Category Archives: small town USA

Dear James Patterson….

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Dear Mr. Patterson,

I’m sure your mom loves you; probably you’re a nice man who is good to dogs and small children, and you try not to run over any manatee in your private pontoon boat near your inlet coastal home.

But frankly, dude, I am so over you.

My husband and I run a used bookstore, and not a week passes that one of three things doesn’t happen:

(Sorry, did you follow that okay? I’ve read a couple of your books, so understand that you prefer simple syntax.)

1)      The door opens and someone staggers in bearing a box full of battered mystery and thriller paperbacks; about 1/3 of them are yours. The others will be Mary Higgins Clark, Danielle Steel, or Patricia Cornwall. (Not that your private life is any of our business, mind.) The person trading these in will dump them on the table and head straight for classics, waving a dismissive hand behind him- or herself. “These aren’t mine; a friend was moving and said I could take them. Never read trash like that. Have you got any Hemingway First Editions?”

2)      The door opens and a customer comes in asking for you (your books, I mean; we all know you don’t get to Southwest Virginia very often.) I point out the shelf you share with John Grisham (again, your private life is your own) where we now stash you for $4 a paperback, $6 a hardback; it just saves time, not having to price you every day. The person scans quickly, then frowns. “These are old. I want the newest one. Why don’t you have it if you have all these?”

3)      The phone rings and someone offers to sell us “a really valuable set of books.” Three times in five, sir, they are talking about an entire hardback collection of you. We explain that we don’t buy books for cash, and they become irate. “This is a really popular author! Everybody reads him!” Yes, we know. We have a growing stack of this popular author’s older hardbacks creeping up the wall in one corner, because they outgrew that Grisham/Patterson shelf. One day some of our foster kittens were playing nearby, and the pile collapsed. You just missed committing multiple felinicides, James me lad. Wouldn’t that have made you feel terrible?

So, Mr. Patterson, we just want you to know–and no hard feelings–that we kind of hate you. Nothing personal, but you make us feel like book pimps instead of erudite scholars. Plus, your customers are so … loyal. We suggest a Kava, plead with them to try a Jance, lead them to Scottoline, even beg them to consider Hillerman or Stabenow. We extol variety as the spice of life.

Nothing works. It’s your spiciness they crave, Mr. P, you who have filled used bookstores everywhere with your 1,2,3, nursery rhyme titles, with your “same-plot-different-characters” smoke, mirrors, and adverbs routine. You are giving the readers exactly what they want.

{Sigh}. And that’s why we hate you.  So now you know, and I hope you can still sleep at night, riddled with all that guilt.

Sincerely, Wendy and Jack, proprietors, Tales of the Lonesome Pine Used Books

P.S. Please do not send any of those men who read your novels professionally for ideas, to rub us out. We are small town people and would have no defense. Thank you.

My Poor Husband

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Those who read this blog regularly know that my husband and I live above the used bookstore we own and operate in Big Stone Gap, VA. This living arrangement leads to some fun handyman projects around the house-cum-bookshop: like painting the titles of novels on our porch steps, so they look like books lying sideways. Or putting up one of those lighted reindeer at Christmas, the one with his head down like he’s grazing, and adding a pair of glasses and a copy of Night Before Christmas.

Jack is a naturally gifted handyman who built all the shelves in our bookstore–including a set of floating shelves upstairs that the customers don’t see. Floating shelves look cool, but they are not space efficient for a shop that is climbing rapidly past 38,000 used books. So we go with the simpler model downstairs.

The project we are most looking forward to currently is the arc de books, copied from a bookshop in Lyon, France. Jack’s been studying on how to build the thing, and I’ve been squirreling away the books we can no longer sell-1990 computer manuals, damaged classics, and those Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. (These are the pigeons of the bookselling world; they leave their crap everywhere.)

Unfortunately for Jack, the interest of friends and fellow bookshop operators in this plan has been piqued. People are sending photos and websites of cool book projects–and I am dreaming big. (Thanks Carolyn Jourdan and Jim Mentink for the photos that appear today.) Jack is keeping his head down and drinking the good whiskey.

Don’t you think these would look nice in our shop, downstairs or up?

I could see myself luxuriating in this tub…

and we could totally use the piano shelf upstairs.

Since Jack is in Scotland right now, leading his annual tour of folkies through Scotland and Ireland, I think I could get a few new projects into his “honey do” jar without too much of a fuss, don’t you? After all, he’s a very handy guy around the house.