Most literate cities

I ran across an article today about chasing book thieves, and I noticed that the Seattle paper where it appeared, The Stranger, has a regular feature called “Constant Reader,” about books and bookstore life.

Seattle must be a pretty bookish town, I thought. And sure enough, Seattle is ranked number two on a list (a few years old) of “most literate U.S. cities.” Minneapolis is number one, and other cities I suspected of bookishness were high on the list as well. Madison is number four, Washington, D.C. is number six, and Boston, Portland, and San Francisco come in at eight, nine, and ten. (By “Boston” I suspect the researchers meant the greater Boston area, with Cambridge providing most of the boost.) The high scores of Pittsburgh and Cincinnati did surprise me.

New York City ranks 49th, which strikes me as about right. Despite being the center of the publishing world and the home of a lot of writers, New York is not the most bookish town. As Jenn has pointed out, New Yorkers generally want to be entertained, and not by sitting in an armchair with a good novel.

About book thieves: I’ve read that shoplifters are psychologically different from other sorts of criminals. They generally don’t commit other crimes, and their motivation for stealing is often to make themselves feel better by giving themselves a gift. When Jenn and I had our bookstore cafe, we noticed that theft spiked up dramatically in the weeks after 9/11. Some people knitted, some drank herbal tea, and others made off with whole stacks of expensive coffee-table books.

Palm-of-the-Hand Stories

Some books are imprinted forever with the places where you read them. When I think of Palm-of-the-Hand Stories by Kawabata, for instance, I think of the old stone quarry in Rockport, Massachusetts.

A few times in the summer, back when I was living in Cambridge, I took the train from Boston to Rockport and hiked to the rocky peninsula where the quarry was dug long ago. Now it’s filled with rainwater, and a few bushes have taken root between the blocks and slabs of rock. It was a good place to go either alone or with a friend, and when I think of it I remember leaning against a flat, sun-warmed slab of granite and reading the hardcover edition of Kawabata’s book. The cover was just ornamental type on a very pleasing shade of deep blue.

A couple of times I was there in the late afternoon, waiting for the sunset. The bay to the west of the quarry was broad enough that you could actually see the sun set into the water — rare for the East Coast. I kept hoping I would see the famous green flash at the last moment of sunset, but I never did.

I checked out Palm-of-the-Hand Stories from the library, but I haven’t recaptured the magic of reading it the first time. The paperback edition from the library has a murky photo of hands rather than the deep blue cover. The stories, too, are more disturbing than I remember, though Kawabata’s ability to convey character and emotion in two or three pages is amazing.

On the Beach

On Saturday night Jenn and I watched On the Beach on Turner Classic Movies. I had read the book long ago, but didn’t remember much about it, except that it was set in Australia, where survivors of a global nuclear war are waiting for the fallout to reach them.

The movie was extraordinarily powerful but never sensational. Though the premise is the complete annihilation of humanity, you don’t see even a single dead body throughout the film.

On the Beach stars Gregory Peck, as an American submarine captain stationed in Australia. His wife and two children have died while he was at sea, a fact he hasn’t been able to accept. Peck falls for an aging but attractive Ava Gardner, whose weakness for alcohol has been reinforced by the approaching end of the world. Anthony Perkins is a young Australian naval officer (his light accent seems to come and go) married to a high-strung wife. Fred Astaire, in his first nonmusical role, plays a brooding, lonely scientist who shows enthusiasm only for his Italian sports car.

It’s a longish movie without much action, which leaves the viewer to think about what is going to happen to these characters. The American sub sets on a mission to the north to sample the air in hopes that the intensity of the fallout has diminished. It hasn’t.

On the way back, the sub stops at the deserted port of San Francisco, where the view from the periscope shows nothing living on the hilly streets. A sailor whose home was San Francisco deserts the sub and swims ashore, knowing he will have only a few days to live. Next morning, in a weirdly funny scene, the sub raises its periscope a few feet away from the dock where the sailor is peacefully fishing. Captain Peck has a brief, friendly conversation with the deserter before the submarine cruises away.

The most striking thing about On the Beach may be the calmness with which the characters face the end. They go to their jobs, throw parties, take care of their families, go fishing, and even have love affairs. They may argue a little about whose fault it was that the bombs fell, but the arguments peter out pretty soon. There’s no longer any point to arguing.

My limited experience with disaster leads me to think this is just how people would react. I once took off on a flight from Los Angeles that circled a couple of times over the ocean, then returned to the airport for an emergency landing. The cabin attendant repeated the emergency landing instructions with her voice cracking. I’m sure many of us thought these were our last moments, but nobody yelled or screamed or carried on.

When the cold war ended, people stopped worrying about this kind of global catastrophe. But with poorly guarded nuclear devices and materials scattered around the world, each of us is in at least as much danger from a smaller attack that could still erase a city and render vast territories uninhabitable for generations. It’s not a cheery subject for the campaign trail, but I hope the presidential candidates have given some thought to it. 

So you want to open a bookstore

In the three and a half years that Jenn and I ran a bookstore cafe in Brooklyn, we met a lot of people who wanted to do the same thing. Sitting down with a cup of herbal tea and some chocolate chip cookies, listening to Miles Davis on the stereo, and looking out at the fountain in our garden, customers would remark on how relaxing it must be to work there.

There were many great personal satisfactions to running Indigo Cafe & Books in those years. We met a number of authors we admired, and thousands of book lovers. We looked forward to seeing our “regulars,” and became good friends with some. (We even went to Paris to visit the jazz trombone player who used to live upstairs.) But overall, it was not a relaxing existence.

Consider the numbers. Let’s say you sell 500 books in a month, at $20 each. That’s $10,000 — but given the skimpy discount you get from book distributors, you keep only $4,000. Out of that $4,000 comes the rent, the phone and electricity (both charged at a higher rate because you’re a business), the cleaning lady, the counter staff, the musicians you hired for a special event, and the toilet paper in the bathroom. Keep in mind that you’ve already spent tens of thousands of dollars to renovate the space, buy furniture, and fill the bookcases with books.

Soon you discover that the only way you can break even is to fire your helpers and do all the work yourself. So six days a week you put in a 12-hour workday that might end at 10 or 11 at night, when you gently urge the last customer toward the door, start the dishwasher, pull down the security gate, and trudge home. One day a week the store is closed, but you spend most of the day catching up on paperwork and going through publishers’ catalogs.

You can help boost your bottom line by selling remaindered books, where the profit margin is much better, or other items like mouse pads, candles, incense, pastries, and coffee. But you will have to sell a lot of these things to make up for the fact that selling new books (without the sweetheart deals that the big chains get) is inherently unprofitable.

If you’re thinking seriously about opening a bookstore, you should read Rebel Bookseller by Andrew Laties, which makes many of these points with wit, force, and numbers. If you go ahead anyway, know that you are doing your part to save Western civilization — but don’t expect to make money.