Yes We Can

The people have spoken. We campaigned hard and fast during October, marching through perhaps the worst international economic collapse ever. We asked our Friends for money; we promised to be the best we can be, to serve the people, to assemble a visiting "team" of remarkable thinkers and writers who will challenge, inspire and entertain, and to expand our services to a downtown location. We sent out emails asking you to become Friends of Left Bank Books. We invited old Friends to re-up more generously. A couple of weeks after the stock market collapsed, we held a fundraiser with the generous help of our landlord, Peter Rothschild, and our friends at Duff's. The results? Nearly one hundred of you responded. We raised almost $14,000!

This vote of confidence was much more than a "bailout" - although it certainly secured our immediate future - it was a huge boost to our battle-sore spirits. Not only did folks join the Friends at generous levels, other folks did what they could by actually spending some portion of their book budgets at Left Bank Books. You have no idea how important that small act is.

Earlier this year we wondered if we could or should keep going. Thanks to your amazing response we don't wonder if we can, now we say, "Yes we can!" This feels historical. We're looking to the future, daring to hope for something better. These numbers shatter the Borders-effect. We see a bright time in literary St. Louis - a St. Louis that not only sees the value in an independent bookstore - and it deserves an independent bookstore. It demands an independent bookstore! You shall have one.

To be sure, it didn't look likely. Retail sales in October were the worst in 39 years, according to the ICSC-Goldman-Sachs index. Major retailers reported declines of 10 percent or more. The giant sucking sound in the economy has people preparing for or already in the middle of the worst. What's odd about this is that while October certainly wasn't our best month ever, it wasn't our worst month, either. In fact, thanks to you, our gross income was slightly above last October! If you adjust for the Friends memberships, our book sales were actually down about 11 percent, echoing the national figures. But since we are booksellers, we consider this business as usual. We're used to tough times. We know how to hold our breath.

We have no way of knowing what the future brings. We prepare to open our downtown store in cooperation with developer Craig Heller. We continue to make upgrades to our Central West End location so that we can serve 21st century customers in 21st century ways. We will not ask the president-elect to save us from our profligate ways, mostly because our ways have never been profligate, but also because, as independent booksellers and operators of a small business on Main Street America, that's simply not what we do. The vertebrae of this country's economic stability are its small businesses.

But even though we don't know what the future brings, we are willing to take the risk. You've asked us to. Thank you, readers, book buyers, and cultural citizens of St. Louis, for voting for Left Bank Books. We don't take your vote lightly. This next year will not be easy and it will take all of us. We know that cash is short and times are uncertain. We also know that there are some dozen chain bookstores in the metro area, and a sizeable number of boxes with the A-word on them being delivered to St. Louis doorsteps. They're opening their doors and selling millions of dollars of books to St. Louisans. Then they're taking the profits out of town. All we ask is that the next time you do have a few dollars to spend on books, you come to us or any other locally-owned bookstore. That's all. Even a fraction of a percent of the sales going to those chain stores and that online usurper of local economies would make a huge difference. A sustainable difference.

A final note of hope: the 44th president of the United States is not only a voracious reader, he's a member of the 57th Street Books/Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago. He supports his local bookstore and see where it got him? Yes we can, St. Louis!

An Open Letter to Booklovers

Kris Kleindienst

The rumors are true. Left Bank Books is opening a bookstore downtown. It will be a second location, which is backed in full by downtown developer Craig Heller. Without his backing, a downtown Left Bank Books would not have happened. It’s a 3-year agreement and if things go well, we will purchase the store from Craig. We will continue to operate our main store in the Central West End. Both stores will carry similar inventories and offer author events. We are busily at work making arrangements for the downtown store, which we hope to open by the end of November.

The downtown store is part of a long-term strategy to re-invigorate Left Bank Books, which has suffered not only the downturn in the economy that affects everyone, but has had to battle the unequal playing field created by Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.com. (How that playing field is unequal is an article in itself.) If even a tiny percent of St. Louisans who buy books anywhere else would buy them through Left Bank Books instead, the future of our store would be secured. It’s not about shelling out more, it’s about changing existing spending habits.

As it now stands, we are anything but secure. We struggle constantly with a cash flow that depends largely on smoke and mirrors. As the cost of doing business rises and sales do not, Left Bank workers—and here I must ask you to picture your favorite Left Banker—live on an unworkably low wage. Owners do as well. Burnout is a constant danger. It becomes harder and harder to stock the store as we envision it, and harder, therefore, to serve the community we love.

But we are also absolutely committed to keeping Left Bank Books open and thriving. To that end, we are unfolding our bold plan to build a sustainable future for Left Bank Books. The downtown store is only a part of our plan. A sustainable Left Bank Books begins in the Central West End. As we enter our 40th year and contemplate the un-viability of doing business as usual, the first phase of our bold new plan involved you. We are sending out a plea to our friends, neighbors and customers to support our store. Here are seven things you can do that won’t cost you anything. (And one that will.)

1. Buy books from Left Bank Books
We are not asking you to buy more books than you already do. We are asking you to buy them from Left Bank Books.

2. St. Louis out of Amazon.com
Click through to http://www.left-bank.com/ instead of Amazon. Not only would you be supporting Left Bank Books, you’d be supporting your local tax base as well. No dollar spent on Amazon ever gets recycled into your police, schools, roads, local government, public services, etc. And when is the last time you attended an author event sponsored by Amazon?

3. Friends don’t let friends shop at chain stores.
The next time you hear someone say they’re headed to Barnes & Noble, or they’ll “get it on Amazon”, why not suggest Left Bank instead? Dare to be influential. It works! Remind them that the next time they want to see Chuck Palahniuk or Anne Lamott or even Hillary Clinton, they might not want to drive to Chicago to do so.

4. Give Left Bank gift certificates as gifts
Actually they are Booksense gift certificates, soon to be Indiebound gift certificates, and they’re redeemable at over a thousand independent bookstores nationwide. They are also redeemable on our website. http://www.left-bank.com/

5. Give your corporate and institutional book business to Left Bank Books
We have very competitive discounts, offer free delivery, and personal service. Plus your organization can feel good about supporting a locally-owned store. kris@left-bank.com

6. Link your website to ours and make money!
Affiliate your website with ours and earn money on every purchase made via click-throughs from your site to ours. Schools and not-for-profits don’t have to send your purchases out of state. You’ll earn a higher percent than you will from that other place, too. http://www.left-bank.com/, click on the affiliate link.

7. Join or renew your membership in the Friends of Left Bank Books
Ok, this might cost you $35 (more if you can) up front, but if you spend $140 at either of our two Friends-only 25% off sales a year, you will break even. http://www.left-bank.com/ Click on the Friends link, or stop by and sign up.

8. Got more to invest in a sustainable future for Left Bank Books?
Left Bank Books is planning a major fundraiser in October to generate much needed capital which will enable us to retire old debt from publishers, upgrade our badly out of date inventory control system and re-work our store to serve you better. We invite anyone with more resources and a commitment to a sustainable, world-class literary center in St. Louis, should contact us immediately. kris@left-bank.com, 314.367.6731

In the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, Clarence shows George what his community would have been like had he never existed. If Left Bank Books had never existed, St. Louis would have missed out on thousands of visits by authors ranging from first-time novelists and obscure poets to judges, princesses, nobel laureates, and presidents. It would have missed out on a store committed to Women’s Gay, and African American studies sections since the 1970s. St. Louisans would have had few places to turn for given publishing advice, coming out advice, and reading advice. Ailing neighbors would have gone without hand-delivered books. There are at least a couple of school libraries that would have had no help in creating and stocking their shelves. Local causes would have missed out on hundreds of book donations. Dozens more would have lacked author event programming and a portion of our proceeds on those booksales. The careers of some major artists may have turned out differently without starter shows in our gallery. What would Euclid and McPherson be without a Left Bank Books for its Duff’s? But most important, without Left Bank Books, St. Louis would have a huge hole in its cultural fabric. The public conversation, the availability of texts, whether poetical or polemical, the relationship of reader to writer to bookseller, all those indefinable but essential qualities of a life lived in the company of books, would be vapor, pure concept, had we never existed.

To the choir out there, thank you for bearing with me. And to the rest of you, I ask you to imagine a future with Left Bank Books and help us make it a reality.

A Man Walks into a Bookstore

by Kris Kleindienst

Larry McMurtry started collecting books in 1942 at age 6, when a cousin who was going off to war gave him his library of 19 boys’ adventure stories. McMurtry, who lived on a book-free ranch in Texas, was stunned to learn that there could be made up stories. He re-read his library numerous times, and by the time he was a senior in high school, his passion for books was a full-blow disorder. Today, most know McMurtry as the author of nearly 40 novels and numerous screenplays including Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show, and Lonesome Dove, and the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. But his pride and joy is his used and antiquarian bookstore, Booked Up, which contains over 400,000 volumes housed in a several buildings in downtown Archer City, Texas. Perhaps if his cousin had given him only one book instead of a library, he would have kept his bookstore to a one-building operation, but I doubt it.
McMurtry details his lifelong obsession in Books: A Memoir, published this July. The tiny chapters read more like the kind of short, frequently interrupted conversations one has say, behind the counter of a bookstore. They are nearly blog-like, which would seem an anathema to McMurtry. To this day, he has refrained from putting any part of his vast collection online. He remains a thoroughly old-world collector and bookseller.
Because of that, his memories of books and book people are richly anecdotal stories about the highly eccentric substrata of people for whom particular words on particular pieces of paper are imbued with an almost spiritual power, not unlike relics in the Church.
McMurtry’s milieu includes gum-shoe book scouts who think nothing of spending hours sifting through yard-sale detritus for pristine copies of vintage American pulp fiction or rare first editions. They could be collectors enhancing their own libraries, or they could be dealers, turning their finds into profit. It also includes the likes of Dorman David, the son of a wealthy Texas rancher who, in the sixties, used his inheritance to design a mouth-watering bookshop complete with humidor and set about acquiring books from major dealers in Texana and Americana. It seems he bought more like a collector and less like a dealer, leaving very little room for profit and soon “flamed out”, leaving his mother and sister, who were ill-equipped for the task, to dispose of his treasures. McMurtry lent them a hand and remains friends with the mother, now in her nineties.
One of my favorites in McMurtry’s rich pantheon of book people is the scout known for his habit of scooting along the floor of a bookstore on his bottom to study the lower shelves. This man never left a bookstore with a clean behind, but he also discovered a number of treasures overlooked by scouts with a more upright posture. One could say he stooped to conquer. My favorite bookstore of the hundreds McMurtry has scouted, worked in, partially or wholly-owned, or simply bought out, was housed behind the San Francisco Chronicle where the floor-to-ceiling shelves were so high customers were given binoculars to browse.
Another of those hundreds of bookstores McMurtry walked into over his 50 year career as a bookman was Left Bank Books where, in 1994, he and his co-author Diana Ossana read from their novel, Pretty Boy Floyd. There were a polite number of people in attendance and they bought a polite number of books. The surprise of the evening came when the reading was over and McMurtry and Ossana fell upon our poetry section with a fervency I had never experienced in a customer before. Seven hundred dollars later, they left, only to return the next morning and do it again. It occurred to me then, that we might actually be running a world class bookstore. We have kept an infrequent contact with McMurtry since then, trading in the odd first edition here and there.
I hadn’t expected to find our store mentioned in his memories, but was surprised to find another St. Louis store mentioned, Lost Generation Books. I was surprised mostly because there has never been a Lost Generation Books in St. Louis. On a hunch, I called Book Up in Archer City to ask about this. Khristal, who took the call, promised to ask him and get back to me. Two days later, she did. “Larry says yes, he was thinking of Left Bank Books when he wrote that, but he got the name mixed up with a bookstore in McLean [Virginia] where he also used to shop.”
Nowadays, when he feels a scouting urge come on, McMurtry heads out to the lower 40 of his own warehouse and is delighted to find, say a woefully under-priced edition of an early Anthony Powell novel which he re-prices from $7.50 and resells immediately for $350. While his rancher relatives may have stocked a pond with bass, McMurtry has a fully stocked library to troll.
Larry McMurtry is a rare breed, clearly a case of nature over nurture. His habitat is secondhand bookstores and private libraries. I consider myself privileged to have grazed near him. In these days of internet shopping, people brag of finding a specific title or edition of something they’re after with a few clicks, but those are empty calories, as if they pushed away a five star meal for drive-through, forgetting, almost, why one reads in the first place. They will never know what they might have missed in this surgical operation, what embarrassment of riches—in sights, sounds, relationships and yes, books—that could have been theirs had they spent a few moments more, and walked into a bookstore.
______________________________________________________________________
In Memorium. We are saddened to say goodbye to another passionate book person. Larry Sather, who taught English at St. Louis Community College, Florissant Valley for 39 years, passed away June 27. I loved his dry wit and withering commentary on current affairs, and especially the long conversations we used to have in the basement office of the bookstore where he’d plunk himself down for a chat whenever he stopped by, which was frequently. He was a great supporter of the store, and a dear bookstore friend. He will be missed.

Bookselling - An Open but Committed Relationship

With this article we formally welcome my life-partner Jarek Steele as Left Bank’s newest partner in books, bookselling and bookpeople. He’s already logged 6 ½ years in the store so he’s no stranger to many of you, but we thought it was time he came out as a managing partner. –Kris Kleindienst
When I stood to introduce David Sedaris on June 17, I faced a bookstore full of people who had paid at least $35 to support our store in addition to buying Sedaris’s new book. Outside, 300 more people sat on the curbs and in the street, in lawn chairs and on blankets, sharing wine and food, lounging with their families, friends and pets just to hear this man read from his book. To laugh with people. It occurred to me how remarkable that is – that literature and the community it builds are powerful enough to stop traffic in the city of St. Louis.
On the Saturday after September 11, 2001, about six months before I came to work here, I locked myself in a hotel room in Ohio where I had been stranded and cried for two days, alone with the images on the television. That same weekend, Deepak Chopra rented a car in Chicago and planned to drive to the next destination on his author tour. It didn’t include St. Louis, but he offered to stop by the store for a visit on his way. This was before LBB had e-blasts and large mailing lists, so with less than 24 hours notice, Kris made phone calls to news organizations and emailed the few folks we had on our lists. What happened next was unbelievable. People flocked to the corner of Euclid and McPherson and packed themselves into our store. They stood touching each other wall-to-wall all the way out the door as Deepak led them in guided meditation. Hundreds of people, standing together, healing together. That is the power of the community and ideas surrounding this store. It was something I didn’t even know I was missing until I found it here the next year.
As any alumni of Left Bank Books can tell you, it doesn’t take long for the dream of a bookstore to wear thin and the fiscal reality to set in. My first year here, I lived in Illinois and took two busses and the Metrolink to the BJC station and walked the rest of the way. As the reality set in and I realized that the struggle of this little business wasn’t some bump in the road, it was the whole unpaved stretch, I got frustrated. Kris said, “Jay, there are sprinters and marathon runners in this business. You just have to know who is who and which one you are.” It was the truest and most valuable thing she’s said to me about Left Bank. In the city of St. Louis, in the field of bookselling, in the cultural scene, LBB is a marathon runner. We don’t necessarily get off the starting line first, or run as fast, but we endure. We have endured, And we’ve grown, thanks to the love and support of readers in St. Louis. We are still writing this story.
As the newest, youngest co-owner at Left Bank Books, our customers haven’t really gotten to know me and, to be honest; I haven’t had the years of experience Kris and Barry have had to know myself within the context of the store. I’ve worked only six of the thirty-nine years we’ve been open. I stare at the dormant alphabet of my ergonomically correct keyboard as I undertake to write this article and I realize I don’t yet know what my dormant alphabet will spell for Left Bank Books.
The store here on Euclid and McPherson has housed the footsteps of all its staff, customers and writers. Authors ranging from Sonny Barger to Jimmy Carter have walked among our shelves. All of these footprints tap out the fantastic and unlikely story of this store. They make what we have here worth more than just some books on some shelves and a cash register.
What I hope to add to the mix is another vote of confidence, another pledge to keep this community alive. I’m adding my hope for this city and an invitation to all of its citizens to be a part of the Left Bank community and help it thrive. It’s good for all of us.

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

(headline attributed to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich)
by Kris Kleindienst, Co-Owner

I have been inspired by Phillis Schlafly to write this article. Most of you will realize how unlikely this source of inspiration is: Phillis Schlafly is the 83-year-old uber-right wing founder of the Eagle Forum. She dedicated her early years of activism to furthering Senator McCarthy's anti-communist crusade, but she really hit her stride in the 70s when she discovered that preventing equal rights for women was a more timeless cause. Political systems come and go, but there iwll always be women to oppress. So why in the world would a co-owner of St. Louis' progressive bookstore be inspired to invoke Ann Coulter's fairy god-mother?

We have a lot in common, actually. For one thing, Schlafly is a graduate of Washington University, as are most of Left Bank Books' co-founders, my mother, and me. All of us are activists, having co-founded or directed various projects, including this bookstore, where the "women's" section is not for books on diet, fashion and relationship. While Schlafly led the charge to defeat ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in the late 70s, my mother was working in Washington, D.C. as the president of Northern Virginia N.O.W. to secure its passage. Too bad Schlafly won.

Phyllis Schlafly was busy in the late 70s. She was in law school at Wash. U., graduating in 1979, the same weekend I received my bachelor's degree in Women's Studies. Our names are in the same commencement materials. I thought it was very inspiring at the time that she could be vociferously arguing for women to stay in the home while she pursued a professional career. Rumor around campus back then was that she was so busy on her anti-ERA campaign, that she had hired help to get through all her law school homework. I'm not saying she actually cheated, I'm just saying. I'm pretty sure she wasn't doing her own housework.

The reason she inspires me today is that our alma mater has seen fit to issue her an honorary degree. Washington University has always been forward-thinking on the issue of women's rights. Its law school was one of the first in the country to admit women. Even Harvard University, where Schlafly earned a masters degree in 1945, refused to admit women to its law school until 1950. Phoebe Wilson Couzins was Wash. U.'s first female graduate in 1870 and, like Schlafly, Couzins had women's rights in mind. She co-founded the National Women's Suffrage Association with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Coincidentally, I'm pretty sure I was one of the first people to graduate from Washington University with a degree in Women's Studies, about a hundred short years after Couzins co-founded the NWSA. (Ok, you couldn't major in women's studies, but it could be your second major, kind of like working full-time, caring for the kids, and going to school.)

The point is, here's Phyllis Schlafly, getting another degree from Washington University (her first was a bachelor's in 1944, one year before her master's from Harvard), one she didn't even have to pay for, while powerful women's rights advocates like my mother (who, incidentally, also wrote implementation guidelines for Title IX and authored a landmark government study on families of military personel), hacve gone to their graves without so much as a nod. The anti-war activism of Left Bank co-founders has made law book history, and their collective effort to provide a progressive voice in the founding of Left Bank Books still stands today, albeit beaten about the kneecaps with the lead pipes of late-capitalism. The surviving founders all do amazing community work and activism in their respective communities. One of them, Anita Diamant, even wrote a bestselling novel.

But do any of us get an honorary degree? No! Instead, we get repeated requests for donations from a school with one of the healthiest endowments in the country. Personally, I would happily settle for a tenured position on the faculty. Come to think of it, not only did Washington University officials overlook my mother and the co-founders of Left Bank Books when they thumbed through their rolodex of prominent graduates, years ago they actually eliminated the very department that spawned all this activism to begin with: the Sociology Department. And, were it not for a generous and carefully worded matching grant from local philanthropist and Women's Studies "major" Susan Stiritz,there would probably not even be a women's studies "area" to second-major in anymore.

And yet. In a published statement, Chancellor mark Wrighton apologized for the "anguish" his university's decision has caused and admitted he doesn't even agree with most of Schlafly's positions. He says that the degree is intended to recognize "an alumna of the University whose life and work have had a broad impact on American life," whether or not you agree with the effect of that impact. I guess that's why Trustee Emerita Margaret Bush Wilson, another very powerful woman, volunteered to read the citation to award the degree to Phyllis Schlafly. Ms. Wilson is the first woman of color to serve as the national chair of the NAACP, the second woman of color admitted to practice law in Missouri, a prominent St. Louis civil rights attorney for more than 40 years, and - small world - was a colleague and close friend of my mother's, close enough to speak at her memorial service five years ago.

I am a great admirer of Margaret Bush Wilson. Her life's work broke ground, sometimes in spite of Phyllis Schlafly's life work. She inspired my mother and she inspires me. I would much rather she get the honorary degree than give it. More than being moved by Schlafly's impact on America, I guess you could say Ms. Wilson is moved by the First Amendment. I am too. It can be a powerful tool in the right woman's hands.

That Chance Element of Surprise: Get Your Opinion In Print - Por Favor!

by Tanya Mignon Parker

Tanya Parker has a place on the green employee payroll sheet of Left Bank Books. She is Francophone by association, with family in South Africa, Rwanda, Mali, Chad, Paris and Bruxelles – depending on where the war is, and how quickly you can flee.


Just over a year ago, I met Fabrice Rozie, the literary attaché
to the French embassy, at his office on Fifth Ave in New
York. It is a marble-encased shrine opposite the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, something Guy de Maupassant would laugh
about – the foyer dominated by a nude, white marble Greco-
Roman sculpture surrounded by marbled floors and walls.
On a small brass plaque, the building acknowledges itself as
the cultural division of the French Embassy. (I imagine
Maupassant would see the sculpture moving as others see it
inert).
I’m no stranger to the French. I learned the lingo early on in
Zimbabwe from Congo/Belgian/Parisian/Francophone
cousins who first taught me the cuss words, then the songs,
then the prayers and then later, my aunt and uncle intervened
and ameliorated the situation by sending me to proper
Grammar school.
At the embassy, I knew I would be meeting a diplomat and
had conjured an image of a staid, inert bespectacled man in a
collar. Rozie is anything but. He is bouncing off the walls,
dressed in jeans and a t-shirt with a youthful grin, tennis
shoes, and eyes full of humor, intelligence, mischief and
empathy. The next time I saw him in St. Louis, he was
wearing a mismatched suit and a hideous bowtie, an
idiosyncratic nod to any Francophile who took him or herself
too seriously. Behind this impressive homme de lettres is a
professor, play-write, and more recently, co-editor of a new
book, As You Were Saying: American Writers Respond to
Their French Contemporaries.
What Rozie imagined for As You Were Saying was simple
but brilliant: Let’s get over the myths of French elitism and
the “Ugly American” and focus on ideas we would all like to
explore because of our shared and brittle humanity. Let the
French writer begin a story and leave the American writer
with the job of finishing it!
Rozie assembled well-respected French and American
writers and translators who took on the challenge for free.
But he still needed a publisher willing to take the risk. He
found a good home with Dalkey Archive Press, known for
publishing literature in translation. Senior editor, Martin
Riker, calls Dalkey’s mission “to promote not just the [work
in] translation, but also the idea of translation.” He squeezed
the project in while moving himself from Colorado and the
press from Bloomington, Illinois to Urbana, Illinois. The
book becomes a reality this month when 15,000 copies are
released.
Some of the stories read like poetry, others force you to
think, and others leave you questioning. Marie Darrieussecq
and Rick Moody write about an ugly Frenchman who
undergoes a face transplant. Camille Laurens and Robert
Olen Butler examine the pain of waiting and losing. Lydie
Salvayre and Rikki Ducornet adapt an old French tale with
caustic wit.
My personal favorite is about a Bosnian refugee, who
because of his thick accent, is relegated to selling upscale
magazine subscriptions, (which belong in the northern
suburbs of Chicago) to a more sleazy part of town, where he
encounters a drunken priest with awful dandruff and his
playboy lover. Aleksander Hemon, who wrote the story with
French writer Philippe Claudel, was born in Sarajevo and
has lived in Chicago since 1992. His writing regularly
appears in McSweeney’s and he now has a place in the
annals of modern French writing! It doesn’t get better than
that.
In independent bookstores, surprising friendships come
about between authors, publishers and booksellers and that is
one good reason to find out exactly why a Bosnian refugee
would be so moved by his encounter with a drunken priest
and his playboy lover in the sleazy part of Chicago! (It is not
about the sex, stupid) Well, it’s sort of not about the sex!
The only thing missing is the reader. The reader is why any
of us exist at all!
And so, dear reader, marvelous reviews of the book are
inserted into this newsletter, BUT we would like to challenge
YOU to review the stories yourself. You after all, are the
audience we booksellers told Rozie, Riker and these writers
about. Only three percent of the 290,000 titles published in
the United States last year were translated works. In France,
where presumably the total number of titles published is
smaller, the percent of titles in translation is much higher.
And nearly forty percent of those translations are American
texts. So let’s show the French that readers in the heartland
of America are world readers, too. Buy the book. Read it.
And then, please send your reviews to info@left-bank.com
to be posted on our website.

Look, I Can’t Hear You

By Erin “Erica” Quick

“…the miracle. Which is, of course,
…that with these words…
we manage to make sense to anyone at all.”

--Lucia Perillo, “Short Course in Semiotics”

I get attached to my customers. We booksellers can’t help it. We spend our days peddling books, those odd and beautiful agents of language. In fact, when it comes to our customers, nearly everything we do is about thought and communication. The intimacy involved in such transactions is sometimes startling, and almost always rewarding.

Like the delightful night when one of my favorite regulars was loading up on cookbooks. When I asked her if she liked to cook, she smiled and said no, in fact she did not. This was her bedtime reading. When I looked puzzled about the contradiction, she just smiled and told me that it was like people who read porn but don’t have sex.

Then there was the rather awkward time when I got busted for not having finished my staff pick. On my way to dinner, I ran into a friend of mine, and we milled a bit over what I was reading. When he saw A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters tucked in my arm and paused (“Wait a minute – isn’t that your staff pick this month?”), I knew I had breached some area of trust in the bookseller/reader relationship. (I have long since finished the book, which I loved all the way.)

I have book soul-mates with whom I have made no end of discoveries, who call me just to tell me how much they are enjoying Gregory Orr or Octavia Butler. Each time they come into the store, I feel as though we are preparing a meal together, sharing food and time and a table. And we always go home sated.

But one of my most unforgettable, most cantankerous, and most beloved customers was Senator Thomas Eagleton.

Senator Eagleton was quite a presence. He had a big voice, a friendly smile, and an assurance about him. He was one of those customers who always knew exactly what he wanted and how he wanted it. I was rather intimidated by him, aware of his prominence in the community and his robust personality. And that’s not to mention stature – all 4’8” of me, even standing on the riser behind the counter, never quite reached eye-level with the Senator. I was so nervous every time I had to help him that I always seemed to do or say the wrong thing.

Early on in my bookselling days, we had a most disagreeable encounter. As many people know, he was quite hard of hearing, which made for a slew of miscommunications. On this particular day, I got to be involved in one of those. Impatient and frustrated with me, he blew me off in a most unpleasant manner. Being new and nervous, and wanting to be of service, I continued to try to help him, which only irritated him further. In the end, I wound up walking tearfully away, hoping against hope that he would forget who I was so the whole incident would blow away and I could just go on being invisible when he came around – feminism be damned.

As it happened, he never did forget. And he spent the rest of our short-lived friendship (yes, even he referred to it as such) trying to make it up to me. Even though he never got my name quite right, he always made a point to find me when he stopped in. He even haunted my days off, leaving friendly little notes. And the apologies never ended. Each visit, while often still confusing, was quite pleasant. I even came to the point of being one of the few people in the store able to decipher his handwriting – another feat in our quirky communication.

The last time I saw him, I made probably my biggest bookseller blunder of all. He came in on a Saturday morning, greeted me with his usual smile, and asked me to recommend a good new history book. The man who always knew exactly what he wanted, who got frustrated with me when I was unable to understand exactly what he wanted, now wanted me to tell him what he wanted. In my nervous haste, I picked up the closet history book to me, Nixon and Mao. Senator Eagleton threw his arms up and said, “Oh, Erica, don’t give me any of that Republican crap!” I felt devastatingly embarrassed. He only smiled and selected for himself a copy of Spymistress: The Life of Vera Atkins, the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II. In the moment when he might rightly have taken some personal offense, and certainly might rightly have gotten frustrated with me, he only laughed, and double-checked that he had my name right – which, of course, he didn’t.

I did not know Senator Eagleton in much of a political sense. I was a young child during his service in the US Senate. But I feel lucky. As his bookseller, I got to experience something a little more memorable, and endearing – we got into a fight and had to make up.
I am going to miss him.