Requiem: Old Sperryville Bookshop, 1998-2006
By James P. Gannon
It’s always sad to see a local business die–especially when your own blood, sweat and tears have been invested in it. And so, when I visited the Old Sperryville Bookshop today, on the last day of its existence, it felt a bit like sitting casket-side in the funeral home, remembering the good times and thinking about what might have been.
It was about 3 p.m. Sunday, December 31, 2006–the last day of the year, and the last day that the Old Sperryville Bookshop would be open. Boxes of used books lay on the tables where customers once sat to have coffee and chat. Bargain-hunters milled in the aisles, picking over the remaining stock. Bookcases and other fixtures were marked “sold,” awaiting someone to come and haul them away.
Inside the old Episcopal church that has housed the bookstore for the last eight years, it was dim and dreary, due to the slate-gray overcast afternoon and the fact that some lamps had been sold. One customer haggled with storekeeper Linda Thomas over the last remaining pieces of furniture–a display table, a marble-topped wash-stand, three display cases.
I had come in the final hours to pay respects, like attending a hospital’s intensive-care ward before they pulled the plug and turned off the respirator. The Old Sperryville Bookshop had been on life-support for months, its inevitable end in sight, but there was always hope for some miracle. Maybe a book-loving rich guy comes along, falls in love with the place as I had, and revives the patient. It can happen.
Not this time. The building had been sold, but not to someone interested in running a book shop. Time was up. It felt like the emotion you have when you come to the very last page of a great book–you don’t want it to end. You want another chapter, maybe a sequel. But there it is: it’s over.
It began in the summer of 1998, when my wife Joan and I saw the old church for sale and agreed that it would make a wonderful book shop and coffee house. The century-old church had housed a gift and antique shop called The Church Mouse, which had gone out of business. We took the plunge, bought the old building, and began scrubbing, cleaning, waxing the old hardwood floors on hands and knees. We knew nothing about the book business or retailing in general, but we figured we could learn on the job and have fun.
We bought some old restaurant tables, chairs, lamps, and other fixtures. We fixed up a coffee bar, arranged for food supplies, ordered cartons and cartons of new books. The fall tourist season was approaching, and we rushed to get ready to open by the first week of October. We opened Oct. 3, 1998, still uncertain how to run the new cash register, and were immediately overwhelmed with customers–tourists and locals who were glad to see a new business on old Main Street.
The business took off at a gallop, and we were giddy with excitement. It went that way through Christmas, sustained by weekend tourists and a small but loyal following of locals who came to support us and our new venture. Then we discovered the fickle seasonality of business in a place like Sperryville. As the winter set in, tourists disappeared and locals hibernated at home, and business slowed to a crawl.
One snowy day in January, 1999, our total sales consisted of two cups of coffee and one Washington Post, for total receipts of $3.46 for the day. (I know this because our old ledger book, recording daily receipts, sits on my desk as I write this.) On those cold, windy days, the drafty old church was frigid. My feet would turn blue and numb. I chugged coffee to keep warm. The only relief came when I could sit by the gas fireplace, hoping no customer would come in to tear me away from the fire.
Business would rise gradually in the spring, as tourists returned, stay strong most of the summer, and peak in the fall and before Christmas. We treasured the loyal local customers who kept us going in the slow months by special-ordering books, and returning often to browse, chat, and encourage us. We made wonderful friends, learned about the community, and developed a keen appreciation of how difficult it is to sustain a small, retail business in a tiny county like Rappahannock.
Running a little business in this county is like paddling down a slowly meandering stream. You have to paddle hard much of the year to move at all, and at times you have to literally carry your business like a canoe over the rocky parts. But then you hit the swift water of high tourist season and it’s a thrill again–an adrenelin rush over the rapids, a real yahoo! moment, and you think: What fun! Let’s do it again!
This feeling lasted about five years, but, in time, we began to realize we could not do this for too long. We gave up every weekend to be in the store when business was strongest. We could not entertain family or guests because we were tied up in the book shop. We began to look for an exit strategy. On a whim, we ran a little ad in the Washington Post’s Book World section, offering a small-town book shop, housed in a church in the Blue Ridge Mountains, for sale. To our amazement, we had a buyer within a month.
We sold the Old Sperryville Bookshop in July 2003 to Nancy and Greg Ostinato of Fairfax County. We walked away with the satisfaction of having created something worthwhile, pleased that someone else saw value in it and wanted to carry it on.
It’s not for me to say why things didn’t work out as well as the new owners had hoped. Small businesses are living things; they grow and thrive, or decline and die. By 2006, it seemed clear the Old Sperryville Bookshop was not going to last long. It was put up for sale this fall, and is now under contract to sell to new owners, but it will no longer be a bookshop.
It’s a pity, and a loss for the community, but it is not a surprise. Vicious price-cutting by the likes of Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Borders and Costco has made the new-book business unprofitable for small, independent bookstores. Only the book superstores and the discount stores will survive. Some used book stores will hang on, but even the used-book trade is migrating primarily to the Internet. There will be fewer and fewer physical book stores in which to browse through old volumes and to discover that wonderful book that you didn’t even know you were looking for.
On Sunday, looking over the books remaining on half-filled shelves, I had feelings and memories. It was like looking over the battlefield after the smoke cleared; what remained were the dead soldiers, awaiting a decent burial.
What will remain, in the long run, are the happy memories. I will remember the good times, and the good people. I will remember sitting down over coffee with Gene McCarthy, politician and poet, who would drop in to talk with an old political journalist. I will remember Marshall Boarman, book-collector extraordinaire, who would spend long afternoons thumbing through dozens of volumes and go home carrying another armful.
I will remember Ben Jones, in full Santa regalia, charming a gaggle of delighted children gathered in the book shop at Christmas time to see Santa Claus and hear him read stories. I will remember those kids staring wide-eyed at the Lionel electric train we’d set up in the shop each Christmas. I will remember the sound of Irish music ringing in the rafters of the church on St. Patrick’s Day when we’d bring in a Celtic band and fly the Irish flag.
And I will remember the quiet afternoons when Joan and I sat alone in the shop, with a gentle rain playing melodies on the old church’s tin roof. The place had soul, and for a while, a beating heart. It was full of ghosts and memories, and whispered prayers, and history and heartbreak. And may it rest in peace.
-- James P. GannonComments
Comment from gwenandclyde
Time: January 1, 2007, 10:36 am
Jim, I grieve with you. In the 60s and 70s I loved “Klondiking” for First Edition Sinclair Lewis, Gene Stratton Porter, Anne Morrow Lindberg and “found tresure” books. But then I started climbing the corporate ladder instead of a dusty library ladder, time was valuable and the Internet easy. I fed my addiction but the fun was gone. I could get any book I wanted if I was willing to pay. The movie 84 Charing Cross Road explains the multiple sensations we can never have again. Thank you for your story.
Comment from Pam Owen
Time: January 1, 2007, 1:58 pm
Nice piece, Jim, and I, too, am sorry to see Old Sperryville Bookshop close. You and Joan did a great job in setting it up, and a lot of us will miss it.
When I opened my shop, I saw OSB as a complement to my business rather than competition and would have loved to see the building continue as a book store. You touched on the vagaries of the independent book business in general and of doing retail business in our small, rural county that should make it no surprise that someone else didn’t want to take the plunge and keep the store going after the Ostinatos decided it wasn’t for them.
Those of us who love books and are trying to keep bricks-and-mortar bookshops part of our culture hope that enough book lovers will continue to visit the decreasing number of open shops to keep them from disappearing completely. We hope they’ll value the chance meeting of a book they were not searching for but is just what they want to read, will want to handle vintage bindings crafted by people (now long dead) who cared about quality, and will want to chat about their favorite books and authors with other book lovers face to face.
In my shop, customers will talk about the books that sparked a whole new way of thinking, the books whose illustrations inspired their imaginations and helped them appreciate the value of art, the books their parents read to them as kids and that they want to read to their kids in return, the books that kept their souls warm on a cold winter night in Rappahannock.
Like most people these days, I do plenty of buying online. I also sell online and wouldn’t expect my book store to survive in Rappahannock County without doing so. The Internet can offer prices and variety with which a small used-book shop cannot compete, but it doesn’t offer a chance to share a love of books with other readers in person or to have the sensual pleasure of handling books. The books might sometimes be a little dusty, even a little musty, but they offer an experience of the senses, memories, and intellect that cannot be matched by looking at books on the Internet.
Thank you and Joan for Old Sperryville Bookshop. It will be missed.
Pam Owen
Fly-by-Night Books, Etc.
Flint Hill, Virginia
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