An Ozark native gets friendly with Wendy in his shop

Redemption comes in many forms. Our Ozarkian odyssey ended with Julie Henigan, a folklorist in Springfield who appeared at our hotel with her gorgeous 1936 guitar. (We’d met her at lunch.) She regaled us with ballads and stories until just after 9, when my head nodding could no longer be disguised as me keeping time to the music. I think I’d started snoring, which was a pity because her music was lovely!

She and Jack went downstairs to close the hotel’s entryway lounge–the clerk next morning said it was her best night of work in a long time–while I plotted our route across Missouri and fell asleep with the atlas on my face.

Awaking refreshed but with a staple mark between the eyes, I bundled Jack into an early-but-not-marriage-endangering departure and our wheels rolled by 8:30. My circuitous route took us up another of those dotted scenic highways (Dear mapmakers: I’m sorry, but you have broken my trust for the last time) and then along a tiny grey line eastward to Lebanon.

For some reason the hotel breakfast had not stuck, and when we turned right at the tiny dot called Buffalo, I was hungry enough to concede to a fast food breakfast, despite our resolve to only eat in local establishments. At that moment there hoved into view a small, local cafe.

I pulled in so fast Jack almost swallowed his microphone. (He’s regaling me with stories of his musical exploits with Heritage back in the 1980s, and we’re taping them for a possible publication project later.) He  started to say something, but saw “bacon and eggs” on the sign, and switched the mini-disc recorder off.

Truth be told, ’twas fairly mediocre breakfast, not quite as homemade as one might have expected. Not all little restaurants in small towns are magic, but it filled the need. We asked Brandy, our server, if there happened to be any bookstores in town, and she pointed the way we’d come.

“One block over.”

We’d driven right past a bookstore and not seen it? I thought our eyes had attuned to 10-point type by now, but we backtracked–and realized why we hadn’t noticed. A plywood-and-paneling shack sat next to a desultory thrift store.

“Aimee’s Books” looked….cheap and cheerful from the outside, and we walked into your basic dormer on a concrete slab. One good prairie wind, and the whole house of books would collapse. 1950s gospel played on a radio as two locals, George and Debbie, chatted about what had been in the paper that week. I took a quick look around, found a cheap book that would do, and planned to beat a quick retreat.

Debbie at Aimee's Books in Buffalo, Missouri

Debbie asked where we were from. Jack told her, adding that we owned a bookstore. Her face lit up.

“I’m friends with about 300 bookstores on facebook,” she said, and launched into her own story. Illness, divorce, grown children who’d have to leave town to find jobs, and voila, a bookstore was born. When the daughter she’d set it up for found work at the local hotel, mom stepped in to keep it going, since by then the locals were regularly coming by with trades, and happy to have her there. And the store was named for her newest acquisition, somebody else’s three-year-old she was raising to give her some stability. Aimee’s picture had pride of place in a newspaper clipping describing the store’s opening. I began to understand Debbie’s philosophy on life. Warm heart, sweet spirit, messy bookstore. Priorities are important.

Debbie, oblivious to my inner musings, said, “Take George, the guy who was in here when you came in. His wife gives her mom lunch at the nursing home every day, and he comes in here and talks to me while she does that. He comes every day.” I could see why. Debbie embodied “earth mom meets home nurse” practicality and kindness.

She’d already heard about my book, and suddenly she broke off the thread of the conversation to say, “I always wanted to write about the people who come in here. They’re a real bunch of characters. But I don’t write. Not at all. Well, I’ve done a couple of things for local organizations, and on Facebook and stuff. But I never got into the habit of writing.”

“You should!” I just about shouted. “I wrote most of my book while minding our store, between customers.” I pointed to her desk, barricaded behind the only counter in the place. “Just prop your laptop up there and write when no one’s in. You’ll be amazed how fast you amass words.”

She nodded thoughtfully, and I hope her local paper will benefit from my prodding in the future. Maybe she’ll start a blog…..

Another regular customer cruised the store as we talked, and it became obvious that she wanted to talk to Debbie herself, so after some 30 minutes of comparing notes –how hard it was to get away, how lovely to have regular customers who would step in and keep the place running, how $28 a day take-home was a good day for her–we hugged goodbye.

You can’t judge a bookstore by its cover. Debbie was absolutely lovely, and her store fit that community like a hand in its glove, reaching out to everyone who crossed her path.

We drove a lovely small farm road (without any scenic dots, but one of the nicest we’d been on) down to Lebanon, where we entered the first of several bookstores across our route named “[town name] Books and Toys.” A new bookstore with one bay of used books, in a strip mall replete with bright fluorescent lighting, the place seemed almost schizophrenic in its personality, that center aisle of battered paperbacks competing with crisp and colorful new books in side displays. The young woman working the counter gave us a bag printed with its eight or so sister locations; the shops were the creation of three brothers who distributed magazines across the state, and had started their own bookstores. I liked the mystical angle of the three brothers, picturing the youngest as the fairy tale Jack, always doing the wrong thing at the right time to win out in the end. These boys must have been doing something right, as their family-owned chain dominated Missouri.

Hopping onto the highway, we drove to Rolla, Jack picking up his Heritage stories along the way. In Rolla, we found to our surprise a vibrant downtown section, complete with renovated sidewalks, and the most beautiful bookstore we’d seen to date. Large windows in beautiful brick-and-wood settings, an old-fashioned hand-lettered sign announcing “Reader’s Corner.”

The outside should have prepared us, but Debbie’s place hadn’t matched its cover, so we walked in expecting anything, and found the most beautiful bookstore we’d seen yet.

Dark wood shelves with decorative corner work, books lined neatly along them, corner bins and turn racks neatly arranged, and unusual statuary, old typewriters and suitcases atop the lot, stretching to the high ceiling. At the back, two castle turrets stood straight and true above the children’s section, teddy bears storming their towers as a rag doll with braids looked down, smiling vacantly.

I couldn’t speak. Jack took one look and headed straight for the guy behind the counter.

It was about an hour and  half later that we tore ourselves away from Larry Bowen, who probably had gotten embarrassed by our repeated assertions that he ran the prettiest used bookstore we’d ever seen. Brittany, his shop assistant, photographed us together, and we vowed to stay in touch. (His dad was a sign painter, as was Jack’s; he played guitar; etc.)

Jack with Larry, owner of Reader's Corner

Larry told us several funny (and all too familiar) stories about his adventures as a shop owner, and this blog will feature some of those in the coming weeks. (Yes, in response to queries, I will keep blogging once we return to our regularly scheduled lives, because there’s so much to say from all the lovely shopkeepers we met, but it’s going down to once a week.)

One of the things we talked with Larry about was the ever-present local/Amazon effect. Push me, pull me, shop local, get it cheaper. Larry had instituted a policy that anything Amazon sold cheaper than his shop, he would match at $2 higher. This took into account his expenses at running it, and the low budgets of a downturned economy’s customers. It seemed a good compromise.

Not so fast. A customer who’d come in a few weeks earlier to get a donation for her church went away with $50 in gift certificates. She reappeared and showed him a book on Amazon for $13.57. “Can you beat that price? I want to shop local,” she said, smiling winningly.

Larry sighed, swallowed, and pushed up his metaphorical shirt sleeves. “I can do $15.57.”

Her face fell. “But you can’t beat it? I need 10. The church board wants these for our next Bible study.”

Larry smiled. “$15.57.”

She frowned. “I don’t think our board would authorize that extra expense. It would be $20 more than Amazon, all told. No, I’m sorry, I just don’t think that will do.”

“What about the $50 donation I gave you last month?”

She looked suddenly sheepish. “Well… I mean, we do want to shop local. It’s just we need to be good money stewards.”

Larry smiled again. “So do I. I need to keep my business standing in the community I serve.”

Larry 10 x $15.57, Amazon 0.

Reader's Corner in Rolla, Missouri: world's prettiest used bookshop

Isn't it pretty?

How can I put this? The Ozarks are odd.

We pulled into Springfield last night and had a nice dinner with an old friend from Newfoundland days, who with minimal arm twisting agreed to meet us this morning and spend the day marauding through  bookstores. Rae met us at 9:30 a.m.  (a sacrifice for her, believe me) and we set off.

Rae's car was much admired as we journeyed.

And promptly ran into our first unfriendly bookstore manager. When I arrived at the typical-strip-mall location we were expecting the usual encounter of unusualness. To explain, about half to 60% of the bookstores we have visited are named Book Rack/Corner/Palace/Exchange and are 25,000 or so paperbacks tucked onto homemade shelving in a strip mall.

GOOD FOR YOU! we say, and since these places are usually staffed by the owner, we know their uniqueness lies not in what they offer or how they offer it, but in who is doing the selling. It’s part of the bookstore charm that owners tend to be colorful local characters, or sweethearts who just missed getting a social work degree, etc. We haven’t met two alike yet.

We bagged our first curmudgeon in this Missouri strip mall. Being the first, he seemed utterly charming, like gathering around the cage and going, “Oh, look! He’s doing it again!” when a gorilla flings poo.  Jack talked with the lad a bit longer than I did, since his Scots accent breaks down defenses, and by the time we left we knew that Cur (who was not that bad, as mudges go) and his family owned the store, they’d been there 20 years, and there were three other used bookstores in town, one run by a “real jerk,” and one by “Mr. Used Books; he wrote a book about running used bookstores, like 30 years ago.” (My ears pricked up.)

Warming to my husband, Mr. Personality also told us about “the secret store.” Apparently, if you are a good little customer and read all your classics, the community will let you in on an unmarked shop at the corner of a busy intersection. The store is in an industrial location and has no sign, but the faithful few know where to find “The Book Jungle.”

See, there’s no other way to put it: the Ozarks are odd. Charming, and fun, but odd. As we left that store, I said to Rae, “Wow. We’ve never met an anti-social used book store owner before. That’s really rare.”

Her bemused, one-raised-eyebrow look should have warned me, but we arrived at the second store convinced Cur was a one-off. At the door we were greeted by a sign that said, “No, we don’t have a customer bathroom. So don’t ask.”

It was the only greeting we got. Rae’s eyebrow made ever more sense as we shopped. Although spacious, this store boasted no overstuffed armchairs, no cozy corners, no warm lamps for reading. Another sign on the back wall said something to the effect of, “Put it back where you found it. If you can’t, why are shopping in a bookstore in the first place?” I nudged Jack. “Let’s get out of here.”

The college kid working with the owner couldn’t have cared less about our bookstore in Virginia, and we started to leave, but the owner looked up and said, “Where in Virginia? Never heard of that.”

We spent 15 minutes making bookstore small talk, and he warmed up enough to show us his $1,000 signed first edition of SE Hinton’s The Outsiders. As we left the store, Rae said, “That place has been here a long time. Now I know that he bought it six years ago, it’s starting to make sense. The personality of the store really changed then. Before, it was friendlier.”

Jack and I have often said, there are people who sell books because they’re books, and there are people who sell books because that’s what they ended up selling.

Okay, two weird bookstores in rapid succession. Now we’d had our quota.

Welcome to Redeemed, our first ever second-hand book dealer for Christians only. Redeemed, to be honest, was well organized and not leaning specifically to the “only Republicans are Christians” attitude we’d seen rather broadly displayed since reaching Springfield. Rae and I, folklorists to our cores, had already talked Jack’s ears off discussing which was the buckle of the Bible belt: Appalachia or the Ozarks. And I have to concede this point of honor to the Ozarks. I thought I’d seen a lot of “God is a white American who spends his weekends hunting” displayed in Appalachia, but we’ve got nothing on this town.

(Caveat the second: let me establish where on the mast my colors are nailed. In essence, I would die before giving up being a Christian, but I wouldn’t kill anyone over anything to do with any religion, period. If you ask me what being a Christian means, it comes down to He really was God’s Son; She really was a Virgin; It really was a Whale; and if you start the hymn, you must sing all four verses. After that, I’m flexible. I do, however, doubt very much that God is a white, English-speaking male.)

So lest you think I’m making fun of something that is the underpinning value of my life, we liked Redeemed just fine as a bookstore. Our big question was, how would a Christian bookstore decide which books to stock? They had a small classics section, in which Madame Bovary appeared, but not Dracula, Brideshead Revisited or Tom Jones. Was this happenstance? Sarah Palin’s books had pride of place in politics, but Barak Obama’s Audacity of Hope appeared on the shelf as well.

How would one run a bookstore based on an interpretation so specific to the shopkeeper’s personal beliefs? This was an interesting question for us. I’ve often said that, if you turn a book shop owner’s heart inside out, what you get is the shop. It’s a display of who and what the person is. Earlier in the trip, Joe’s shop was as messy and free-spirited as a VW bus parked at Woodstock, Joyce’s as neatly executed as a cross stitch pattern. The one TN shop we hadn’t liked sported low lighting and high prices, and once you met the owner, you knew it for a shyster’s dream. A Christian bookstore would be so hard to define, then to defend from its own clientele. How would one do it?

We would never know because the staff were too busy for us to feel comfortable approaching anyone; the place brimmed with people bringing in trade volumes–which made us think with a pang of our baby, back in Big Stone being looked after by the student Edward. The week after Christmas has traditionally been a time when people clean out closets, and we wondered if our back room were already impassible with this year’s dredgings.

Never mind; we have a week left and we’re going to live in the moment! Out of Redeemed’s parking lot we went, on to that secret location for The Book Jungle.

Oi vey. Now we know. Odd is Ozark normal.

This rat maze of a bookstore, with the lowest lighting I’d ever not been able to see in, was literally the size of our hotel room. Yet he must have had 20,000 books stuck in there – very neatly organized, too. If this shop had been a man, it would have buttoned the top button of its collar, not spoken unless spoken to, and known the exact distance to Mars, when the first silent film appeared in America, and how to get out if trapped in an underwater car.

Which pretty much sums up the owner, a man whose name we never got. Our conversation with him consisted of amiable fishhooks tossed out on our side (“Wow! You been here long?”) and grunts on his.

His prices were low – too low for him to have been using a computer. Had we been buying for our own shop, we could have scored big time, but we contented ourselves with a few real finds. It felt too much like taking candy from a surly infant.

Lunch with a couple of Rae’s college friends, and a final bookstore stop: ABC Books. Okay, put the cherry on the icing of the Odd cake: this was a secondhand bookstore where the front was Christian, the back full of paranormals and how-tos. And this shop did display personality, right next to the canners and the “how to survive when the electricity fails” pamphlets published by the owner. And advertisements for “Survival Series” shooting courses, tailored to “never shot before” wives and children.

I looked at Rae, a Missouri native. She grinned. “Welcome to the Ozarks.”

We bought a couple of fun titles there, and I look forward to planting my edible front yard when we get home.