We Got Handed a Dream In the Discount Card Aisle

Susan and I, Caro, are going to share writing about our bookstore experiences.  I am going to start, Susan will add some entries later.

I’m Caro and I’m a bookaholic.  I’m the retired librarian version; I worked 42 years consecutively in libraries before I retired from the school three years ago.  Lest you think I am ancient rather than merely “getting up there a little,” I started my first library job as a “page” at age 14.  My friend Susan sells books on-line.  She’s a bookaholic, too. Not only that, we’re known bookaholics.  The whole town knows this about us.   Hence this scenario.

We were shopping in Wal-Mart.  Ours is a small town Wal-Mart.  This means that you meet everybody you know there and it can take two hours to get a gallon of milk if you stop and talk to even a few of them.  So when a former student of mine (we shall call him T.) stopped us near the really-cheap birthday cards it was, “Oh, hi,” and then he eventually said, “The art center downtown supports several bands and choirs, dance, painting and art, but we don’t have literature.  How would you like to run a bookshop and reading room upstairs?”

Blink.  We didn’t even know the art center had an upstairs.  Turns out that the building was once a hotel.  Heh.  Okay, it was a bordello like half the other upstairs rooms in town, until the ladies got nudged out of town 50 years ago under circumstances too lengthy to enlarge upon right now.  Maybe later.

Susan and I hadn’t honestly considered a brick and mortar store before, even though there were plenty of empty stores downtown (see reference above to mega-store chain) because of start up costs and the local  economy.   But then again, we did have a few thousand books in the shed, due to Susan’s business and a complete inability to pass by a book sale without filling a few boxes.

We knew a store would mean steep a learning curve, start-up expenses, and be a pain in the posterior, and frankly, it didn’t appeal.  What lured us now was the thought of all that…space.  The books were about to take over on the home front.  We had no more room to expand.

They offered us a space consisting of three rooms (about 12 x 14 each), for $200 a month, price to include utilities.  We’d have to schedule the conference room and open it for after-hour meetings.  They’d provide the shelving.  So of course we agreed to go look at the space.  Just to see, you know.  We made an appointment to meet T. there.

Twenty-one steps up.  I counted.  My knees asked me if I were serious about this.  I told them it was going to be great for our cardiovascular systems.  No lights up here at the moment, T. told us.  For light, he turned on his phone.  Worked pretty well, actually.  Although…after 35 years in at the local middle school just about nothing gets to me, but that first glimpse was just a bit startling.  Turns out this was where the locals stored their haunted house props when it wasn’t October.  Fantastical shadows lit the manikins in the corner, and the giant spiders were stacked shoulder high.  Old chairs leaned in the corner, and the light bulbs hung down on cords, uncovered.

We shuffled through the rooms, unused since 1960-something, but remarkably rodent and insect free.   Good wooden floors.  Gilded wallpaper peeling off the walls.  The potential was there, but it was going to take some time to renovate, T. told us.  This gave us some time to get organized, and so…we agreed to do it.

Insert maniacal laughter here.

Part 2 of Caro and Susan’s adventure