GUEST SHOT

An Essay

by Barbara Kingsolver

Obit For My Guardian Angels

IN 1958, WHEN I WAS HARDLY YET A DOT on any map, a new bookstore opened its doors on East Speedway in Tucson. It would have narrow aisles crammed with every kind of wisdom, and helpful staff to track it down. One worker there, a tiny woman named Anne whose memory presaged computers, could identify just about anything ever published, declare it in stock, and scramble up a ladder for it.

Thirty years later, when I was still on nobody's map but my own, I'd claimed The Book Mark as my territory: I met friends there, debated art and politics, once even began a star-crossed love affair behind the discreetly turned spines of Virginia Woolf and Leo Tolstoy.

It was now 1988, the year I first produced a book of my own. My New York publisher had turned out a few thousand copies, and hoped maybe some of them would sell before it faded out of print. This is the way of first novels: they aren't generally greeted with trumpets. Mostly they're ignored. That's why most writers starve, or else have day jobs.

I was lucky, though. I had a guardian angel, a tiny one named Anne, who loved my book and made it her mission to shove it into the hands of everyone she thought would like it.

This included nearly everyone who entered The Book Mark, and some who were merely hanging around in the parking lot. I had other guardian angels, too, it turns out, booksellers all over the country who discovered my novel and sold it "by hand," as they say in the business.

It went back to print again and again, and I earned enough royalties to quit my day job and write another book, then another. Now the copies of my books out in the world number in the millions, many in languages I can't read.

When I gave the debut reading from my newest book in November, I stood on a platform in The Book Mark's parking lot surrounded by hundreds of cheering Tucsonans, and felt a little like Evita Peron. I don't take any of this for granted.

I owe my career to people such as those at The Book Mark who first guided readers to my words. I think of them as family. When my daughter was born I sent them a birth announcement, which they proudly displayed.

Yesterday, they sent me a much less joyful announcement: after 40 years, The Book Mark is passing away. Tucsonans' buying habits are changing: We now purchase through the Internet, we hunt for bargains, we're drawn by the lure of chain stores.

Over the next weeks I'll go in often to say goodbye to my favorite aisles and buy more books from their emptying shelves. The store must sell its stock, but I'll feel as if I'm sifting through the goods of a dying relative. I cannot bear this passing.

I suppose I'm grateful that books are still sold elsewhere, but I have a bone to pick with the way the behemoth chains organize their bookselling: They don't play fair. They purposefully out-compete the neighborhood shop, dazzling customers with glitzy displays and -- above all -- discounts.

They can afford to cut the price of the latest blockbuster, because chains order these books by the thousands, at a reduced price that the publishers don't offer to the independents. (Independent booksellers are presently challenging this practice in court, claiming unfair competition.)

Publishers also subsidize certain books with "co-op money," a payola scheme that determines which books move forward into the chain store's large displays. So you can hardly walk in the door without tripping over a stack of the new Stephen King or -- yes -- Barbara Kingsolver.

But it wasn't always this way. Once I was the name no one could spell, on the spine of a first novel -- the kind you'll now find way in the back of that big store, a needle in a brightly lit haystack, quietly going out of print while its author goes back to waitressing. There, but for the grace of my guardian angels, go I.

It's not just starving artists who should care about this; it's a First Amendment issue. To put it bluntly, chain stores and publishers are in league to manipulate what Americans will see, purchase, and read.

"Independent" means what it says: bookstores that are locally owned, by people who know books, and need not tailor their orders to the appetites of a distant city, but would rather honor their customers' interest in regional issues, local authors, small press books, poetry, first novels, things that matter to us, right here, right now. Is this something you can live without?

Apparently, you'll have to. Miraculously, Tucson still has one glorious feminist independent and a raft of specialty and used-book stores. But the generalists, the all-purpose locally owned bookstores, have gone the way of Arizona's native fish. One by one, their streams dried up and they went extinct: Haunted Bookshop, Coyote's Voice, Marco Polo, Whiz Kids. And now, that bookish trout that swam upstream for so long, The Book Mark.

I'm still in the earliest stage of grief: denial. I'm banking on a miracle on the order of Jimmy Stewart's in "It's a Wonderful Life." People will show up there in droves, cash in hand, to prove their hearts were not sold for a $3 markdown. The prodigal readers will return, and those who never left will also return to scour the aisles, looking for the enlightenment and passions and how-to manuals that filled our lives before TV stultified us with 100 channels of conformity.

The tides of fortune will reverse themselves. It will happen, I'm thinking, because this is America. We love independence and freedom of thought. We believe in our own story: that any one of us could write the Great American Novel, and the rest of us could read it, without waiting for Big Brother to buy it a place at the table.

We do, don't we?

[ Copyright © 1999 Barbara Kingsolver. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the author from The Arizona Daily Star.]

Barbara Kingsolver is the author, most recently, of The Poisonwood Bible.

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