Spotlight on Bookstores: *Brattleboro Books* in Brattleboro, Vermont

Allow me to introduce you to Jessamyn Smyth, who will introduce you to Brattleboro Books in this Spotlight on Bookstores.  Brattleboro Books is the kind of place where one can have a “glorious debauch” and the owner takes pride in his role of enabler.  I hadn’t even finished reading Jessamyn’s essay the first time through before I was opening a new browser window to Google Maps and checking the driving distance … just about two hours, perfect for a daytrip next spring, don’t you think?!

Jessamyn Smyth’s writing has appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Red Rock Review, Cezanne’s Carrot, Nth Position, Abalone Moon, MiCrow, qarrtsiluni, and many other journals and anthologies. She won listing in Best American Short Stories/100 Distinguished Stories of 2005, and has several books in progress: you can find her online at www.jessamynsmyth.net

Brattleboro Books has it.

Brattleboro Books (photo courtesy Brattleboro Books)

If you’re a lover of old-fashioned, unpretentious used bookstores, you know what “it” I mean: the smell of paper-dust and leather, dark-ish, precarious stacks, too-tall shelves loaded too-full, cubbies, niches, piles both vertical and horizontal of everything that seems related but doesn’t quite fit, labyrinthine, narrow aisles leading to chairs in corners stacked all around with books—and the sense that each aisle’s turning might also lead to Narnia, or that time of greater happiness, or that place and time you cherish more than any other, or the fiction section anyway.

I once went into Brattleboro Books looking for Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, everything by James Herriot and Gerald Durrell, a decent edition of The Decameron, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, a copy of Plato’s Symposium for someone who didn’t realize how hilarious and awesome it is in every way, some Clive Barker for my brother, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, some Agatha Christie and John le Carré, and every Nero Wolfe novel Rex Stout ever wrote. In spite of all likelihoods, I came out with nearly all of it. I think I only got seven or eight Nero Wolves, and I may have only found several Durrells. But it was all there, waiting for me.

When what I’m looking for isn’t waiting for me there, something better is.

A couple of months ago I went in for a copy of Ursula Le Guin’s astonishing and perfect speculative/utopian/dystopian/literary novel The Dispossessed to give to someone else. All copies were cleaned out. So I left with Le Guin’s Searoad instead: interconnected short stories which create a portrait of a time and place so specific it’s universal; a collection which fed and eased my heart so startlingly and well that I promptly loaned it out. It never returned. I’ve given away several more copies already.

Mid-December, I had a glorious debauch there: this time, no agenda except something vague about Christmas and a fully-justified lump of cash to spend. This meant I could enter the Brattleboro Books fugue utterly, without guilt, for whatever unfolded.

See, I love to read writers who love to read and write. I don’t love a particular genre or style to the exclusion of others, and I don’t dismiss any. None. Anything could be astonishing. Anything could be entertaining, and teach me something. Anything could literally save my life. Anything could send me home on a writing bender of my own. Anything could get me through a cold winter. And much of it does. I like sharing it, too. Brattleboro Books is tailored to this sort of reader. Someone for whom the word “eclectic” doesn’t even begin to be the point.

The owners have it, too. They greet you warmly, offer to help if you need it, then leave you alone.

I’ve been in there enough that this time, when the co-owner (whom I only know as Ellen’s Husband) greeted me and said I should let him know if I needed anything, I answered: “At a certain point, which will become self-evident, I would like you to throw me out.”

“No,” he replied.

I grinned. He’s an enabler.

In the Classics section, I pulled a bunch of Dante of various translations, some Russians—Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky—and also Sarah Orne Jewett, abundant Virginia Woolf, some Defoe, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells. Now that’s how a Classics section should be.

In the plays section, I decided I wanted some Euripides, Suzan Lori Parks, and Caryl Churchill. There were none of these, and the shelves were in a clearly-recent splatter of knock-down disarray which could only indicate that some jonesing theater-junkie had gotten there before me, leaving only a bunch of Edward Albee, a long string of chestnuts, and the scores to some Broadway musicals. I’ll go back later, and get there first this time; it’s like Macy’s on Black Friday, theater.

First editions and collectibles, in a battered and unpainted wooden stand-alone, leans against the weirdest and best cookbook collection anywhere: I found a 1900 or so Poetical Works of Poe in the softest, most beautiful leather imaginable; spine broken, edges foxed, and utterly lovely. A wonderful Frances Hodgson Burnett from 1890. A 1951 Agatha Christie with a pristine, original dust-jacket.

By the time I got to the fiction section, I told the owner: “I’m gonna need a bigger basket.”

“Yep,” he said. “You can start stacking them here.”

“You’re not helping,” I said. He just smiled.

By the time I left, I had piles. Glorious piles. Gifts for all, including me. Barry Lopez. Louise Erdritch. Kazuo Ishiguro. Carson McCullers. Stephen King. Madeleine L’engle. Peter S. Beagle. Jules Verne.

Ringing up the purchases, Ellen’s Husband said: “Do you know you have two of this Le Guin?”

“Yes,” I answered. Then, by way of explanation: “It’s really good.”

“Well alright then.” We chatted for a while about how gorgeous Searoad is, and how impossible to keep in the house, and why. He said he’d pass on the news. “Oh, you got the Edward Gorey,” he said. “I wondered who’d grab that first.”

I’m small, it’s true. But I’m quick.

After a long period of ringing things out and packing them up carefully, he said: “This is a lot of books. I’m giving you a discount.” Which he did. A steep one, for which I was grateful.

“Thank you,” I said to him. “This place is what bookstores always mean to be, but rarely are. It makes me so happy.”

And finally, with inquiry after whether I’d scored a parking place close by in the lot across the street (I had), he finally threw me out.

Until next time.

Brattleboro Books
34-36 Elliot Street
Brattleboro, Vermont

Click here for directions to Brattleboro Books, and to view photos taken by the owner.