When I wanted new books, I hung out at the local B. Dalton located in the dark basement of our biggest shopping center, or at a tiny Little Professor tucked into the back end of a nearby strip mall. I bought mass-market editions of Steinbeck (every single one within six months), Cheever, Updike (for the respectable naughty bits), Vonnegut, Heller, Barth, Barthelme, Pynchon. I read with no particular aim or agenda and allowed the blurbs on the back of one cheap paperback to lead me to the next.

  Each Thursday night, I accompanied my mother to the Valley Fair mall, and while she was getting her hair done, I’d wander to the neighboring department store’s book section, where I purchased my first hardcover, the Modern Library’s Complete Tales of Saki. I knew nothing about Saki except that it was a pseudonym (a fact irresistible to a teenager), but I loved the red and blue and green cloth covers of the Modern Library, and Saki was the cheapest at $2.95. A year earlier, I’d shoplifted a book from this same store, a hardcover copy of Lennon Remembers, tucking the book into the large pocket of my brother’s Marine Corps field jacket. But then, after discovering Steinbeck and the thrills of reading, I could no longer bring myself to steal a book.

  I often ventured into San Jose’s disheveled downtown and wandered the mazes of the cavernous used bookstores near the state college. I was ignored by the clerks while I sat for hours, skipping from book to book, with an occasional detour through the stacks of used Playboys.

  My bookstore obsession grew to the point where I’d search for new shops during family trips, as though that were the reason for our travel. In cities up and down California, I came across stores—in Monterey, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Berkeley—where the atmosphere was markedly different from my neighborhood haunts. In these stores books were not treated as mere commodity, and there was a palpable sense of reverence for books and the time it took to read them. Since this was the 1970s, such reverence was often made evident through the decor—dark, rough paneling, potted ferns, and faded tapestries. For the last two years of high school I was unaware that such a place, Upstart Crow and Co. Bookstore and Coffeehouse, had opened a short bike ride from my home. I had to trip over it to find it, and when I did, I was trying to impress a date.

  Upstart Crow was located in the Pruneyard, a rambling, two-story, upscale outdoor mall done up in neo-Spanish colonial style, with flowery, covered walkways, tiled fountains, a fake bell tower, and terra-cotta roofs. The Pruneyard painted shopping as a leisurely stroll, a perfect California day of spending, and I’d heard it was quite the place for impressing a date. Mine was no ordinary date; I was with the fair Selinda, and yet it became increasingly hard to maintain my teenage cool after stumbling upon this cave of wonders.

  Decades ahead of other book retailers, Upstart Crow’s owners had created something of a theme park, where the atmosphere (I’m sure they thought of it as “ambience”) was as much a draw as the merchandise. There were foreign periodicals, chessboards, plenty of big tables and comfy chairs, and summoning the tradition of the English coffeehouse—shades of Dr. Johnson, The Tatler, those who made the eighteenth-century coffeehouse an institution—Upstart Crow brought the first espresso bar to our neck of the woods.

  The walls of this coffeehouse and bookstore were covered with framed prints and photographs of writers who were surely famous, even though I had not yet heard of them: Geoffrey Chaucer, Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf, Edith Sitwell, Graham Greene, E. M. Forster (who for some reason appeared in his photo in drag as Queen Victoria), and dozens of others, mostly British. Typed labels identified the writers, and I whispered these names aloud to remember them. There was a close sense of history in this brand-new place, a sense of the importance of the past and its legacy, a sense of history I found remarkable, growing up as I had in past-less California. What struck me most, however, was that these famous writers lived on. Their photos were more than decor; their books stocked the store’s shelves.

  The name of the store was enough to make me feel connected to a past I could as yet only intuit. The Upstart Crow is Shakespeare, so named by an envious contemporary of the Bard, Rob’t Greene, who wrote,

  yet trust them not: for there is an Upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers Hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you …

  The quote appeared on the store’s bookmarks, along with a Leonard Baskin drawing of a crow. I knew it: here was proof that there were people in the world, adults who weren’t high school teachers, who understood the importance of Shakespeare and books and writing.

  I still have one of those bookmarks, along with a few other things from Crow, a captain’s chair and a plain white coffee mug, both of which I stole after four years of happy employment. But I don’t have the orange book bag with the perfect-length shoulder strap. That, and much else, has been lost.

  It was more than the atmosphere that grabbed me. There were the usual stacks of beautifully photographed and reasonably priced cat books, and rows of mass-market Self-Help and Romance, but also stacks of books by the writers whose photos graced the walls, and many others, all engagingly displayed. The books I’d sought in other stores were always stuffed into a far corner or downstairs, but here every book was promoted. I wandered the shelves and tables with a gape-mouthed reverence, gravitating to the S’s in Fiction, where I found a book that I had already purchased and read, but whose present incarnation amazed me.

  The Long Valley was one of my favorite Steinbecks, mine was a tiny mass-market edition. Upstart Crow carried a Viking Compass edition, a trade paperback with beautiful type and a serious, Expressionist cover. This edition made me feel the power of its words before I’d turned to the first page.

  Selinda and I sat in the coffee bar, sipping Café Mit Schlag, a drink I ordered for its name and which thankfully came festooned with whipped cream. On the way out that night, I paid for The Long Valley at the front counter and asked for a job application.

  It’s a good thing bookstores are places for hanging out, spending more time than money, because Upstart Crow didn’t hire me for nearly two years, although not for lack of trying on my part. I was there nearly every week, as if I might be hired by sheer obstinance, and three times I filled out an application, which was a written test of literary knowledge. The first time I took the test I missed only one question: What category of books does Dona Meilach write? (Arts and Crafts). Charlotte, the manager, was always friendly but leery of hiring a high school student. The summer after my freshman year of college, Charlotte brought me on for temporary help with shelving, finally tired, I imagine, of listening to my wheedling. I was so certain I’d be taken on permanently, I left a thriving career as a 7-Eleven Slurpee jockey.

  During my first week at Crow, I did nothing but shelve box upon box of Penguin paperbacks. At first I was hesitant, ferrying small handfuls of green, black, and orange books from one wrong section to another, but soon I was arm-loading twenty to thirty at a time, all now broken down by subject and precisely alphabetized. I was thrilled by the weighty order of the books, and by the vast web of names and titles I did not know; this may have been the moment when I realized there would never be enough time in my life to read everything.

  At the end of that first week, passing the new hardcover releases, I happened upon a book that would not let me go, John Steinbeck’s The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, a posthumous work, recently published, with a cover in imitation of an illuminated manuscript, deckled (or rough) pages on the fore-edge, maroon cloth under the dust jacket, and perfectly pristine. I had read every Steinbeck in existence, and knew, I thought, all there was to be known on the subject, so such a book seemed impossible to me. And there were five copies! Charlotte tried to talk me out of buying it, and she was right; I would have to shelve for five hours to pay for it, even with my discount. One of the other clerks, Greta Ray, came up next to me, stroked the book lightly with the palm of her hand, and said, “It really is beautiful, isn’t it?” It was beautiful, so I bought it.

  I knew that I had found what I could only describe then as a cool job, although the feeling was more profound and complex. I felt as if I had found the proper city in which to dwell. What I knew that day, what drew me to the bookstore, I would not be able to articulate for many years. But my inability to describe the feeling did nothing to diminish its power over me. Books, I knew then and now, give body to our ideas and imaginations, make them flesh in the world; a bookstore is the city where our fleshed-out inner selves reside.

  While I shelved the last of that day’s shipment, the books appeared like a city’s lighted windows, seductive glimpses of the lives that dwelled between their covers. This was more than retail, this was pleasure, both intangible and sensual. I also sensed that the customers and clerks who wandered the streets of this city were like-minded souls, who believed that the book and what it held were one and the same, both common and rare.

  Leaving at dusk that day, I stopped to say good night to Greta. She was sitting behind the long front counter, against the tall windows that looked out on the covered walkway and the parking lot. She asked to see Steinbeck’s King Arthur again, and cooed over it. “Goddamn it,” she said. “It is beautiful.” We stood there talking for the longest time.

  Greta Ray was a complete surprise to me, certainly the type of person I’d never expected to meet. She was close to my mother’s age, I knew that, late generation World War II, but far from the stereotypical housewife of my limited experience. I would have called Greta a hippie then, in 1976, with all of that word’s positive connotations, but bohemian might be more apt. I had grown up in a military family, traditional and working class; Greta had lived the kind of life I thought existed only in books.

  She had short peppery hair, the reddish complexion and angular beauty of a native American, and startling blue eyes. She wore the authentic hippie attire of northern California: blue jeans, sometimes with patches; peasant blouses; Birkenstocks before they got a bad rap. She also wore funky pieces of silver jewelry her husband made for her out of pre-war Australian florins. Her husband, Jack, was a professor of logic, a writer, painter, and flutist. I learned they had met in beachside L.A. in the late 1940s, part of a glamorous crowd into jazz and sports cars. They had smoked marijuana in the fifties and were early opponents of the war in Vietnam. They were thrilled to be in the audience when Dylan went electric. Their children attended a very alternative school called Daybreak. Real paintings hung in their house, among them Jack’s “Logicians Dancing.” Greta thought the Kinks were the greatest rock band in the world.

  She was also the most learned, voracious reader I had ever met, and while raising her kids, and helping to write and edit Jack’s papers, Greta worked in bookstores. Her first job was at Buffum’s Department Store in Long Beach, California, in 1949. She had been working across the street at a music store, but visited Buffum’s basement lending library so often they finally gave her a job. She had also worked at Smith’s Acres of Books, Iowa Book and Supply, Kit’s, and later, Printer’s Inc. She’d been at Upstart Crow for five years when I met her.

  Greta and I had talked a couple of times when I was still a customer at the store. During my freshman year in college, I discovered a first book of stories by the still unknown Raymond Carver. I borrowed and devoured Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? from the college library, and unable to find the book elsewhere in San Jose over winter break, I special ordered it from Greta, who knew the book and talked at length about this writer I assumed I alone had discovered.

  Later, when I started at Crow, after having served my time as a temporary shelving apprentice (something akin to a cabin boy), my head now filled with thousands of new titles and authors, I was rewarded with regular shifts and began to spend more time with Greta, who taught me about the cash register, the inventory system, customer service and special orders, the proper way to display a table or stuff a shelf, and it would turn out, much that was not included in the employee handbook.

  For the first couple of years, Greta and I worked the night shift, which is a different country indeed. We’d arrive at four in the afternoon and leave near midnight after closing and cleaning up. Most of the ordering and shelving was done by the day managers, and for the two clerks on the night shift, the task was to keep the store open and running. Without the busier work, we had time to enjoy the space.

  The coffee bar was set into the back of the brightly lit bookshop, and behind it, lay the darker grotto of the coffeehouse’s constellation of tables. I always dropped into work early to scoot behind the bar for a cup of Sumatra, chatting with the barristas, students like myself, but whose style tended to be punkier than the bookstore staff’s—dyed hair, multiple earrings, thrift-store black. I’d chat with some of the regulars at the bar and peer into the coffeehouse to see who might be back there, maybe Chess Guy or Tarot Lady. A lot of regulars came in every day for months or years at a stretch. They came at prescribed times, stayed for hours, and while we might talk to them daily, we might never know their real names. The most regular of the regulars at this time was Zoltan, a thirtyish fellow of seemingly independent means, who spent seven or eight hours a day in the coffeehouse. He kept undisclosed notes in a fat binder and was inclined to discuss issues of social philosophy rather than the weather. Zoltan was still an everyday fixture at Crow when the store closed ten years later, and we can only assume he found a new home-away-from-home.

  There were also the drop-ins and the semi-regulars, all seated at the wrought-iron and wood tables in captain’s chairs or rattan thrones. Dim spotlights, heaps of open books and newspapers, a rather lazy mood to it all. The bookstore and the coffeehouse are natural allies; neither has a time limit, slowness is encouraged.

  On her stool behind the front counter in the evenings, Greta would be going through the special orders, sipping her coffee, smoking a never-ending cigarette, and cursing the inability of most of humanity to fill out a simple form. We’d play records we’d brought in from home; Greta took me through the jazz catalogue to start with, my first tastes of Miles, Coltrane, Bird. We’d ring up a few customers, answer the phone, enjoy the lull.

  Coffee finished, I’d wander off to straighten the store, a perpetual chore (although Sisyphus never had it this good), and by the start of the evening rush, the store was tamed and ordered, all possibility, ready to get trashed again.

  The rest of the shift was devoted to helping people find books. A simple enough proposition, mind you, and frequently customers did have the exact information and only needed to be guided to the proper shelf and alphabet. At other times, finding the right title could be like constructing an ancient religion from a single artifact. Who could guess that Roger the Sorcerer was code for Roget’s Thesaurus?

  No matter how roundabout the path, it’s always satisfying to put the right book in the right hands, but the real thrill in bookselling is to put the right book into unsuspecting hands. Because I found her name enchanting, I still remember Victoria McIlvrag, one of the first customers I ever surprised with a book. Today I don’t remember much about her, except that she wore a brown raincoat and was always with her young son. The first time we met, she told me she had been reading nothing but trashy best sellers—her words—and she loved to read but wanted something new; she wanted to read about real women. I led her to Fiction and handed her a blue and silver copy of Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter. Ms. McIlvrag looked at the book with some skepticism, but bought it anyway, and came back the next week asking for more by Ms. Welty, please, and anything else I cared to recommend.

  After the rush, Greta and I would redo the shelves for the last hour or so, then close the store at eleven, and draw ourselves a glass of Anchor Steam beer before we counted and deposited the money. We would sweep and clean, yelling to each other across the loud music we played, Neil Young or Genesis or whatever album we’d discovered that week.

  On one of those first nights, after closing, listening to Getz and Gilberto, Greta presented me with three books, and said sternly, “Now, goddamn it, Lewis, be quiet and listen to me. You have to read these books, and that’s all there is to it.” She gave me William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, The Essays of E.B. White, and Higglety Piggelty Pop by Maurice Sendak. Just like that, three entire worlds opened up for me, and thirty years later I’m still reading these writers, their worlds still moving through me. “Besides,” she said then, pointing to the books, “just look at them, they’re gorgeous.”

  The coffeehouse was shut up, the parking lot a tundra, and Greta and I often stayed too late, loading new records, jumping from one section to another with books in hand, our enthusiasms wagging their furry tails. We were quite happy there, alone together among our books.

  The conversation we began that night has continued for thirty years now. Greta and I worked together forty hours a week for the first ten years—four years at Upstart Crow and six at Printers Inc. in Palo Alto. She saw me through my education, my first marriage, my first madness, the subsequent madnesses, my second marriage, the birth of my daughter. At various junctures I’ve lived with Greta and her family, sleeping on the couch or floor. We’ve mourned her husband, her dearest friend, and her youngest son. While our friendship has gone well beyond our love of books, that love has always been central, and at least for us, it’s impossible to find any boundary between books and life in the world. Today, we see each other maybe six times a year, but talk on the phone once or twice a week. When she calls, it’s always morning and she’s already breathless. “Have you read … ?”

  What Greta was trying to tell me that night, and ever since, was that the books are right, we are not alone.

  The Magic Box

 

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