Anthem Book Blog

In May, author Catherine Wald contacted me about her new book The Resilient Writer, a collection of twenty authors telling their stories of rejection (Persea Books, $14.95, isbn: 0892553073, distributed by Norton).

Catherine was nice enough to write an exclusive piece on bookstores for Anthem. Thanks Catherine! Good luck with your latest book.

from Caterine Wald, editor of The Resilient Writer:

When I was a 12-year-old, growing up on a heavy diet of what were not then called YA novels, there was no such term as ‘independent bookstores’ either -- because they all were. Independent, that is. And when I think of the term now, the first thing that comes to mind is a tiny bedroom-sized room in a bookstore/former house that I think was called Mad Tom’s, just outside Manchester, Vermont. Mad Tom’s’ kids’ section/bedroom was crammed full of exotic paperbacks, all of which I wanted to possess with all my heart. Although Manchester was within striking distance of my family’s vacation home in Landgrove, I don’t think we – my mother and my six siblings -- got in more than one visit a summer. Still, the trip inspired in me at least as much mouth-watering delight as our more frequent forays to the penny-candy section of the Weston Country Store.

Like the country store, the bookstore was filled with sensual delights. I remember especially the legions of Penguin Books which, it seemed to me, must have been imported directly from England (the prices on the covers were in pounds). They had a very particular freshly minted yet musty odor about them; I loved to bury my nose in the spine of a new Narnia book or something about The Five Children and It or a wonderful story about a koala bear who roamed about the Australian countryside with a couple of animal sidekicks (maybe one of them was a wombat?). The illustrations were so different and exotic to my eyes, and the pages yellowed so beautifully and organically with time. Those pages were like leaves attached to tree boughs that swept you off from the earth to the place you really wanted to be, but didn’t know existed.

And that’s what bookstores were to me, back then. If books were my country (and they were the only place where I really felt my own language was spoken) then bookstores were my travel agencies, and they weren’t great big bureaucratic chain companies, but tiny seat-of-the-pants operations where the owner’s personality, prejudices and predilections imbued the planning of my journey.

My own children were raised in suburban sprawl, at a remove from both city and country independents. According to some studies, it’s an environment that is bad for our physical health – we become so dependent on cars that we are less apt to get the kind of good physical exercise that you get from walking to the corner store. I don’t think living in the suburbs hasn’t been detrimental to my kids’ development as book-lovers. But by necessity, my their book-buying adventures have been fostered in chain stores; they had to cut their reading teeth on plastic books from the infant shelves of the stores at the local mall.

Luckily, on vacations, we’ve sometimes had the good fortune to come across what I still think of as the real thing – an independent bookstore like Cabbages and Kings or Yellow Umbrella Books in Chatham, Massachusetts. (Imagine – two in one town!); Macintosh Bookshop and Sanibel Island Books in Sanibel Florida, (again, double delights – and both apparently unscathed by hurricane!) or Brome Lake Books or The Book Nook, two personality-rich independents in small towns in Quebec Province, where you can peruse the works of great Canadian authors you’d never otherwise have heard of. Each of these stores has its own ambience; they’re the equivalent of the tiny restaurant where the locals go, where regional specialties are proudly served and the waiter will happily steer you toward an unusual selection and an appropriate wine or mug of beer to accompany it. I’ll take them – even if they’re holes in the wall -- over Applebee’s or Red Lobster any day!

On the other hand, I do sometimes come across chain outlets that have enough of a personality to remind me of the smaller places where I made so many discoveries as a child. For example, there’s a substantial Borders in White Plains, N.Y., that is designed with enough nooks and cubbyholes to make it enticing. For some reason, each time I go there, there’s always one book that jumps off the shelf into my lap and seems to be just what I was looking for.

As for my kids, I hope that, whether they end up book shopping in town, in the malls, or on-line, they just keep doing it. Too, I hope that somewhere along the line they have had, and will continue to have, the magical experiences of discovery that Mad Tom’s conjured for me 40 years ago.