Shop Around the Corner

Garrison Keillor's little bookshop just opened yesterday: Common Good Books. I get my hair cut in that same building that houses the shop--the Blair Arcade--and on a recent visit my stylist, Giselle (really, Giselle) said, "That man, Garrison Keillor, just got his hair cut before you. You just missed him." The stylist next to Giselle does GK's hair. When I first starting seeing Giselle she looked like the blond Ashlee Simpson, sort of, but now she looks like Lindsay Lohan. Like Lohan she wears glasses with her long strawberry hair. I think she just wears the glasses for effect. I wondered if she had seen the movie A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison and Lindsay, among others.

I asked, "Was he wearing red socks?" I wondered if he kept that same grumpy face as he watched himself in the mirror. I felt like I might see that same grumpy face stare back at mine from the mirror right about then.

Giselle laughed heartily and said, "I have no idea why you said that." So then I explained his radio show and his presence on stage, and those red socks he always wears.

"Do you know he's opening a bookstore next to us?" Giselle asked. She always forgets I'm in the book business.

"I bet he doesn't know that the back wall of his bookstore butts right up to the wall of our break room. We scream and laugh and tell dirty jokes and talk about all our customers down there. I really don't think that's the kind of stuff he expects to have come streaming into his bookstore," she said.

"Have you been inside the new store?" I ask.

"No, but yesterday I asked the construction workers out at the top of the stairs smoking, the ones who have been remodeling the place. I asked them if they know Mr. Keillor and what they think of him. And they say they never heard of the guy."

I imagined myself getting a haircut, having a chai at Nina's, and spending an evening browsing that new bookshop. We all say we miss the good independents. I have many memories of some of my favorites.

When I first started out in publishing there was no Internet; we didn't even have personal computers at our desk. So we young editors were sent out on assignment to do comparative book research. (Now we just scan Amazon.) The senior editors would tell us, "Go find a few books on the same subject and bring them back so we can see what they have." We didn't have a decent bookstore in downtown St. Paul at the time so we would research at the grand St. Paul Central Library, just across the street. I'd bring a briefcase filled with a notebook, pica measuring stick, maybe even the manuscript of the book we were considering publishing. Then I'd pull off, say, Carl Sagan's Cosmos and write down all the chapter heads and the number of pages and how much it selled for.

When we found out nobody really knew how long we'd been out, we began using the code "book research" for all kinds of hooky outings: we'd have blueberry pancakes at the Q Restaurant; we'd even go see a matinee at the now-defunct Galtier Plaza theater.

So when I took a job in downtown Minneapolis, I was thrilled to be so close to the old Baxter Books. Again, pre-Amazon.com, our books team would converge on Baxter's right after lunch; still pica sticks and notebooks in hand. We wrote down specs from the back-of-the-book colophons (this one uses Galliard. I love Galliard! we'd write). We looked at the names of artists whose work was reproduced on the front of more sophisticated titles: Picasso, Jacob Lawrence, Chagall. Owner Brian Baxter, now manager of Birchbark Books, was always very generous and even let me take books without paying so I could quick show the staff and return them by the end of the day. Once we saw Meredith Baxter Birney at the counter talking with Brian and we felt connected a bit to Hollywood.

Once one of my publishers flew me out to meet with a NYC author. I had never been to Manhattan. The author, a horribly difficult man whose book took us years to produce and whose ways made some of us cry, had transformed into a charming and thoughtful host. His book was nearly done; he was happy with the results. He took me to MOMA, Windows on the World at the top of the World Trade Center for lunch (I was there, I was there, I kept saying after hearing about September 11), an art fair in Greenwich Village, and best of all, to the Strand. 18 miles of books. I kept pausing at the tables, then looking up at him, like a kid in front of the Candyland counters, and he kept smiling and looking very pleased and hopeful. I thought maybe he was thinking, "Perhaps now they will finally like me."

When I vacationed in San Francisco I knew I needed to visit City Lights. My husband was tired of walking by the time we got there and the place is very small and winding and pinched for space, not at all like the big-box models of Barnes and Noble. And when he asked to use the bathroom they told him it was across the street. He thought they were short-changing him; they looked like young Bob Dylans; he looks more like Kent Hrbek, and he thought they held that against him, as if he really didn't belong in a hip place like that. (But the bathroom really was across the street.) So he was in no mood to browse. Luckily, I knew already what I wanted: Virginia Woolfe's A Room of One's Own. Cliche, I know, but sometimes you just have to give in to them.

And when I needed to distribute and sell a small academic journal I was also editing at the time, I decided to make a visit to Denver's famous Tattered Cover Book Store when I was in town for a conference. I brought in my stack of journals and had practiced my pitch in my head on the cab ride over. The buyer was burrowed behind a stack of books and journals at his desk. His clothes had that slept-in look like the dress of old poets and English professors. He put down his pen and spread open the pillars of books and let me talk across from him for awhile. And then he very simply said, "Yes, we'll carry it."

So I hope I get over to Common Ground Books soon. And I hope my first memory of the place is spotting a pair of red socks from behind a shelf chockful of good books and hearing the squeals of gossip from the salon ladies next door.