Spotlight on Bookstores: a trio in Alabama and *Three Sisters* in Shelbyville, Indiana

Today’s Spotlight post is written by Kirk Curnutt,  author of several books, including guides to the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, a tongue-in-cheek faux interview with Ernest Hemingway, and a collection of short fiction called Baby, Let’s Make a Baby.  His most recent work is Breathing Out the Ghost, an engaging ”noir thriller” which will be reviewed here tomorrow.

In this Spotlight, Kirk gives eulogies of sorts to two special bookstores that have closed or announcing a pending closure.  He gives props, also, to Capitol Book and News in Montgomery, Alabama, and Three Sisters in Shelbyville, Indiana (where much of Breathing Out the Ghost is set).  Read along and visit some of his memories:

To me, the difference between patronizing a big chain retailer and an independent bookstore is sort of like the difference between going to church at a massive tabernacle and going to one of those wonderful shotgun-style houses of worship you pass out in the country. One overwhelms with the solemnity and expansiveness of its space; the other is intimate and full of fellow sinners. The former is ornate to the point of sterile, while in the other you feel like you can grip the pew ahead of you and dig your nails into the wood. A Barnes & Noble or Books-a-Million is like a tourist destination—you almost expect people to whip out their cameras and snap mementoes of their visit to the Self-Help section. A good indie bookstore feels like the study you always hoped to have in your home. It’s usually warm and woody, with one good chair and footrest that you have to wait your turn to relax in. If you’re really lucky, you never get your shot at that throne because the owner’s basset hound is curled up in it, loudly licking its jowls.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a bookstore snob. I used to hang out in my local Barnes & Noble a lot. About ten years ago, I wrote an actual book in one. Two or three mornings a week, while on a sabbatical, I would take my laptop there, chug a huge cup of coffee, and work. It was usually a great place to get a page or two done. I only stopped when I realized that every time I went I was among the same five people loitering away in the sitting section. Most of them came to catch up on their sleep, and the staff starting eyeing them as if they were vagrants. I was regarded with equal suspicion, in part because for all of my visits there I was spending a whopping average of three dollars per appearance. Obviously, I wasn’t buying books, and B&N is in the business of selling them. I was, however, reading a lot of books and magazines to distract myself from work. No matter how much B&N wants you to believe you’re welcome to peruse, they expect you to cough up a purchase or two. I imagine it’s sort of the same reaction you get from the staff at the Sistine Chapel. You came all this way to see this marvel, they say. Cut us a break and buy a T-shirt and postcard, will ya?

I used to have four indie bookstores I considered my faves. In the past few months, two have closed. Tammy’s Book Basket in Wetumpka, Alabama, was a one-woman operation that built a great audience in a tiny community. Tammy put together wonderful events, including a moveable feast for mystery writers and a potluck dinner this summer at which my band got to play “Barbara Ann.” It gave folks in a bedroom community something to do without having to drive fifteen miles to the state capital. The other store, The Gnu’s Room in Auburn, hosted readings for the Auburn English department. I was lucky enough to read there twice this past year, and it made me nostalgic for the days when it was a challenge to keep one’s eye on a line of print when so many beautiful bookish women were in your midst. The Gnu’s Room was a co-op operation: a group of investors came together because there was a demand for a place close to campus where students could come and find a used copy of an obscure book somebody happened to mention in a class. Maybe the customers got to meet a poet while there, too—that doesn’t happen at a B&N, trust me. I don’t think the demand in these little stores changed so much as the economy did. Both of them places lived on credit, I’m assuming, and when that got tight, the cash flow just wasn’t enough to keep the lights on.

So now I’m down to two favorite bookstores. One is close to my home and work: Capitol Book and News here in Montgomery. It’s been around for more than thirty years. I have a feeling a nuclear bomb could go off and the owners, Cheryl and Thomas Upchurch, would find a way to keep it open. That’s how much they love books. I like their store because it’s sort of a labyrinth. You walk into a main room and then swirl around to what, forty or fifty years ago, was obviously a residence. It takes a certain sense of humor to stock the cookbooks in the old pantry. I take some pride in knowing my books are shelved in somebody’s former bedroom. I like to imagine the ghosts of former tenants once slept with books stacked on their mattresses, just like I inevitably do at my house.

My other favorite is located in the city where a few scenes from Breathing Out the Ghostare set: Shelbyville, Indiana. It’s called Three Sisters, which has a wonderful Chekhovian ring, though there’s none of the Olga/Masha/Irina melodrama, and nobody waxes wistful about how cool it would be to live in Moscow. Three Sisters reminds me of how bookselling is a labor of love. Like many indie bookstores, it’s helmed by retirees who spent their lives doing other things and have now come home looking for an avocation as opposed to a vocation. And there’s nothing more rewarding than advocating the pleasures and importance of reading.

I had an interesting moment at Three Sisters last spring. They were kind enough to host a booksigning for Ghost attended by a lot of my relatives, many of whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years or so. I was sitting among copies of my book stacked as high as temple pillars. Behind me was the city square where as a child I would come with my grandparents to a little community festival called the Bears of Blue River, which I’d written into the novel. If I pretended hard enough, I could see my mother and aunt driving my grandfather’s tractor through town on the way to my great-grandmother’s land to the east, as they used to do when they were teenagers. I imagined seeing myself and my cousins at ten, trying to peek under the tent at the county fair where the Hootchy-Kootchy girls danced. I especially enjoyed daydreaming that I was a giant and could see beyond the downtown to the mosaic of my uncle’s corn and soybean fields that were just then being planted. He and my aunt were kind enough to take that morning off work to come and support me.

Then my eyes happened to wander to the bookshelves, where they landed on a Gertrude Stein collection called Geography and Plays. I own a few copies of this book, and I’ve read through it several times, having once entertained ambitions to be a Gertrude Stein scholar. This is by no means an accessible book. To most folks it’s probably gibberish. It made me wonder how a relatively obscure book landed in Shelbyville, Indiana, and whether it would ever be purchased in the way that folks were gobbling up the latest Stephenie Meyer. I almost bought the Stein, but the thought of snatching it off those shelves was disturbing. It was like kicking out one of the axles of my identity. Here I was, fascinated by the rigor and rituals of farming because I was a generation removed from the land, a man who’d spent most of his life between book pages, now searching for something harder and more tactile than memories to sink my hands into, and for the first time those obverse obsessions seemed to come together in perfect perpendicularity. Suddenly, I wanted that book to stay right there until the pages moldered and the grain of the paper became fertilizer for whatever, a century from now, would occupy that spot. Simply stated, I wanted Gertrude Stein to take root in the loam.

I’ve been back to Three Sisters three times since that visit. It’s not an easy trip; there are five hundred miles of I-65 separating me from my family history. Two of those trips have been for funerals: my grandmother died at 90 last June, and my great-grandmother at 115 in November. Their deaths only added to the urgency of my needing to see that book in that spot, and fortunately for me, the demand for Gertrude Stein in Shelbyville is not so great that I was forced to feel further displaced by its disappearance.

I’m not sure when next I’ll make it up there. With so much of the family gone now there’s no pressing reason. When I do visit Three Sisters again, though, I may just buy Geography and Plays. But I won’t take it with me. It’ll be more like rent. I’ll pay the sisters to keep that collection right there in its place, just so when I need it most I know I can come to their bookstore and leave refreshed with a sense of my own.