Spotlight on Bookstores: *Troubadour Books* in Hadley, Massachusetts

From beginning (how she and her husband arrived at the bookstore) to end (what the proprietor offered as a departing refreshment), Rebecca Rasmussen’s Spotlight on Bookstores will hold your attention.  I suspect that’s what we’ll find when we read her novel, The Bird Sisters, due out from Crown/Random House in April 2011.  In the meantime, you can learn more about Rebecca, her work, and her fun by reading The Bird Sisters blog,  joining her Facebook fan page, and following @thebirdsisters on Twitter.

Rain and sleet don’t deter us. Neither do windstorms and hail. My husband and I would snowshoe to Troubadour Books if we had to—that’s how wonderful this bookstore is and how painful it is that we’ve moved on to Missouri now and that snowshoe jaunt would be somewhere in the ballpark of 1,100 miles. Yikes!

Still, we’d do it. Wouldn’t we, honey?

(Honey is reading on the couch. “For Troubadour,” he says, “yes!”)

My husband and I were married in our backyard many years ago, but we should have been married at Troubadour Books in Massachusetts because this is one of the few places in the world that unfailingly accommodates our opposite natures. My husband wishes he could take a food pill, for example, because to him eating is mostly bothersome. I teach a Food & Culture class. So there it is. In both daily life and in a bookstore, we require serious diversity. 

Enter Troubadour Books. My husband was the one who found it the year before he went back to school, when he was driving around with his landscaping/snow removal crew on the back roads in Hatfield, MA. The two-lane roads and the gently rolling farmland beyond them are already breathtaking. In the summer, there’s alfalfa, cabbage, corn, and tobacco. In the fall, pumpkins and squash all the way to the hills. In winter, it’s snow, of course, and a few old-soul snowmen children have built along the way. In spring, it’s field flowers so lovely you’ll cry. Or at least stop to pick a few. So you see, cruising around the back roads is always reward enough if you have your eyes open.

Or is it?

After work one fateful winter day, my husband came through the front door, grabbed my coat off the hook, and we smushed into the front seat of his truck. Never mind that it was snowing, which meant he’d have to go back to shoveling driveways and spreading salt as soon as his beeper went off. Never mind that my homemade chicken potpie was sitting in the oven, half-baked.

“It’ll be worth it,” my husband said.

And it was. Good lord, it was.

But when we first drove up to Troubadour Books, it didn’t seem glaringly obvious how amazing this bookstore would be, perhaps because it was in an old house or perhaps because there was only one other car in the small gravel parking lot and it belonged to the owner. We were used to store-like bookstores. Nametag-wearing staff members. Staff in general. This was…well…different.

Enter Bob Willig, the owner.

“Come on in,” we heard when we pulled open the screened door on the front porch and stood hesitantly at the threshold.

Aside from the inordinate amount of impressive first edition books cloaking the entranceway, we could have been stepping into someone’s living room. In front of us were a ragged old couch, two armchairs, and a man reading a newspaper.

“I think there was a cat, too,” my husband reminds me just now.

“Are you sure?” I say.

“Well, there was hair at the very least.”

This is what staying away from Troubadour has done to us: we’re starting to lose our minds a little bit.

Cat or no cat, the owner Bob Willig introduced himself, but didn’t get up.

“Welcome,” he said, and left us to wander the first floor on our own.

I went straight to the fiction section and immediately started challenging the strength of my arms with gently used editions I’d always wanted, but which my bank account would never support. My husband found the classics section and kept walking between it and me, whispering things like, “They have this one in Sanskrit. Can you believe it?” or “This book lists for $200 and it’s $25 here! Amazing!” or  “This section is so good I would cry, if I weren’t a brawny man.”

As I said, this was right before my husband went back to school, right before I became pregnant with our daughter. I have to say Troubadour is a large part of why my husband turned his interest in Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit into his vocation. The stacks of beautiful, hand-sewn old volumes he ended up taking home that day changed our lives. They really did. (Whenever I walk by them on my husband’s bookshelf, I smile and give thanks. I love the passion they induce in my husband.)

When it came time to check out that day—we’d stayed nearly two hours!—Bob discounted each book, which we’d come to learn was characteristic of how he did business. We learned, too, that he opened his “store” in 1995 and had a storage unit full of books that wouldn’t fit into this old house. He did another thing that day, which, from then on, he always did whenever we visited and it was cold and blustery outside. He reached under the front counter and pulled out a bottle of good whiskey and two shot glasses.

“To brace against the cold,” he said, smiling.

That’s how I remember Bob.

I’ve heard Troubadour has moved to a new location now—that they are expanding, if you can believe it!—which is supposed to be just as great as the location I know and love.

Is there still a maybe-cat in the store? Does Bob still discount every book at the checkout counter? Does he still offer winter travelers whiskey? Do they drink it? That’s what I’m putting my money on.

note from Dawn:  I found that Bob is now operating Troubadour Books within “Sam Burton’s Grey Matter” near Route 9 in Hadley, Massachusetts.  It’s about a 2-hour drive for me; I’d love to make the trip some day!