Spotlight on Bookstores: *Talking Leaves* in Buffalo, NY

Today’s Spolight on Bookstores has me looking for an excuse to visit upstate New York!  Gabrielle Burton, author of the non-fiction Searching for Tamsen Donner (2009) and the novel Impatient with Desire(the imagined diary of Tamsen Donner, 2010) writes about the store’s nearly 40-year history as a local gathering place.  She gives much credit to the store’s owners, Jonathon Welch and Martha Russell; you can’t get that personal touch from a virtual bookstore!  Gabrielle shares the web address; you can also follow them on Twitter: @tleavesbooks

My husband can run into a hardware store and stroll out two hours later with a smile on his face.  I’m the same way with bookstores.

One of my all time favorite bookstores is Talking Leaves, the oldest independent bookstore in Buffalo, NY, where I lived for 30 years. Now Buffalo is a much-maligned city filled with treasures not enough people know about.  To name a few: Albright Knox Art Gallery, six Frank Lloyd Wright houses plus a F.L.W. mausoleum, perfect summer weather, authentic chicken wings, and Talking Leaves Bookstore.

“Independent and idiosyncratic since 1971.”  That’s Talking Leaves motto or manifesto.

I moved to Buffalo in 1974 and already 3-year-old Talking Leaves was a community fixture, albeit with a ’60′s twist.  This store would not have come into being or stayed in existence without the best of the 60′s philosophy as manifested in its co-owners, Jonathon Welch and Martha Russell.

Jonathon, his later to be spouse Martha, and a group of fellow graduate students opened Talking Leaves with their own money and money borrowed from friends. Begun as a co-op, a $5.00 annual membership gave you 10% off any book purchase.  Situated next to a food co-op, you weighed your tenth of an ounce of rosemary on the scale, dug in the bin for oats to toast for your granola, then went next door for spice and staple for your mind and spirit.

Talking Leaves has had several locations over the years, getting larger each time, but never TOO large.  A second branch, opened in 2001, was similarly financed like the first–by small loans from members of the community, teachers, musicians, lawyers, and local activists.  People in Buffalo believe Talking Leaves is a valuable anchor to a community that has had a lot of rough knocks, but is still talking proud.

Even Talking Leaves’ first tiny space always seemed to have just about any book you wanted–classic and mainstream fiction, non fiction, poetry, literary criticism, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and books with gay/lesbian or African-American perspectives when these books were not easily had.  Say you’d read about a great book and it wasn’t there, Talking Leaves immediately ordered and stocked it.  We customers just took it for granted that the most obscure literary journal or underground rag with the ink barely dry would be on the rack near the front door.  Now I wonder: How did they find all those magazines covering literature, politics, film and cultural interests that reflected the quirkiness of their customers–publications that weren’t ad-driven, but had small enthusiastic circulations. They kept their ear to the ground and attuned to the customers.

Many people founded and helped maintain Talking Leaves but, at some point in most people’s minds, it became synonymous with Jonathon Welch and Martha Russell.  They have been its enduring face over the years.  You don’t go into the bookstore business–or stay–to make the big bucks.  But you can’t survive–keep a store open and raise a family–without some business savvy.  That customers rarely glimpsed the savvy behind Talking Leaves’ constant striving to survive is a testament to Jonathon and Martha’s integrity.  Although a base of customers has always been academic, they don’t sell them sweatshirts and backpacks.  Talking Leaves has slipped a greeting card and calendar in now and then, but has always been first and foremost, a store for readers of books.

Most every writer who came through Buffalo read at Talking Leaves–in the early days folding chairs set up in narrow aisles, wine and snacks on the house–often now in different venues in joint production with other arts organizations in town.  When my first novel, Heartbreak Hotel, came out in 1986, Talking Leaves threw a signing/party for me in a popular bar.  While people streamed in and out, Jonathon broadcast over public radio–”Come on down, folks, we’re having a great time here.”  And they did come on down and we had a great time.

Last year I was in Buffalo reading my memoir Searching for Tamsen Donner at a printing press museum, and of course Jonathan and Martha were there too, the table piled high with my books.  A traveling bookstore: another thing I never thought about until I wrote this is the staggering unending logistics of transporting all those books, the energy and dedication required.  Authors just take for granted that no matter the venue, Talking Leaves will be present with our books, and like the Trinity, it always was and is.

I live in California now–the pull of 4 of 5 daughters on the West Coast too strong to stay East–but I’m going back to Buffalo this month to celebrate the publication of my new novel Impatient with Desire.  For me, and so many other writers, Talking Leaves is a core part of sending a book out into the world.

“We’ve faced immense challenges,” said Welch, reflecting on the store’s history. “It’s always a marginal business. It gives you resilience and a visceral understanding of being marginal. It teaches you how to better react to adversity.”

That is a quintessential Buffalonian statement.  We who have lived there or live there still call Buffalo “City of No Illusions.”  Like the independent bookstore business, Buffalonians are tough, resilient, and know how to live with adversity and survive it.

This started out as a paean to Talking Leaves, but it’s also becoming a paean to Buffalo.  Really, the two are inseparable.

Independent and idiosyncratic.

To paraphrase Talking Leaves’ website:

“Our conscience, taste, & community guide our decisions.  Who we are and what we stock set us apart.  We are an independent, alternative, general and literary bookstore–fiercely proud of our Buffalo roots, and proudly insistent that local independent businesses are the foundation of their communities.”

Hear, hear.

But I haven’t told you anything about how warm, comfortable, and welcoming Talking Leaves is, how you can disappear in the aisles and no one bothers you, how it carries the comfort of the libraries I found haven in growing up.

Take it from me: next time you’re planning a trip to Niagara Falls, be sure to make a side trip to Talking Leaves Bookstore.  Niagara Falls may be one of the 7 wonders, but in these days of homogenized or online bookstores, Talking Leaves also ranks high as a wonder.

You can shop online too.

http://www.tleavesbooks.com

Note from Dawn:  more thoughts on Talking Leaves at @writeMeg’s blog