The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap Read Online Free PDF Page B

open, said how nice it was to have a bookstore coming to town. They liked that they were getting a bookshop! It felt so good to be wanted.
    Staring at the book morgue, I knew the men and women who had come by to ask about our opening looked forward to what we represented: a simultaneous intellectual, emotional, and economic investment in the Coalfields of central Appalachia—not to mention access to books, glorious, cheap, preloved books. So as God was our witness they were going to get the world’s greatest—well, friendliest, nicest, whatever—bookstore. We would not be defeated by low stock numbers—not yet, anyway. Rallying, I said, “Don’t worry, love. Even though we’re in a bit of a bind here, I have a way forward.”
    My husband cast a suspicious eye toward me, knowing that when I said not to worry, he probably should. But I continued with an expansive wave at the dead books, “Clearly we need more inventory.”
    “Clearly we’re out of money, Wendy.” The recent furniture fetch in a rented U-Haul, coupled with the three rooms of newly made shelving, had drained my day job’s modest paychecks. We’d been eating Crock-Pot chili or mac and cheese interspersed with some old army rations a friend from my Snake Pit days had given us. I don’t know exactly why she gave us that box of twelve MREs (meals ready to eat)—perhaps she felt bad when I walked away and didn’t want to see us starve—but let me just say, food that can’t spoil doesn’t taste good.
    “The solution is obvious,” I went on. “And I am the perfect person to implement it.”
    Jack closed his hazel eyes as if in pain. “Just tell me.”
    I kissed his brow. “At great personal sacrifice, dear, I will give up my Saturday mornings to go garage-sale-ing, and will return with boxes of book bargains.” With that, I rose from my seat on the stairs, wiped my hands of the ubiquitous coal dust, and made an internal commitment to get that slump out of my beloved’s shoulders.
    Having been a graduate student for ten years, I was intimately familiar with yard sales. I consider myself adept at spotting bargains and think browsing sales is fun, but had been avoiding them since we were rapidly approaching the point where we couldn’t afford air, let alone amenities. We cut our own hair and changed our car’s oil, so I didn’t want to be tempted to spend even small amounts of money on nonessentials. But now, a lifelong addiction had become a business skill. No way were our dreams dying without a fight. The people who’d stopped and talked to us, who’d told us they were counting on us to open (and then not close six months later) could not be disappointed. The readers of the world—okay, the Appalachian Coalfields—were waiting.
    Yeah, it was overblown self-aggrandizement, but every once in a while, that really works to stop a self-pity party.
    Soon I was at play in the field of the books, with apologies to Peter Matthiessen. (For those of you unfamiliar with At Play in the Fields of the Lord, his novel about sincere yet bungling missionaries living fish-out-of-water lives in the jungle, it’s a wonderful, thought-provoking read.) Buying from yard sales is one of the least expensive yet most time-consuming ways of getting stock. Time is money—especially when you haven’t got any money. All through July, I swept onto front lawns offering ten cents per for every title they had. My weekend hunts quickly and inexpensively gathered an impressive collection of battered Jackie Collins novels and Farrah Fawcett detox diets, hardback Danielle Steels and ten-year-old batches of Harlequin romances. I didn’t know what I was doing. Fortunately, it wasn’t costing much.
    The shelves grew fat on these unsellable space-takers until I wised up. From e-mailing other bookstore owners, reading Internet advice, seeing what sold on eBay, and restarting my common sense after so many years in graduate school, I soon learned to bypass vintage sets of Better