Celebrate My Bookstore

My Bookstore, the anthology published by Black Dog & Leventhal in support of booksellers across the country, came out November 13, and I'm making my way through it. So far, I've especially liked Richard Russo's introduction. His first bookstore, like mine, was a stationery store. "Alvord and Smith was a store for people who--though I couldn't have articulated it at the time--had aspirations beyond life in a grungy mill town...to me, bookstores, like my first one, remain places of genuine wonder...Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, best, most thrilling conversation. The people who work in them will tell you who's saying what. If you ask,...they'll put in your hand something you just have to read, by someone you've never heard of, someone just now entering the conversation, who wants to talk to you about things that matter."

I'm also taken with Louise Erdrich's tale of a coffee date that led to browsing in Magers & Quinn Booksellers. Her date chose a Roethke collection for her. "Bookstore Lovers, I married him."

My sheep characters invaded my essay, pages 302-304, about Nicola's Books in Ann Arbor. We'll celebrate my bookstore, My Bookstore, and my book Elena's Story, at 7 p.m. on December 5. "Sheep Phone It In" concerns the limits of e-commerce, and comes to a happy end in the Westgate Shopping Center. You're invited.