Spotlight on Bookstores: *Brookline Booksmith* in Brookline, Mass.

This week’s Spotlight on Bookstores post is written by Daphne Kalotay, author of the captivating novel Russian Winter, which will be out on September 7 (oh, the day my kids return to school, mark the date for many reasons!).  I’ll post my review of Russian Winter tomorrow; here’s a six-word tease: “I didn’t want it to end!” 

Kalotay lives in the Boston area, where the present-day storyline of this multi-time-period multi-setting novel is set; in this essay she sings the praises of her neighborhood bookstore, the Brookline Booksmith.  If you’re in the neighborhood on September 7, visit the Brookline Booksmith for the launch of Russian Winter.

Since 1993 my neighborhood bookstore has been the Brookline Booksmith.  It’s an oasis I’ve watched make its way through various incarnations, and when in 2002 I moved to an apartment just one street away, the Booksmith became something like an extension of my living room—more shelves for me to easily browse almost whenever I feel like it.

Back when I first discovered the store, as a twenty-three-year-old student in a creative writing program, the Booksmith held a definite power over me; it could overwhelm me with evidence of so many writers doing what I too wanted so badly to do.  If I was in a good mood, the tables full of new or recommended or remaindered books inspired me, gave me hope, and I would leave with a haul of paperbacks stamped with bright yellow bargain stickers.  But on days when I felt weighed down by the writer’s task, unable to fathom how one might satisfactorily conclude a short story, let alone navigate the windy road to publication, the Booksmith was a place I simply could not enter, for the doubts it might set off and the envy that might besiege me.

Back then I was also enough of a snob that, watching as the store expanded by adding another room, I was dismayed to see the new room become a gift shop.  Until, that is, I took a look at the offerings.  Not only were the greeting cards tasteful, the jewelry and gifts attractive, but the prices were utterly reasonable.  I’ve become a regular in this section of the store, and I’m sure this first-rate gift shop must be a large part of what has helped the bookstore stay afloat despite Amazon and e-books.  Why, two Christmases ago even the Barnes & Noble on the same street closed its doors.  But the Booksmith, with its superb staff and selection (including an array of literary/art journals and a children’s area at the back) has kept going.

It has done so even when certain arrangements didn’t quite work.  There was the period, for instance, when the Cinemasmith next door moved its excellent video & dvd rental business into the Booksmith’s basement—the room where the Booksmith’s many literary events are held.  Each time an author gave a reading, the moveable stacks of rentals would be pushed aside to make room for folding chairs, and a sign would be placed up at the top of the stairs saying that the video store would be closed for a couple of hours. 

That arrangement didn’t last so long.  Nowadays the basement is the store’s used book cellar, where I often have the discrete thrill of finding exactly the book I’m searching for.  It is also the location where I launched my first book and will soon launch my second.          

And what luck that it’s all right around the corner.

                                                                                                –Daphne Kalotay