My Bookstore

Isabel Allende

Book Passage, CORTE MADERA, CALIFORNIA

I am old-fashioned. I believe that one should have a personal doctor, a dentist, a hairdresser, and, of course, a trusted bookstore. I wouldn't think of buying books at random, without my bookseller's recommendation, no matter how good the reviews may be. Fortunately, when I immigrated to the United States twenty-five years ago—because I fell in lust with a guy whom I eventually forced into marriage—I ended up living in Marin County, California. Almost immediately, I found the perfect bookstore. However, to find the proper doctor, dentist, and hairdresser took some time. Book Passage, an independent bookstore in Corte Madera, is only ten minutes away from my home, and it rapidly became my refuge and the extension of my office. The owners, Elaine and Bill Petrocelli, welcomed me with open arms; not because I was a writer, but because I was a neighbor.

Since l987 I've started the tours for each of my books at Book Passage, the favorite place for authors on tour because they get an enthusiastic audience and are treated like celebrities, even when they are not. I have had the opportunity to attend readings by great writers, politicians, scientists, stars, gurus, and many more whom I would never have met elsewhere. I have enjoyed fabulous meals at the Cooks with Books events organized by the store in classy restaurants. Due to the requirements of my job, I am a nomadic traveler. Before any journey I visit the store's great travel section, where I get maps and information, including, for example, where to buy beads in Morocco or where to get the best pasta in Florence.

Book Passage is much more than a store for me: It's the place where I meet friends, journalists, students, readers, and fellow writers; it's where I have my mailbox and an open account for me and my family to buy and to order all our books. As soon as my grandchildren learned to dial a phone they would call the store to order kids' books and then call again if they didn't get them the next day. For years, they were present every Sunday at story hour, and they were the first ones in line, wearing the appropriate outfits, for the fun midnight Harry Potter parties.

Willie Gordon, my husband (yes, the same guy I met a quarter of a century ago), retired as a lawyer and decided to become a writer. I couldn't believe that he intended to compete with me but he persisted. At Book Passage he attended the Annual Mystery Writers Conference and opted for crime novels as the most appropriate genre for him, not because he has a particularly mean streak, but because he knows a lot about law and forensics. He took writing classes and read the books suggested by the staff. To my dismay, Willie has written five novels in the last few years, translated into several languages. Nothing pleases Elaine Petrocelli so much as to see a student at her conferences return a couple of years later to teach as a published author. Willie is just one of many cases. Elaine is the first person to read Willie's manuscripts and review them. Bill helped Willie to publish in the States.

The buyer at Book Passage selects novels, audiobooks, and reader's copies for me. I don't even bother to choose my own reading material! She gave me The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean and Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese in manuscript, long before they were published. With the help of the store's knowledgeable staff I have researched sixteen books, including several historical novels and—go figure!—a treatise about aphrodisiacs. Before writing a trilogy for young adults I attended the store's Children's Writers Conference, and later, so that I could learn what kids really like to read, they organized a yearlong kids' book club.

This bookstore is the cultural soul of a large community. It's the place to take writing classes, learn languages, attend conferences, participate in book clubs and speakers' series, and, if you are a teenager, Twitter-talk (whatever that is). Elaine and Bill Petrocelli work with schools, community organizations, and restaurants, they do fund-raising for many causes, and they have a partnership with Dominican University so that students can receive credit for classes and conferences. Their clientele is so loyal that Amazon and the chains have not been able to put them out of business, and, let me tell you, they have tried.

The only place as comforting as a friendly bookstore is probably your grandmother's kitchen. The sight of shelves packed with books of all kinds, the smell of printed paper and coffee, and the secret rustle of the characters that live in the pages warm up any heart. I go to Book Passage to pass the time, to read, to gossip, and to lift my spirit. But I have also gone there to share my sorrow, as I did when I was grieving for my daughter's death. At the store, amidst all those books, many of which were painful memoirs, I realized that I had to write Paula's story, as others had written about their broken hearts before me. During that terrible year of mourning I spent many hours at Book Passage writing by hand, sipping tea, and wiping my tears, supported by my friends at the store who kept me company while respecting my privacy.

Sometimes, when I have a fight with Willie, or when I feel particularly nostalgic, I fantasize about going back to live in Chile, but I know it will never happen—because my dog can't travel so far, and I am not willing to lose Book Passage.

ISABEL ALLENDE is the best-selling author of nine novels including The House of the Spirits, Inés of My Soul, Portrait in Sepia, and Daughter of Fortune.

Rick Atkinson

Politics & Prose Bookstore, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Sometimes in our lives habit becomes ritual, and ritual then becomes superstition. For me, such a transmutation began in October 1988, when I typed the last line to my first book, a group portrait of the U.S. Military Academy class of 1966. The final scene is set in the West Point cemetery, where so many of those killed in Vietnam are buried, and the book ends with the academy chaplain reflecting: I loved these men. I loved these men with all my heart.

Now what? I asked myself. What do authors do when they complete a manuscript? I pushed away from my writing desk, tugged on a pair of sneakers, and headed down Utah Street before turning right on Nebraska Avenue to cross Connecticut Avenue. There in a drab retail building was a hole-in-the-wall shop that showed promise of becoming a neighborhood institution in Washington, D.C.—Politics & Prose Bookstore. This, I thought, is what writers should do when they finish writing: They should seek the company of other writers, at least through the books they have written. And what extraordinary new writings could be found at Politics & Prose that fall—Gabriel García Marquéz's Love in the Time of Cholera, Stephen W. Hawking's A Brief History of Time, Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities.

I would repeat that homely routine by trotting down to Politics & Prose upon finishing my second book in the fall of 1992. Then, fearful of jinxing myself by deviating from the ritual, I did it again, in 2000, and in 2003, and in 2006, and, most recently, on February 3, 2012. For me, a book feels incomplete without that capstone visit to the bookstore. Browsing among the shelves is the equivalent of typing The End on the last page, and less trite.

My family and I had moved into Washington's Chevy Chase neighborhood not long after Politics & Prose arrived. A remarkable woman named Carla Cohen opened the shop in the fall of 1984, selling the season's big books—Robert Ludlum's The Aquitaine Progression and an eponymously titled memoir by automobile executive Lee Iacocca—but also Barbara W. Tuchman's The March of Folly, Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings, and a curious biography by local author Bob Woodward titled Wired: The Short Life & Fast Times of John Belushi. A Baltimore native who had worked as a city planner and a federal housing official, Carla was savvy, gregarious, and forceful, with avowed ambitions of running "the sort of bookstore in which I liked to spend time." Another local writer and store patron, Ron Suskind, later observed, "There are hundreds of writers who imagined Carla as their ideal reader. She is a tribal leader, like Abraham."

Carla had placed a newspaper ad for a store manager and instead found a business partner in Barbara Meade, who had returned to Washington after several years on the West Coast. Barbara knew books, and she knew retail. The two women, both voracious reading mothers soon to turn 50, complemented one another perfectly: the effusive, opinionated Cohen and the reserved, meticulous Meade. Barbara later described their collaboration: "I, the cat, walk unobtrusively into a room and sit quietly on the periphery, intently watching everything that is going on. Carla, the dog, joyfully bounds in and jumps on everyone." Among their few business disagreements was the name of the store, conceived by Carla as somehow emblematic of Washington. "I think that's a terrible mistake," Barbara told her, but the name stuck.

For the first few months, the staff consisted of the two owners and a part-time clerk. Within a year, a second sales associate was added, and by 1989 Politics & Prose had a half-dozen employees. That summer the store moved across the street to more spacious digs with a wider show window. A policeman tamed the traffic on Connecticut Avenue as neighbors mustered to carry 15,000 books from the old shop to the new. I was among them, hauling cartons of that season's big sellers: Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, David Halberstam's Summer of '49, A. Scott Berg's Goldwyn, Simon Schama's Citizens. For many of us, the experience of lugging best sellers and backlist titles, obscure poetry anthologies and must-read classics that somehow we'd never read, embodied the store's slogan, printed on tote bags and T-shirts: "So many books, so little time."