Spring 2008
Fully Booked
By Diane Foulds
Illustrated by Kevin Ruelle
In Howard Frank Mosher's most recent novel "On Kingdom Mountain," the main character Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson is a crack shot and bootlegger. She also happens to be a scholar, librarian and literary historian. It's part of being a Vermonter, Mosher seems to say. Early in the book, he even sets down Miss Jane's "Precepts for the Serious Bookperson," the fifth of which is: "There is absolutely no money to be made in selling, lending, reading, teaching, publishing, or writing of books. All are labors of love."
Vermont has love to spare. Per capita, we lead the nation in the number of libraries; bookmobiles roam the state like ice-cream vendors in everything from private cars to retired school buses. At a time when reading is falling off nationwide, Vermont's library attendance is growing. According to Vermont's Department of Libraries, participation in reading programs for all ages is up 67 percent in the last 10 years. Greensboro (population 791) devotes a full half a room of its library to books by former residents.
No doubt some of the literary-minded statistics can be partly attributed to the sparsely distributed population, not to mention the long, cold winters and muddy springs that encourage stowing away with a good read. Though Vermont is known for its mountains, streams and pastures, in many ways, its literary landscape can be equally compelling.
The Ubiquitous Bookstores
Despite the relentless reach of big-box stores and Internet commerce, somehow the smallest Vermont towns keep bookshops alive. Brandon is home to the astonishingly well-stocked Briggs Carriage Bookstore, with its aisles of new releases and a café upstairs to peruse them in. Misty Valley Books in Chester features an annual celebration of first novels, while stores in Putney and Hardwick hold their own. None of the towns has more than 3,000 residents.
In a cycle as reliable as the seasons, glossy hardcovers drift to the shelves of used bookstores; The Country Bookshop in Plainfield (pop. 1,365) is an antiquarian book-lover's wonderland: 30,000 volumes stacked floor to ceiling.
Sometimes it seems that the smaller the community, the larger the inventory. Bulwagga Books & Gallery in Whiting, a town (pop. 400) north of Brandon, has more than 10,000 tomes in a building that once housed a general store; one just has to step over the yellow cat stretched across the entranceway to wander the stacks, which include a generous section on classical antiquity. At the back there's a reading room where the book-weary can sip tea and contemplate the store's other offerings: onyx rings, limestone bowls and pickles. Central to Benson, a town of 1,079, is The Book Shed, where proprietor Joe Trenn sits among 30,000 titles with Jack, his Pekingese-Shih Tzu mix. Converted from a town clerk's office, it is crammed to the rafters with everything from political memoirs to fairy tales.
Why books? "I've been a book person my whole life," he says, "reading them since the first grade and buying them since I first had my own pocket money." Like many, his business has evolved into a "bricks and clicks" operation, a physical store increasingly supplemented by Internet sales. "I sold my first book to Africa last month," he says. "Now we have sold to customers on every continent but Antarctica."
In 2003 Renee Reiner and Michael DeSanto gave up their Essex book business, feeling squeezed out by the big chain stores. They tried other things, but couldn't get their minds off books. Last October, they opened Phoenix Books, which this time has a café and wine bar. "If it's in your soul," Reiner says of running a bookstore, "you have to do it."
The Quirky Libraries
For sheer quantity of books, The University of Vermont's Bailey/Howe is unequaled, with 1.3 million volumes and counting. But far more typical in scale is West Danville, whose 1,700 titles fill a former gas station. "People come down and get the key," says Garey Larrabee, the town postmaster, "and sometimes we leave it open." Though its keepers come and go, the readership endures. "Some sign the books out and some don't," he notes, "but they always bring them back. It's on the honor system."
Small-town libraries still often serve as a living room for the village, providing a gathering place, and an escape, in hamlets too small for much else. Former churches, schools, and homes are all regularly used as libraries; the town of Roxbury uses an old tearoom. East Burke's library is part recreation center: You can delve into a book and shoot a game of pool between chapters. East Craftsbury's has a ping-pong table, and Wilder's "Club and Library" features a bowling alley built in 1898. Derby Line's Haskell Free Library sits astride the U.S.-Canadian border. Librarians there recommend books in two languages to readers in two nations.
Several Vermont libraries boast museums. On the second floor of the Bixby Memorial Library in Vergennes, glass cases enclose historical artifacts like arrowheads and Indian baskets. Waterbury's library occupies the home of Civil War physician Dr. Henry Janes, whose amputation knife, ointments and tooth-imprinted bullets fill display cases upstairs.
A few are veritable shrines to a bygone era. Ludlow's Fletcher Memorial is a sanctuary of Italian marble, its ceilings carved from stone imported from France. Montpelier's Kellogg-Hubbard features classical sculpture, friezes and a second-floor skylight that bathes readers in natural light. For splendor, however, nothing matches St. Johnsbury's Athenaeum, an art and palm-filled gem with the atmosphere of a Vanderbilt boudoir. Rutland's grand library, a former courthouse, still has jail cells in the basement.
The Enthusiasts
When Ann McKinstry Micou and her husband retired to South Newfane from Connecticut in 1999, she decided that the best way to get acquainted with her new state would be to read its fiction. Four years and 484 novels later, she presented her findings to the Vermont Humanities Council through which she published "A Guide to Fiction Set in Vermont," arguably the most comprehensive volume ever produced on the literature involving a single state. While working on a sequel about children's books, she conducted a speaking tour at libraries throughout Vermont, meeting a well-read population she describes as "passionately interested in books."
If anything can match Micou's work for sheer ambition, it might be "Vermont Imprints, 1778-1820," an exhaustive 1963 compendium listing every known publication printed in Vermont prior to 1821. It was the brainstorm of Marcus McCorison, a professional bibliographer who started out as a librarian in Montpelier. The research alone took him 13 years.
But to the true Vermont book lover, what's a decade or two? J. Kevin Graffagnino spent 20 years collecting quotes for "Only in Books: Writers, Readers, & Bibliophiles on Their Passion," then invested 10 more into compiling the 1,750 quotations for a sequel. He has compiled 13 other titles, to boot. A self-described "bibliofool," he combs used bookshops for that rare find to add to his already sizeable personal collection. "I'm a historian by training, a book man by heart," he insists. In 2003 he became executive director of the Vermont Historical Society and its 60,000-volume library of Vermontiana.
One of the state's most distinctive private collections is in Shoreham, where J. Robert Maguire, a retired lawyer, nurtures upwards of 5,000 titles ranging from the French and Indian War to Oscar Wilde. "It's pretty haphazard," he says, "not really an organized collection." Yet public libraries often grow out of such personal collections.
Connell Gallagher, former director of UVM's Special Collections, never ceases to be amazed at the books he uncovers in Vermont homes. Gertrude Mallary and her husband moved to Bradford in the 1930s and began raising breeding bulls. By the time she died in 2002 at the age of 100, she had amassed a private library that numbered close to 6,000 volumes. It contained a wealth of Vermont history and lore, including rare volumes on the state's earliest settlers and boxes of maps, diaries and photographs. Now part of UVM, it was for years the best local history library in private hands. "She was just a fanatic about Vermont history," Gallagher recalls.
The Community Support
When Stephen King visited UVM a few years ago as part of the Burlington Book Festival, he drew a record crowd; a few years later E. L. Doctorow was welcomed at Champlain College like a rock star. When Joyce Carol Oates stepped up to the microphone at Burlington's Waterfront Theatre last year, it was standing room only.
Vermont Reads Day is an annual event in which communities read and discuss the same book statewide. Last year, 65 communities took part, and the book they curled up with was Elizabeth Winthrop's "Counting on Grace," the story of a 12-year-old girl of French Canadian heritage forced to work in a North Pownal cotton mill circa 1910. As part of the celebration in Winooski, readers met the author, wrote stories from old photographs as she had done, listened to French Canadian songs, and tried their hands at weaving and spoon-playing. Peter Gilbert, who promotes the program in his role as executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council, hails the program's success persuading non-readers to read and bibliophiles to read more.
For the thousands of book lovers who descended on Church Street for the third annual Burlington Book Festival last year, it was a three-day immersion into all things literary: panel discussions, book signings, author appearances. "Attendance was steeply up from last year," said organizer Rick Kisonak. "It just grows and grows and grows."
Even Oates was awed. "Clearly," she wrote later in an e-mail to Kisonak, "very literate, book-loving citizens live in this part of the world!"