Tag Archives: Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap

Jack’s Guest Blog about Wendy’s Surprise Party

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I hardly ever get surprised by a surprise party. I remember when Wendy went to elaborate lengths to set me up for my sixtieth birthday surprise party, constantly rescuing the situation when people at work said things like “what time are we meeting Friday” and such. Finally, worn out, she went to lie down for an hour and the phone rang. I answered and it was my old pal Jock Duncan apologizing to me for “having to miss my surprise party.” I had to put on an act when we got there of being ‘surprised’! So it usually goes.

But this week the shoe was on the other foot when I got a phone call from our dear friend Ashia to say that she and her husband Witold wanted to recognize Wendy’s contribution to the well-being of the town through her book and the bookstore, by throwing her a surprise book launching party. Much subterfuge occurred as the week wore on toward Friday evening–careful wording of emails, phoning when I knew Wendy was out of the shop, making sure Witold and Ashia’s car was not parked outside the shop when they dropped by for planning moments. It was all so nerve-racking that I could hardly believe that it was going to work!

So Friday evening came and a dozen of our friends assembled at Witold and Ashia’s house half an hour before we were due to arrive and hid themselves away in a side room. As we were welcomed by Ashia I could see Wendy eying the dinner table set with all the best china, wine glasses and cutlery for more than just four of us. Before the penny dropped, though, all our friends came bursting in amid great hilarity. And a wonderful evening ensued. A slide show of pictures of Wendy at various stages of her past life played in the background as she was presented with a framed certificate awarding her ‘The Big Stone Gap Nobel Prize for her outstanding contribution to local self-awareness’; everyone received a bookmark with a picture of the book on it; everyone took turns reading glowing reviews that the book has received; bookstore stories and legends were exchanged and retold.

For me, of course, a big part of the fun was the sheer delight of seeing the realization on Wendy’s face when everyone bowled into the room. But even more I enjoyed looking round the room at those friends who were delighting in her delight, without a hint of jealousy at her success, just pleased to be part of what she’d done, part of our lives, to be friends.

As Wendy said in her speech, “It’s lovely if you can write something and have people like it, but better yet is being part of a group of people who like you just because you’re you.”

The Elder Library

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Jack and I grouse about Gore Vidal. He’s become the poster child of books that aren’t moving anymore.

Occasionally someone wanders in and gets excited about our Danielle Steels. (We pay them 35 cents per book. :] ) But for the most part our rural shop fills quickly with the detritus of 1970s book clubs and the five-year-old passions of a reading public that’s not really on the grid.

Gore and his friends are just…. past it. And yet, they were hot items in their day, tickets to discussion groups and in crowds and even costume parties. Now, they’re slightly musty, fusty, freyed-jacket doyennes and dowager duchesses, all but sniveling on the shelves as they eye the bright shiny Lee Woodruff dust covers.

Ah, for the days of glory; we all miss them, don’t we?

But take heart, for a used books shop is not like the cruel fleshmarkets of retails bookstores and libraries–and I’ll just pause here to remind you that some of my best friends are bookstore owners, so don’t write me in a huff; tuck your tongue in your cheek and keep reading! No, used book shops are the hospices of the library world, where books go to finish with dignity what began with flashiness.

Nary a “six months or you’re out” deadline here. We still have a couple of books that we opened our shop with, six years ago. Now, since we don’t keep electronic inventory, it is possible that they’ve been bought and returned for credit two or three times in their post-high-life careers. Or they could just have sat there all this time, taking up shelf space that Tom Wolfe and Barbara Kingsolver would have left more quickly.

Yet this is the joy of a used books shop: nothing is ever over–not until the spine’s last piece of masking tape disintegrates, the cover is too grubby for human hands to contemplate, or the ideas in the book are so old, sad and sorry that to carry the book would be to connote something lower than the bottom shelf. Short of this, the shawl-draped books of yesterday sit, patiently waiting, for readers who remember and appreciate their glamor, their wisdom, their glory days.

It’s not unlike elders in America, is it? There’s an African proverb: when an old person dies, a library burns down. When faces wrinkle, hands shrivel and bodies shrink, do we dismiss the voices and the minds that still carry so much history, so much wisdom, so much insight into how we should live? How much do we miss when we judge a book by its well-worn cover?

Just askin’.