Most days, you’ll find me perched behind the counter at the bookstore, checking out customers, answering questions, all while also attempting to do some paperwork, place orders, track down missing books, all the things a bookstore manager has to do as well as selling books.
It’s a great place to observe the day’s events, witnessing the potent mix of people and ideas. One of the many things I’ve enjoyed during my time in the bookstore is watching the coming together of people, some known to each other, some not, to discuss books and the ideas contained in them.
Bookstores don’t sell widgets — they sell ideas, adventures, looks into other possible lives, romance, triumph, tragedy, analysis of why things are the way they are, history, travel, poetry, love, flights of fancy, escapism, humor, cooking, grieving, and how to accomplish almost anything.
One of my favorite memories is sitting at my perch, watching a group of people who did not know each other discuss Erik Larson’s “The Splendid and the Vile” during its first release in hardcover. Their conversation spread from that book to other nonfiction books they’d read and loved, sharing titles with each other, notes taken on smartphones for later use. Their excitement, their laughter, and their sheer joy of reading filled the room and remains with me.
Late last summer there was the annual Banned Books Week, an effort launched in 1982 by the American Library Association and Amnesty International, since joined by many others, including the American Booksellers Association and PEN America, to bring attention to the ongoing efforts in the U.S. to ban books. If it was bad in 1982, it is exponentially worse now.
When Banned Books Week was over, we just couldn’t bring ourselves to take them down. It’s now, I suspect, a semi-permanent feature and a source of many a conversation.
From my perch, in direct line of sight of the display, I get involved in many of the interchanges ignited by our Banned Books wall. One of the most poignant was a couple from Florida who feel they are being pushed out of their home state by all the politics behind book banning. Native Floridians, they were not going — yet.
It’s a spot sparking all kinds of conversations, and it’s a topic many want to weigh in on. Teachers on summer break shared their school year woes with book bans. Middle-aged customers say, in bewilderment, “these were required reading when I was in high school.”
Our Great Reads section is another door-opener for conversation. Just the other day, someone pulled the current hot seller “Happy Place” from its spot on the shelf, turned to me, and asked what I thought of it. Before I could answer, another customer swooped in, commenting she had just finished it and loved it.
I sat back and smiled.
These moments of dialogue capture the magic of a bookstore, sharing the good — or the bad — with someone else, offering up personal insights into the intellectual work of an author, creating a vibrancy that is wonderful.
Hard to imagine the same thing happening in a big box store.
Mathew Tombers is manager of Edgartown Books, and will host pop-up book signings at Islanders Write this year.