Garrison Keillor, who owns a bookstore in St. Paul, Minnesota, called Common Good Books, writes in a foreword to FOOTNOTES* from the WORLD’S GREAT BOOKSTORES: *True Tales and Lost Moments from Book Buyers, Booksellers, and Book Lovers that “the little independent bookstore is dying out, they say. Too bad. Someday mine will, too.”
The author of the book, New Yorker cartoonist Bob Eckstein, hopes not. He spent two years collecting more than 300 bookstore stories from around the world, narrowing his selection down to 75 and pairing them with his own illustrations. Eckstein made sure to start with a bang. Here are the first two:
“Scribner’s top guy had his office above the store. Hemingway was turning in his new novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the C.E.O. was unhappy with a certain word in the manuscript. ‘What word?’ Hem asked. The C.E.O. couldn’t bring himself to utter it, so he wrote it down on his desk calendar. Hem agreed to take it out. The following morning, the office secretary wondered why her boss had written under ‘Things To Do Today,’ ‘Fuck’.”Scribner’s Bookstore [1913-1989], New York City
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— Leon Freilich,
The Poet Laureate of Park Slope
“We once received a letter from a young woman who wanted us to know, and hoped we wouldn’t be mortified by the fact, that she had surreptitiously placed her father’s ashes in various nooks and crannies throughout our poetry room. She said it was her father’s favorite place in the world and she was comforted knowing he was there.”City Lights Bookstore [1953-Present], San Francisco
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— Stacey Lewis,
City Lights
I forwarded your post, ashes & all, to Bob Eckstein. To everyone’s surprise, he’s neither Jewish nor a romantic pop singer of the old school, like Billy Eckstein.