projects -- retrieved rhubarb from the freezer to turn into rhubarb chutney; picked apples from an overloaded tree (only recently I learned that apple trees can be "overpollinated"); defrosted strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries destined for jam before another day escapes. 

Home harvest

Things keep happening, though. The world doesn't hold still for a moment. So I paused to remember Bill Milliken and to say a prayer of thanksgiving and hope for full recovery for Jimmy Carter. I read newspapers, rationing each day's intake (in the interest of sanity) and wondering where the hell we are going as a nation and a world. My head was here, my head was there. Sometimes it just wanted to be under the covers, fast asleep.

Fleeing deer!

Thank heaven for books! Books on geology and history put current events in perspective, and old volumes that have survived from a century or more ago reassure me that bound, printed material has staying power and that what I do for a living is worth doing and may last beyond the current insanity. In more optimistic hours, I like to think so. But then, my head is not staying in one place very long these days. 

Finding Treasure -- in Northport!

The book I was so excited to find at a sale recently doesn’t look like all that much at first glance. Unfortunately, the dust jacket is missing. The spine ends are somewhat, though not horribly, bumped. Slight fraying starting to appear at the ends, too. But I was excited, because the title is one I remember from my girlhood and have never forgotten, though this is the first copy of the book I’ve seen since the library copy I read in the 1950s. 

The flying sand and salt spray were in her eyes, in her mouth, in her hair. Her lips tasted of brine and her teeth felt gritty with sand. She was too occupied keeping out of reach of the roaring surf to care, and she had to jump about constantly to avoid the crawling, spreading edges of the breakers that frequently crept up on her unaware. For this was a howling northeaster on lonely Heron Shoals Beach. But Posy had no thought of its inconveniences or dangers. She was enjoying it to the full, chasing retreating waves and flying before oncoming breakers. This was life! This aroused a fire and enthusiasm that she had never known before! 

from The Vanishing Octant Mystery, by Augusta Huiell Seaman

Then Posy spots a treasure on the waves! It eludes her grasp, and she spends the rest of the book searching for it on the beach, where her family has rented a house for the summer.

I cannot recapture my feelings as a youthful, first-time reader of this novel, but I do remember that it was one of those books (like The Silver Nutmeg, by Palmer Brown) that I checked out of our grade school library to read over and over. Today I read online that Augusta Huiell Seaman’s novels for young readers predated the Nancy Drew books in offering adventures and mysteries to girl readers. I may not have read any of her other books and first read The Vanishing Octant Mystery (originally published in 1949) years after the author had died. (Not that I knew or cared about that at the time!) But Seaman was born in 1879, for heaven’s sake, and published her first book, The Boarded-Up House, in 1915, before either of my parents was born! In fact, The Vanishing Octant was her last book, appearing) in 1950, the year before her death, and by then Nancy Drew and all manner of other mystery series and stand-alone titles for young people had appeared. 

(Another favorite of mine was The Boxcar Children, by Gertrude Chandler Warner, though I could never accept the idea of sequels to the original book — sequels I only learned about as an adult — since the entire premise at the beginning was that the children had no family and had to fend for themselves in the world, and in that first book they are reunited with their grandfather. But I digress….)

When I first read The Vanishing Octant Mystery, it transported me through time and space in more than one sense. Let’s say I must have been nine or ten years old; the girl sleuth in the story is 13. At that time in my life I had never seen the ocean, let alone studied ocean navigation. (Still have not done the latter.) But also, the instrument at the heart of the story, the octant, was originally invented around 1699 and produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until superseded by the more familiar sextant. I’d never heard of such a thing. The description and history of the octant fascinated me. For me, then, the octant itself would have been a mystery, even had it not disappeared.

We see very little of the inner life of characters in this story — only a hint, now and then, of Posy’s thoughts, no one else’s. There are no murders, no dead bodies, no guns or knives or other weapons. No characters are involved in flirtations, let alone love affairs, doomed or otherwise. The most vivid “character,” if I may put it that way, is the ocean itself. The story opens with a foretaste of the ocean’s violence, violence that reappears, magnified, in the form of the hurricane that blows through several chapters, bringing various other characters together and the story to its surprisingly undramatic conclusion. I am tempted to summarize the finale, but that would constitute a spoiler.

Local sweet water equivalent: Lake Michigan

Many of the author’s books are now in public domain and available as cheap paperback reprints ($9-10 range). Some were published earlier in paperback by Scholastic. Note that The Vanishing Octant Mystery was published 1949, which is 70 years ago, so will it be coming into public domain this year? I don’t have an answer, but a signed first edition with worn, chipped dust jacket is offered by one bookseller for $327, and another, not signed but priced at $80 online, is described as follows: No dust jacket. Ex-library. Cover is bumped to boards on corners, spine tips are missing, spine is faded, cover is rubbed with water spots on front. Front binding is loose. When you are looking at descriptions of books online and can’t hold them in your hands to examine, it’s imperative to understand the grading system — and, if possible, to know and trust the dealer from whom you’re buying. As my copy (not ex-library) is much better than the $80 book online, I’m pricing mine at $100. 

In the story, Posy’s father explains to his housekeeper the instrument his daughter saw in the surf in these words: 

“[It’s] … an old instrument they used to have on ships, to sight the sun with at noon every day and get their positions, like they do now with a newer kind called a sextant. This one was an earlier kind called an octant. They don’t use octants any more, and they are considered rare.”

There are enough copies of The Vanishing Octant Mystery available online that I wouldn’t call it rare, but it is fairly scarce. As I say, I haven’t seen a copy since the 1950s, and since entering the book business I’ve been looking for favorite old titles in bookstores, thrift shops, and antique stores, at estate sales and garage sales. 

It’s always exciting when the wind and waves toss up something I never expected to see again. So I can’t help imagining some unsuspecting browser in my bookstore suddenly coming upon this book — or another from his or her past — and exclaiming over it in delight. It’s like finding treasure on the beach. Serendipity! That thrill of discovery is difficult to match with online searches, and I know, because I’ve done plenty of those, too, over the years. 

We Get Each Other Through

More than one person in Northport (and you all know who you are!) has told me that my "Books in Northport" posts help them get through the winter, largely because those winter posts in recent years have originated in southeast Arizona. There the Artist and I rent a simple little one-room cabin in a mountain ghost town, where it does occasionally snow but where we need not shovel or plow. I call my unstructured time and adventures in the mountains and high desert a “seasonal retirement,” possible only because so many loyal longtime customers and adventuring new bookstore customers get me through the spring, summer, and fall in Northport. In my eighth decade of life (yes!) and with two younger sisters retired, I do not apologize for taking winters off. I have earned them.

Leelanau County winter

Cochise County winter

My old garden

My first bookstore in Northport was an uninsulated, unheated shed, fine for warm weather, that is, for summer and early fall. Next I tried a Union Street location in Traverse City and hung on for three summers and the intervening two winters, missing my Leelanau County life the whole time. So I went back once again to Northport -- closer to home -- first in yet another unheated, insulated building, but told my new landlord, “I’m in this for the long haul.” That return to Northport was in 1997, and I’ve been here ever since. Three different locations (two with my "long haul" landlord) but all right here in the village. In retrospect, the time has gone by quickly.

Winter on Waukazoo Street, 2016

For many years Dog Ears Books was open through the cold, lonely months of January, February, and March, when I had to take on part-time work elsewhere to keep the bookstore heat on. Copy-editing, book reviewing, substitute teaching, tutoring, cleaning, picking apples — my checkered supplemental employment varied from one year to the next. Over the years, also, I’ve given various answers to the question (which, by the way, I hate), “How do you stay in business?” For a while, I told people the secret was to have “low expectations,” i.e., no one goes into bookselling to get rich! Then I started saying (and it’s true) that I am a very stubborn person and don’t give up easily. 

Now, after 26 years, my answer is simpler: 

How do I stay in business? What keeps my bookstore alive from one year to the next? "I sell books." It’s that simple. There is no trust fund backing me up, no wealthy investors riding on my coattails. It’s true that I don’t expect to get rich and that I’m stubborn, but the absolute bottom line for the continued existence of Dog Ears Books is sales of books. Expanding my selection of new books, focusing more on Michigan writers, and finally making the leap into accepting credit cards have all helped, but the bottom line is still selling books.

106 Waukazoo Street

It's selling books, also, that keeps “Books in Northport” going. This blog has been around since 2007. It’s free for the reading, and I’m happy to help anyone get through the winter, whether they spend the season in Northport or flee to warmer climes. So when the locals who say I help them “get through the winter” come around in spring, summer, and fall to buy books from me, our meetings are warm and happy, whatever the weather, because they appreciate my blog and my bookstore, and I appreciate the fact that they read “Books in Northport” and purchase their books at Dog Ears Books. More than words are involved on both sides: the commitments we have made, we remake and honor one day at a time, year after year. I would be nowhere without the friends and customers who support my bookstore with their loyal patronage, and if my author events and my blog posts and the presence of my bookstore in the village are meaningful to the community, I am happy to continue doing my part.

Looking down Nagonaba to the east

Northport has come a long way from the bleak years of the late 1990s. Businesses have come and gone in that time, as one would expect anywhere, but it feels as if we’re in a pretty good place these days, still small and relatively quiet, yet vibrant and happy, and I’m happy to be part of a small town that continues to support --along with a beautiful harbor, a K-12 school, welcoming library, friendly post office, bank, and grocery store — a small but healthy smattering of restaurants and retail establishments. 

One town in our county  (Empire) recently lost its only grocery store, another (Cedar) will be losing its bank before this month is out, and I realize, once again, that the success of any small town resides in no single business or institution but is dependent on a kind of critical mass. It seems we have achieved that in Northport after years of struggle and hard work. Now the challenge will be to keep what we have, both the success and the friendly, small town atmosphere (and natural environment).

Anyway, thank you, Northport! I'm glad to have put my bookstore roots down in this welcoming community all those years ago and grateful to all of you who support Dog Ears Books, locals or visitors.

Welcome, visitors to Northport!