Tag Archives: Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap

His White, Square Heart

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My 71-year-old husband built me a downstairs office. From a musty dugout basement lined with concrete he created white walls and a safe ceiling (no asbestos) plus a floor made of durable earth-friendly wood and windows that let in all the light a basement can get. He used bright-white materials so the light would be stronger.

He left the central wall’s original brickwork, even though he didn’t like it much, because he knows I think brickwork is cool and funky. He removed all the spiders he found because he has seen me run, shrieking in terror, from Daddy Long Legs.

It took him three months and something well above a thousand dollars, and he did it all himself—except when he had to determine which wires were live, which dead, running over the copper water pipes. For that he called in our friend X, a covert plumber here in town masquerading as a mine safety engineer. (X must not be outed; there aren’t many plumbers around here and his golf weekends would be crushed.)

Jack sealed cracks and underpinned flooring and shaved off door edges and cut special angles to cover protruding pipes. My husband did all that for me, because he wanted me to have a cozy space that I could call my own. Upstairs on the second floor, our private home is full of mind-grabbing, endless chores, while the bookstore is replete with people and noise and sales and inventory–not that we don’t like those things. They are the heartbeat of the bookstore.

But downstairs, with a comfy chair from a thrift store and a mantelpiece donated by a friend and an electric fire Jack hunted down on clearance, there’s a different kind of heartbeat. A quiet one. A steady one. An enduring one.

Jack said, out of the blue the other day as we doctored our respective morning coffees, “I built that space for you as comfortably and as carefully as I could, so you would have it forever.”

“I know,” I said, and kissed him on the cheek.

There are things couples don’t say, and then there are things couples don’t use words to say. When I sit downstairs in the white space that my husband’s hands created for me, I know, and he knows I know, that I’m sitting inside his heart. Cozy and warm, underpinning everything, letting the light in.

Minding the Books

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Jack blogs on the business matters of bookstore life

Since opening our bookstore we’ve kept a close eye on our sales from month to month. This was initially part of the process of calculating sales tax, but as we moved from year one to year two, we realized that comparing the same month in different years couldn’t hurt our planning. (We were business virgins when we started, but we have learned quickly.)

That, in turn, allowed us to see how we were building our customer base in succeeding years – until we hit a plateau around year three or four. We were comfortably aware that we had probably reached saturation point, in terms of our region’s ‘willing to drive to the bookstore’ market, but then things changed again after Little Bookstore was published.

To begin with its effect coincided with our usual pre- and post- Christmas peak (believe it or not January can be a good month for bookstores, as people spend their Christmas gift money). The Christmas Factor made it hard to separate the two. Traditionally, the period from late January through late March has always been very low. In fact we have come to expect a goodly handful of ‘cashless wonder’ days during this period, when people either use accumulated credit or bring boxes of books in for credit. We brace ourselves and eat more mac and cheese.

But, here we are heading for the end of February 2013 and we’ve continued to be almost as busy as during that seasonal Christmas peak. The explanation seems to be that the folk who have read Little Bookstore are intrigued enough to want to experience both the bookstore and Big Stone for real.

It’s becoming pretty easy to tell these nice folk as soon as they come into the shop, too! They have an expectant look about them; they smile at our cats and call them by name. They seek out ‘the rejection letter,’ and they just kind of hover in a satisfied way.

Once we twigged what was going on we would ask where they came from and discovered that our geographical footprint had grown. Quite a bit.

Funny though this may seem, as excited as I’d been about the book coming out, it had never occurred to me it would entice people to seek out our shop. But I’m certainly glad they are. Without exception, they’ve been nice people, pleasant visitors, appreciative of the town without a whiff of “how… quaint” to them. They’re good conversationalists. AND they’re buying books.

What more could a bookslinger ask for?