A New Lorax Is Needed

In the corner of St. Croix Antiquarian Booksellers, over by the color-coded antique maps, is a framed edict that’s actually more of a poem:

"I, Richard Booth
King of Hay
Lord of all booktowns
& their protector in perpetuity
hereby declare that
Stillwater Minnesota
Is the first booktown
In the western hemisphere.
Let no one gainsay
Or dare to dispute
This is my official decree."

I’m writing this too late: Booktown has now mostly disbanded. Gary Goodman, who owns the shop, pointed across the street. "There used to be thirty-two booksellers in that building," he said. Now, like much of historic downtown Stillwater, it’s an antique mall. Goodman then began to count in his head the number of tomes that used to fill the stores by the St. Croix. "I think there used to be five-hundred-thousand books in the Stillwater area," he tallied.

Not anymore. The number of bookstores has dwindled down to four. There’s St. Croix Antiquarian, which is the biggest and most impressive; The Valley Bookseller, which is this town’s Wild Rumpus, with its vast childrens’ section and its cage of assorted, fluorescent birds; Chestnut Street Books, a new-and-used shop which has limited hours that coincide with likely tourist rushes (they’re closed Mondays and Tuesdays, and generally don’t open before noon); and then a theologically based bookstore that’s a bit off from the main drag, in a spot which residents refer to as, "Up the hill."

It’s the usual story of Amazon, EBay, and AbeBooks, Goodman explained, all of which allow individuals to unload their books at better prices than stores might pay for them, and to do so more conveniently. Even Valley Booksellers – by far the most conventional of the shops – seems to be feeling the unfortunate tug of the Internet. For the local high school’s required summer reading, they’d ordered twenty copies of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. As of today, nineteen were still on the shelf. "Maybe by August, when school’s closer to starting, most of them will be gone," a blond clerk said hopefully.

I had the idea for this blog post since last summer, but hadn’t gone back to Stillwater until this week. It was supposed to be about how their downtown had an incredibly impressive wealth of independent bookstores, their inventories unmatched by most sellers in the Twin Cities. (Hell, in terms of rare, out-of-print, and first editions, some of these places gave The Strand a run for its money. Antiquarian still does.)

I’d wanted to focus part of the piece on a new-and-used shop that had been on the corner of Main Street and East Chestnut Street, which Goodman estimated had once held 250,000 books. Now it’s the Summit Boardshop, a place that sells skate- and snowboards, its title written on the building in faux graffiti.

Nevertheless, those bookstores that remain, while they remain, are worth checking out. (And this is the real tragedy – they really all were worth checking out…now there’s just fewer of them.) Their stocks are varied, unique, and unpredictable. At Antiquarian, my booknerd friend found an illustrated first edition of The Little Prince author Antoine de Saint Exupery’s memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars, as well as an early translation of Kafka’s The Castle, whose introduction reads, "Franz Kafka’s name, so far as I can discover, is almost unknown to English readers."

These are treasures, and the booksellers in Stillwater that are left are full of them. My suggestion? If you have any interest in books, which if you’ve made it this far in the post I’m guessing you do, go while you still can.