Writers in the Flesh at the Bookshop

In the dozen years that our used bookstore, Old Saratoga Books, has been open, we've had a few famous writers browse their way through the stacks and order books from us over the Internet. We are located in a quiet rural village of Schuylerville in upstate New York, but are only nine miles from Saratoga Springs and the artist colony of Yaddo, so some writers have taken a break from the Spa City to check out our books. From the imposingly tall Donald Antrim ("The Hundred Brothers" is a hilarious novel) who strode in the shop in biker spandex that seemed to add another foot in height, to the friendly and down to earth author A.M. Homes (who coveted my "It's Always Time to Read" clock in the children's section), it's always interesting and gratifying to meet someone who makes the stuff I sell.

Authors come in many packages. Some shun attention like Jonathan Lethem, who I only recognized after I read his name on his credit card slip. I yammered on about how much I enjoyed "Motherless Brooklyn" but tuned in quickly to his desire to leave with his pile of books without any more chatter. Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Millhauser ("Martin Dressler") was similarly demure when he came in to quietly buy some fiction and grudgingly agreed to sign some (but not the paperbacks) of his books that we had in stock. His companion that day, Skidmore College Professor colleague Steve Stern, prowled around himself for copies of his short story collections to sign.

Despite his reticence, Millhauser has a special place of dedication in our shop as pictured on the right. The shelf of Modern Library classics lies somewhat dangerously in front of the door leading to our basement lair and storage area and my husband didn't know that a famous author was afoot when he briskly strode upstairs and flung the door open, nearing bowling poor Millhauser head first into some Ibsen plays. Someday we'll get around to putting that historical plaque up.

The biggest "rock star" in the bookshop, though, has to be Ruth Stiles Gannett, author of the fantastic "My Father's Dragon", who charmed her way into my psyche with her modesty. You can read all about it my gushing vintage blog post here.

We sold an antique children's book over the Internet to the late William F. Buckley in one of the first years we were in business and just last year sold a cookbook to "Salt" and "Cod" author Mark Kurlansky. That last transaction was spooky, because Dan has just finished "Cod" the night before and we brought the book in to the shop to be housed on our "Books We've Liked" shelf. Kurlansky's call came a few hours later and he wasn't particularly interested in discussing the whole synergy of the transaction (or perhaps was working under a deadline), so that was a brief encounter. Still, kinda cool.

In 1997 we hosted historian Richard M. Ketchum for a book signing of his lively "Saratoga: Turning Point of America's Revolutionary War". Ketchum was an editor at American Heritage for many years and has written many other engaging history and nonfiction titles. He was a courtly and delightful guest at our shop and took the time to speak at length with many of our customers, even the aggressive ones who conducted their conversations with a proprietary hand on his arm. Earlier this year we were also pleased to host Sheridan Hay in our shop for a signing to celebrate the trade paperback release of her bookstore novel "The Secret of Lost Things". She was a similar delight: warm, attentive to all who came and enthusiastic about chatting about other books.

There are many Saratoga County writers who have graced our shop: the prolific Joe Bruchac: poet, reteller of Native American tales and children's author ("Skeleton Man" is Scary with a capital S and highly recommended); Jennifer Armstrong, children's author extraordinaire whom I predict will one day score a Newbery Award; soft spoken Barry Targan, who brings the best books in to trade and who writes novels and short stories in between building handmade boats; Amy Godine, an Adirondack and Saratoga history writer who gobbles down books like candy; and Saratoga gadfly and urban planning critic James Howard Kunstler, who is best known in the larger world for his book "The Geography of Nowhere" and in Schuylerville as the infamous author of a critical New York Times Magazine article.

We're still waiting for William Kennedy to stroll up from Albany and I sure would whoop up a storm if Russell Banks dropped by, but all in all it's still a thrill when we get a real live author in among the ones on paper.

The Book Trout is One Year Old

Lo and behold, the Book Trout is one year old. It's been an interesting year of blogging about things literary and beyond and I think there are certainly enough bookish bits to write about for years to come.

In the last year the Trout has been visited by 7,754 folks and that's pretty mind blowing. Interestingly, the most popular post is our paean to our bookseller colleagues at Lyrical Ballad Bookstore in Saratoga Springs. Since John and Jan DeMarco don't have a store website, I guess most people find us when they want to google "funky Saratoga bookstore". The other most popular posts have been our gift ideas for book lovers, the surprise visit by children's author Ruth Stiles Gannett, a look at home libraries around the world, and book hunting in our neck of the woods.

Thanks to all the good folks who comment on my postings and add to the fun. Off to bake a Trout Cake to celebrate our one year anniversary.

Seeing Shelley Plain: A Bookstore Book Review

Even before Dan and I became booksellers, I enjoyed reading memoirs by bookstore owners for the vicarious thrill from their book hunting adventures. They still delight me and I just finished reading a very atmospheric bookseller memoir, Seeing Shelley Plain: Memories of New York's Legendary Phoenix Book Shop by Robert A. Wilson (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2001). Wilson also wrote the bibliophilic classic "Modern Book Collecting", but this book focuses on time he spent as proprietor of the Greenwich Village bookstore from 1962-1988.

Wilson started his bookseller career in his forties, having served as an Army soldier during World War II, a diplomat in Poland and South Africa, a Broadway actor wannabe and a cuckoo clock factory office manager. A long-time book collecting passion (he collects Gertrude Stein and various poets' works) led him to become the fifth owner of the Phoenix Book Shop in New York's Greenwich Village. Wilson developed the store's specialties in poetry and first edition fiction, and there are lots of great anecdotes about dealings with Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Alice Toklas, Alan Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, Glenway Westcott and others.

The writing is a bit old-fashioned, but that only serves to enhance the reader's immersion into a gentler time in New York City bookstore history. I loved his account of his first day at the helm of the Phoenix, when his gracious colleague, Frances Steloff, of the legendary Gotham Book Mart, came to bless his shop with his first sale. There is a wonderful photo of the snowy-haired Steloff animatedly chatting with a smiling Wilson that captures their mutual delight with each other's company.

As a bookstore owner, I relished Wilson's accounts of venturing into the homes of some exceedingly eccentric authors and collectors. He has a courtly way with words and an understated way of relating how prickly some of these dealings can be. At least twice, however, he hinted at some crazy behavior or insult that he had to endure but then did not dish out the details, so I was annoyed at that. Half-hearted dish is worse than leaving out the incident altogether, but I suppose the publisher's lawyers may have had the final say on these tidbits.

If Oak Knoll's legal department did have the final edit, however, I wish they would have addressed the distractingly large number of typos in this book. I was astonished at the multitude of misspellings, weird punctuation and uncapitalized proper nouns in a book coming from such a literary author and publisher. There were at least two or three such jolts per chapter, which will hopefully have been addressed in any later editions. I can only imagine that Wilson, a publisher himself of an impressive number of literary and poetical titles as noted in the text and in a list at the rear of the book, must have pulled out hanks of hair after seeing these errors in print.

Overall, a book highly recommended for bibliophiles, poetry lovers, fans of literary New York City history and bookstore prowlers.

My Three Sons

First, there was Basil, the Bookstore Cat. When we first opened our shop, Old Saratoga Books, back in 1996, we were not planning to have a bookstore cat. We had enough on our plate with two young daughters, a new business with lots to renovate and lots to learn, and a few hairy pets at our homestead to take care of. However, living across from a horse barn lends itself to having lots of stray animals show up. Basil was a scraggy, elderly tiger tom with a bent tail and loads of other old injuries who kept strolling over from the barn to play with my girls. He was affectionate and gentle and we grew to love him despite his disgusting, perpetual sneezing habit.



Eventually we were won over and brought Basil to live at the bookshop. After numerous trips to the veterinarian for antibiotics to clear up his everpresent boogers, a customer knowledgeable in herbal healing recommended that we dose his food with the herb eyebright. We got some capsules at the health food store and would sprinkle half a capsule on his wet food every day and miraculously, this regimen worked after a couple of weeks.

Basil was a big hit with all of our bookloving buddies with his affectionate ways and scratchy meow. During the warm months he would sometimes sneak out by pushing open the screen door. The next door diner owner would often show up with this long, bony feline package in his arms and dump him back inside the door and I would weakly apologize and try to keep a better eye on him. Basil was our bookstore cat for two years until one day when he went for a much more adventurous jaunt than usual and decided to cross Broad Street. One of our neighbors tearfully came in to let Dan know that he was lying motionless by the curb, apparently hit in the head by a car.

We were grief-stricken with Basil's demise and vowed to be cat-free at the shop because of the street hazards, but several months later, Maggie, the local antique shop owner approached us with the tale of a sweet-tempered Siamese mix who had been dumped off at the local toilet tissue factory. We were hesitant, but Maggie was persuasively persistent, so we went to take a look at this fat, furry boy cat with lots of extra toes. Maggie theorized that his extra toes made him the unwanted result of a breeder trying to make a Snowshoe Siamese cat, one with white paws on a cat with traditional Siamese markings.


We were hooked on his striking looks and sweet disposition and so Bookstore Cat number two entered our lives. Our Harry Potter-obsessed kids named him Hagrid and he was in residence at Old Saratoga Books for almost two years, until his normally sweet demeanor started to erode. I found him stalking young kids at the shop and swiping at them even when they weren't bothering him, so we had to find him a new home. Luckily, we were able to place him with some bookseller colleagues in Vermont where he is now completely in charge of the (childless) household, sleeping on the parental bed at night and keeping a large dog in line.

Once again, Dan and I agreed to keep the shop feline-free for the future. The extra hair and maintenance, the alienation of cat-allergic customers and the desire to keep as much cat poop out of our lives as possible all led to this firm resolve. And once again, the Fates intervened because we are such suckers for strays.



Sam, our grey and white tom cat, was a midnight drop-off at the neighbor's horse barn, and at the time, was an extremely skinny boy with a plaintive voice, whom the reigning barn cats battered and bruised every time he neared the communal food dish. My kids pleaded with us to install him at the shop and we were not too hard to break down. After getting him cleaned up and neutered, Sam ballooned into the fine, fat specimen that he is. It takes strength to hold him in his favorite poses (on his back like an infant or astride the nape of your neck, draped like a Forties fur piece.) He's been the greeter at the shop now for six years and is generally a lovable and charismatic addition. We have trained him to fear the sound of my jiggling car keys when he gets too near the screen door (a water pistol did the trick) so we don't have to worry about cars, and he is given the run of all three floors of our shop with various cat doors. Many a customer has been surprised in our restroom by Sam's face plowing through the cat flap.

Two summers ago, we were greeted at dusk by another feline drop-off: a nursing mother cat and four young kittens. These black, long-hairs were so cute and almost wormed their way into our hearts, but this time Dan and I held firm, and despite the six weeks we kept them in an outside shed and got them cleaned up at our friendly vet's office, we found good homes for all five beasties by bringing them into the bookstore and walking around with these balls of fluff in our arms.

My Father's Dragon Lady

Today I had a customer come in and politely ask for directions to the children's section. She came back a few moments later and had the good taste to have a copy of L.M. Boston's "The Children of Green Knowe" in her hand. We chatted as I rang up her purchase and she commented about how used bookstores are such nice repositories of older titles and mentioned that she was an author herself. Ever-curious and ever-bold from my downstate New York upbringing, I asked what she had written. She demurred and said that she had written a book published way back in 1948 and that I probably had never heard of it. I pressed on with my queries and she very modestly said that she had written a children's book called "My Father's Dragon".

My mouth flapped open. Not heard of "My Father's Dragon"! Unthinkable! This book is a wonderful children's fantasy, and a winner of Newbery Honors. I not only read and loved this book as a kid, but I read it aloud to my kids when they were younger and have pressed many copies into the hands of parents and grandparents asking for recommended reading for their small fry. I restrained myself from running around the counter and squeezing the no-need-to-be modest Ruth Stiles Gannett in a bear hug, but couldn't resist asking if I could take a picture of her holding a copy of her much beloved book. She was gracious enough to inscribe this new family heirloom to my two girls, "daughters of the enthusiastic seller of books of yore".

I mentioned this author encounter to my next several customers and both were knocked out. They too, had not only heard of this book but had read, re-read and gifted this book to others. I found out that there are two sequels to this title, "Elmer and the Dragon" and "The Dragons of Blueland", which I will now have to purchase. A euphoric day at the old bookshop indeed.

Inside Old Saratoga Books

Allow me to give you a virtual tour of Old Saratoga Books. We are located in a large Victorian commercial building, where we share downstairs storefronts with a violin maker, art gallery, doctor and stained glass studio. Our space has 14 foot high ceilings, which makes for great lighting, but terrible circulation of winter heat and summer breezes, particularly upstairs. Best to visit in person in Spring and Fall.

The busiest time of the year is in Summer. Nearby Saratoga Springs has the world-class Saratoga Race Track, where thoroughbreds and the glitterati converge during the six-week racing season. Saratoga Springs also has a great Performing Arts Center which hosts a jazz festival, and is the seasonal home for the New York City Ballet and Philadelphia Orchestra, as well as many other musical events. Other visitors include boaters docked on the Hudson River and history buffs checking out the Saratoga National Battlefield, the Battle Monument, General Philip Schuyler's summer
residence and other area historic landmarks.








We have two floors in our bookshop, with all of the fiction downstairs and a lot of the non-fiction housed above. We have a special kid's section to corral the young ones, although it is frequented most by nostalgic adults.

The last time we took inventory we had between 50,000 and 60,000 books and these are divided up into over 90 categories, from circus books to labor history to Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes. We have strong collections in history of all kinds, but are particularly deep in the American Revolution and Colonial history sections. Dan and I love art, music, cooking, gardening, how to books, natural history and mysteries, so those sections are well represented.

Dan has a love for the Modern Library imprints, so we have a special corner for these classics. He's also a fan of vintage paperbacks (at least their cover art) so there are many beauties from the 1940s-60s in our paperback section, organized alphabetically by publisher and then by author. The books are a hoot, from "The Terror of the Handless Corpse" by William Dale to "After Doomsday" by Poul Anderson to "White Witch Doctor" by Louise Stinetorf. Certainly there is a variety of wild sci-fi, western, mystery and sexy titles to peruse.

Store Cat Sam presides over the shop. He's a skinny stray we adopted after he was dropped off at my neighbor's barn. The resident barn cats would have none of him and he was slowly starving, since he couldn't penetrate the ring of cats surrounded the communal food dish. We brought him to the vet and then the shop and he quickly doubled his weight and is now actually on a perpetual diet. We've had to fend off well-meaning cat lovers from slipping treats through our mail slot when we're closed, especially after the morning I found breakfast sausages on the floor, crawling with ants. Sam does favor a spot of blueberry yoghurt now and then. And catnip anytime.

In the Beginning...

Here's a little background history about our bookstore. Old Saratoga Books was founded in 1996, after owners Dan and Rachel Jagareski had worked in various historic rehabilitation, business and government jobs. After the birth of our second daughter, we knew we wanted a more flexible work environment and some more mental stimulation, so armed with a lot of enthusiasm and a love for reading, we decided to open a used bookstore. We had a large home library and had been scouting around for books in an effort to stockpile an inventory, but we were very green. 

 First off, we underestimated the weight of the boxes of books accumulating in our house and though it's a sturdy structure with mercifully-thick floor joists, our floors started getting very spongy. The teetering towers of books were a hazard to our then toddler, so we rented a storage unit for our book stock. Most of our books were gleaned from library sales, garage sales and thrift stores, and we did have the sense enough to concentrate on acquiring nonfiction, but as we read more and more books about books, and devoured the AB Bookmans Weekly issues, we kept revisiting our potential inventory and winnowing out more and more chaff. 

 The big boost to our education came with acquistion of the "Leonard Collection". Dan had spied a Pennysaver ad about a used bookstore going out of business downstate. A titanic collection of books were for sale at a pennysaver price and blinded by biblio-lust, we bought the lot. With the help of Dan's cousin and a rented moving van, we made several trips to collect our treasure. The learning curve was steep after handling this mass: there were some good books, but they had been picked over quite neatly, leaving a tonnage of common and uninteresting books and a singularly disgusting collection of dirty magazines devoted to specific anatomical parts (Big Butt Magazine,et al). 

 Even after ten years, I sometimes find a Leonard book on our shelves and reach for my rubber gloves for extraction and circular filing. Aspiring used bookstore owners should obtain the invaluable book "The Complete Guide to Starting a Used Bookstore", by the late Dale Gilbert. We borrowed a copy from the library, read it over and over and then bought a copy that we still refer to today. Although Gilbert wrote about the used bookstore in the pre-Internet day, his model for acquiring books, setting up your retail space, accounting, and other information is worth the price of acquiring this out-of-print gem (starting at $35.00 online). His writing style is clever and full of real-life examples. While we don't do everything according to the Gilbert model (location in a strip mall, for instance), it's a fantastic tool and I can't recommend it enough for the any bookseller. 

 We found an inexpensive and large retail space in the Hudson River town of Schuylerville, with a great landlord who has owned the property for 30 years and maintains its 1880s historic character with annual improvements. The long-vacant storefront had former lives as an antique shop, pharmacy (with a lunch counter where a woman choked to death on a ham sandwich), general store and bar. A leaking roof had caused a lot of damage, so we were able to barter some rehabilitation for rent. 

 Dan built all the shelves and exposed the brick walls and we think it's a funky, lovely space. With a grand opening scheduled, we were disheartened to see our book accumulation quickly suck into the shelves with way too much empty space, so we faced out as many books as we could. Flocks of bookdealers initially came to scoop up our under-priced mistakes and we were thinking the first month's cash flow would be indicative of long-term buckets of money, but this was a bubble. 

 Over the years our financial progress has been slow to rise, with many backsteps and quicksteps into a wildly changing bookselling market. The rise of Internet bookselling has caused us to learn more about websites, SKUs, ISBNs, and now blogging, than we certainly ever wanted to, but is has grown to over half of our store income, so we've tried to evolve. W

e've grown to over 50,000 books in the shop and added and renovated a second floor space when it became available five years ago. It's been over a decade and we've gone through three store cats and several village mayors while at the helm of Old Saratoga Books. We're not rich on the balance sheet, but we still love what we do. 

 We don't sit around reading books and sipping Lapsang Souchong as we snuggle store cat Sam as some customers fantasize. Instead, we're scrubbing the bathroom, reorganizing, cleaning and repairing books, answering emails, scratching our heads over the accounting or trying to figure out the latest Internet business tool. However, we dress as we please and commute along a wildlife corridor where we've seen pheasants, weasels, snapping turtles and a bull moose once. Our kids like to "shop" here when they are conscripted into dusting duty. And each time that we unlock the store door, breathing in the book perfume and spying all the books that Sam has knocked over, there's the sense that this is where we belong. Riches untold.