Post #29 of 40
Giving Up Giving Away Books
If the bookstore comes up in conversation, I say, “I was raised in a bookstore.”
My sister says, “The bookstore was home.”
Our grandparents bought Zibart’s Bookstore in Madison, Tennessee, in 1969, and even at the age of five or six, I had jobs to do when I visited. In the early years, I worked in the Hallmark section, making sure each card had three copies on display. If I needed to replenish the supply, I matched the ID number of the card with the file folders of cards in the drawers below and pulled out more.
I straightened the children’s books and took an extra few minutes to check out the new scratch-and-sniff and pop-up books. I checked the spines of the Nancy Drew, Happy Hollister, and Hardy Boys books and made sure they were in correct numerical order. My favorite job was using a tea strainer to clean out the 24-inch tall, sand-filled ashtrays at the end of each row of paperbacks. The cigarette butts and ashes would stay in the tea strainer, and the sand would flow out. My grandfather smoked cigarettes until he had a heart attack in 1971. He never touched another cigarette after that; instead, he sucked on Luden’s cherry cough drops.
By the time I was 8 or 9, I called out the prices and quantities of books during the January inventory. I helped Nana bring out the Christmas wrapping paper, cards, and ornaments, and she taught me how to neatly wrap packages. She was better than I was, even though I had two hands, and she had one. I even helped verify that the book deliveries on Thursday matched the packing slips.
My sister and I were voracious readers, and we were allowed to take home almost any book we wanted. We weren’t allowed to take home the scratch and sniff or pop-up books or the coffee table books that my parents had deemed too expensive. We wrote down the names and prices of the books in a spiral notebook under the cash register, and then our parents would pay the bill at the end of the year. With that agreement in place, I hardly ever went to a public library.
By 10, I was making change, looking up special order books in a giant hardback “catalog” of every book in print and calling customers when their special orders had arrived. This was before the internet or Amazon.
By 14, I was running the store with my sister or a friend when my grandparents journeyed on Amtrak across the United States and back each summer. One summer, I ran the bookstore with a man who had been a faithful customer over the years, and when his wife died, he went into a deep depression. His psychiatrist recommended he get a job, volunteer or otherwise, so my grandparents invited him to work at the bookstore every weekday for a year or more.
I dreamed of owning this bookstore, of arranging seasonal displays in the window, of inviting speakers, of adding a few more non-books to the inventory, as I had seen other bookstores do. I accompanied my grandparents to Chicago to the American Booksellers Convention when I was 16. It was the first time I had been in a commercial plane since coming back from Okinawa at the age of five. I remember being terrified that a pilot other than my father would be flying the plane.
At the convention, I met authors who signed free copies of their books for me to take home. I also met booksellers from all over the country, including a couple from Washington who had been in the vicinity of Mt. St. Helen’s when it had erupted a few weeks earlier. They were far enough away to be safe, but the powdery ash had landed on their house, yard, and cars, and they enjoyed showing me a mason jar full of the fluffy gray matter.
By the time I entered my senior year of college and had some choice coming up about where to live and what to do, the bookstore’s sales were double digits a few days a month, and only slightly better the rest of the time. It was hardly enough to be sustainable. My grandparents sold the bookstore just days before my college graduation, and in the hustle-bustle of senior year, I didn’t get to Nashville one last time to say goodbye to it. The loss of the bookstore may be a grief I haven’t fully processed.
After college, I spent some of my first paycheck on two James Thurber books, one of which held the story that my friend Judy and I loved. We had seen a cartoon of “There’s a Unicorn in My Garden” when we were in high school, and we enjoyed quoting the last line, “Don’t count your boobies before they hatch,” with some frequency. It was the first time I remember purchasing a book at a bookstore other than the college bookstore or Zibart’s.
In the thirty-eight years since the bookstore sold, I have probably bought or acquired around two thousand books. Going to a bookstore was a regular outing for our family, whether at home, in an airport, or in another city or country.
Over the last thirty years, I have probably given away around a thousand books. When we lived in Memphis, Grace-St. Luke’s Episcopal School had a book swap each year. For each two books donated, you could pick out one. Others could be purchased. And, faculty were invited to take as many as we wanted for the classroom. Somehow I always came home with more books than I donated. Over the past few years, I have given books to the little libraries in our neighborhood, to our church’s thrift shop, and to our neighborhood Buy Nothing members.
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I recently decided to give up giving away books. While books are one of the heaviest items to move, and yes, we have moved a few times over the past 36 years, I decided that our books are now an homage to my days of being raised in a bookstore. After all, I have the wooden sign that was on top of the store when my grandparents first bought it.
A month or so after making this decision, I came across an article about tsundoku. Tsundoku is the collection of books that we have bought but haven’t read, yet. Others call it an anti-library, although, for me, my collection of books includes books read and unread. Apparently having a tsundoku is good for the mind - it reminds us to continue reading, and it also reminds us that we have so much more to learn.
I love our collection of books, and I enjoy adding new ones to round out the various categories of books we presently have. As I prepare for a houseguest, I go to our library and pick out three or four books from these categories - a children’s book, a novel, nonfiction, and short stories or cartoons or poetry. The guests get different selections according to their personalities, interests, and current situations.
Currently, our books are settled into our library at the top of the steps on the third floor, and the BOOKS sign from 1969 rests on the top shelf. I have a little regret about giving away so many books through the years, but I know our book collection will continue to grow. Maybe someday I will open a bookstore, or maybe I will just pretend that our library is a bookstore. If I do that, I may have to add some ashtrays and a Hallmark card section.
