Category Archives: bookstore management

A Little Help from our Friends

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Jack guest blogs on the value of friendships, especially in small town shops

This weekend we are once again on our travels with book events, from the John Fox Festival here at home, through a visit to Clifton Forge Library, and then on to the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville. As usual when we are away for a few days our friends rally round to staff the bookstore on rota.

Just call us The Little Book Co-op of Big Stone Gap.

These friends handle book sales, oh yes, but there are also the shop animals to care for, boxes of donated or traded in books to be valued and priced (or politely refused), mail to be collected and opened for book orders, and phone inquiries to be responded to. Although amazed that anyone would be willing to take this on, we are delighted that we have so many friends who will. They represent one aspect of the community presence of our bookstore; we really are almost a co-operative owned by its customers. Quite often a ‘regular’ will be hanging out, checking e-mails or browsing the bookshelves, when suddenly he finds himself in charge of the shop for ten minutes while I do a post office run or dash out for milk.

Occasions like this weekend require a bit more pre-planning, but, despite other calls on folks’ time, we always manage to keep the shop open. We never succumb to the erosion of hours, no matter how tempting; it’s our observation that when small businesses become careless about that, their days are numbered.

So, we pay homage to the many friends of ‘Tales of the Lonesome Pine’ AKA ‘The little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap’.  And we also salute Mark and Sally Smith of Memphis, who are coming to watch the shop for two weeks in April while we get our Christmas and birthdays 2012 and 2013/Valentine’s Day/fifteenth wedding anniversary holiday in. (We’re going to Istanbul. It’s expensive. We’ve been saving for months and we’re going to have the time of our lives.)

You’re going to love Big Stone, Mark and Sally, and they’re gonna love you. Our thanks to you all for keeping the shop while we’re running about promoting a book about bookstores. There’s a certain full-circle feel about it, don’t you think?

For more examples of how people have rallied to their community bookstores, check out the March 18 Christian Science Monitor article detailing bookstores that have been moved, staffed, or even cooked for by locals lending a hand. If you’re in Illinois (Edwardsville, to be precise) check out Afterwords Bookstore, a lovely shop with a similar story. Or ask your local bookshop about their ‘co-op’ friends. They’re guaranteed to have some.

Everyone’s Special Space

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Our bookstore could not do without its cleaning lady, Heather. Heather has three important functions: keep long-term grime from accumulating; remove and regroup immediate clutter; and intimidate us into general tidiness that won’t slip below a certain level.

She performs each of these with dignity, grace, and humor. And the cats love her.

Heather and her husband David have two boys. Reese, their older son, is autistic. The family lives about four doors down the street, and once when David brought him in for a minute, Reese started one of those fits that all parents of special needs children dread. The one that looks like a tantrum but is a natural part of how this child is hardwired. The one that looks like bad parenting to people who can’t hear the music the family is dancing to.

Having spent a lot of my storytelling career working with special needs kids, I told David then, “Look, if you’re worried he’ll hurt himself or unlearn behavior you’ve been working on, that’s one thing. But if you’re afraid he’ll upset us, don’t worry.” That was years ago, but it’s created a space for Reese ever since.

reeseSo when the family got ready to lobby in DC for the March of Dimes campaign this year, Reese came to the bookstore to “practice” public etiquette. He was asked to ask before he touched knick-knacks, to stay away from the fridge and microwave–his two favorite bookstore items–and to sit down for a minute at a time. All of which he did well.

It’s hard for the Reeses of this world to get space for practicing, let alone just being. If you want to read a great article about “public space” and the autistic angle on “separate but equal,” Heather reposted one from the March 16 http://www.slate.com: “Where Should Special Needs Kids be Special? Tricky Questions about how to share Public Spaces.”

Meanwhile, Reese and the family are welcome anytime at our bookstore–and at Malaprop’s in Asheville, where the family surprised us by coming to a book talk I gave there. Reese did his signature bird tweets for most of the talk, and nobody in the audience minded a bit, because they’d been told ahead of time who Heather was and what Reese was likely to do.

It’s just one more reason to be proud of–and support–small independent bookstores, because we (as in community bookshops) get what the article author Amy Lutz said, “But what I keep coming back to is that community, by definition, is inclusive. Ideally, our public spaces should accommodate everyone.”

Amen, sister.