One Pretty Good Bookstore

Garrison Keillor gets plenty of attention as the frontman for Common Good Books, the bookshop he opened last November a few blocks from his home in St. Paul’s Cathedral Hill neighborhood. But his secret weapon is store manager Sue Zumberge, a fifty-six-year-old dynamo who learned the business when she owned The Book Shoppe in Whitefish, Montana, more than thirty years ago. In those days, Zumberge worked nights waiting tables and pouring drinks to make ends meet, and she says the jobs have a lot in common. “A good bookstore is like a good corner bar,” she says. “People drop by in all states of mind. Sometimes you need a book as much as you need a drink.”

That could explain why Common Good Books feels as though it’s at the center of an oasis. Tucked into a lower-level corner of the handsome old Blair Arcade Building at Selby and Western, the shop lies directly beneath Nina’s Coffee Café and across the street from W. A. Frost—a nexus where you can quench pretty much any thirst. The store is airy and warm—banks of sidewalk-level skylights admitting what the elements provide. It’s small, but it seems bigger the more books you put into it. Zumberge says it started with about 9,000 titles on opening day, and it’s up to 13,000 now—about a tenth of what Barnes & Noble stocks over at the mall, but an impressive number for an independent bookstore. Keillor e-mails regularly to report on titles and authors he’s discovered in faraway bookstores and wants to add to the inventory, though Zumberge says they often already have the books that strike his fancy. “It is his store,” she says, referring to Keillor, who actually spends a few hours at the bookstore a couple of times a week when he’s in town.

Like the shelves, the crowded tables up front offer proof of the choosiness of the owner. Bestsellers are here and there, but they’re outnumbered. Zumberge and her colleagues—assistant manager Martin Schmutterer is another veteran bookseller, most recently by way of Grand Avenue’s late Bound to be Read—work behind the counter on the left as you come in. There is no office. “We do everything right here,” says Zumberge. “Everything” includes practicing the fading art of “hand-selling” books. “Hand-selling is about a book you, the bookseller, likes,” Zumberge explains. “You pick it up. You hold it. You talk about it to your customers. And you persuade them to buy it. And everybody who works in this store can do it.”

Zumberge has been having a fine time telling her customers about Birds in Fall, an otherwise nearly invisible novel by Brad Kessler that concerns the aftermath of a plane crash in Nova Scotia. “I’ve been hand-selling the hell out of that book,” she says. “I love it.” This approach, says Schmutterer, is the way things used to be done in the business. “We’re trying to do something old in a new way,” he says.

Of course, the book business isn’t what it used to be, not that anyone is complaining about its seemingly unstoppable success. Thanks to Barnes & Noble, Borders, Amazon, prose-pushing celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, plus ever-higher cover prices, Americans spend more than $25 billion a year on books—even though the actual number of books sold is more or less flat, as some categories swell and others contract. Amazingly, the fastest-growing genre is juvenile literature—thank you, J. K. Rowling—a cheery proposition for the industry’s future. Alas, other top categories are religious and self-help books, which suggests that as all those Harry Potter fans grow up they'll be facing existential dread and perpetual confusion as to why God didn’t make them thinner and richer.

I don’t know any writers who don’t happily imagine their books streaming out the doors at B&N. We are, in one way or another, all in this together. Those authors not occupying the bestseller lists are indebted to those who are, in approximately the same way the college swimming team owes its existence to the football team.

So books sell, but by different means. Independent bookstores big and small have suffered heavy casualties in recent years. Among the local departed are Gringolet, Baxter’s, Ruminator (formerly the Hungry Mind), Bound to be Read, and Odegard Books in its several incarnations and locations. Old hands recall the musty warren that was Perine’s in Dinkytown and the long, tightly packed shelves of Savran’s on the West Bank, where The World According to Garp once stood in multihued ranks lit by the late afternoon sun and you could pick up a book that bore the faint scent of patchouli from the last person who thumbed its pages.Keillor joins a short list of well-heeled famous authors dabbling in the book business that includes Louise Erdrich, with her cozy, Native American–themed Birchbark Books in south Minneapolis, and Larry McMurtry, whose Booked Up store in tiny Archer City, Texas, houses an outsized collection of half a million used books. It’s not a business model likely to catch on widely, but it’s welcome all the same. David Unowsky, former owner of the former Ruminator/Hungry Mind (former being an all too common descriptive in the business), doubts Keillor can make money at Common Good Books, but says “any time there’s a new bookstore in town I’m happy.”

Unowsky believes that if there is a formula for survival it involves having an intimate relationship with a neighborhood. At Magers and Quinn, the wonderful, rambling bookstore in Uptown where Unowsky now works, another trick is to be many things to many customers. “We sell new books, used books, rare books,” he says. “We sell them in our store and we sell them online. Personally, I don’t like the online world. I’d rather people go to their neighborhood store. But the market dictates that you sell online too.” Unowsky says independent booksellers don’t have a monopoly on a devotion to books—there are people at Barnes & Noble who know books too—but the independents remain a beacon for readers who care about books and like to kick the tires on titles that nobody paid to have stacked up at the front of the store.

Common Good Books is only slightly organized—that is, its books are not arranged into many categories and subgenres, but rather under the broadest possible headings. If the author made it up, the book goes in Fiction. Poetry, to which Keillor is deeply devoted, occupies an entire wall, but you also find volumes of poems just about everywhere throughout the shop. Mary Oliver’s recent collection, Thirst, has been a big seller here—a statement that in any other context would seem ludicrous. Zumberge says the store also sells a lot of books about religion—all faiths, traditional to New Age, being found in the section labeled God, which Keillor isn’t completely satisfied with yet, though I don’t believe that means he’s tinkering with the Almighty per se.

Keillor has said that Common Good Books will always be a work in progress, and so far that’s been the case. According to Zumberge, Keillor initially nixed books on art and popular culture, but requests from regular customers caused her to stock some anyway. The same thing happened with graphic novels, which Keillor supposedly doesn’t like, though Zumberge says they occasionally show up on his lists of books to be sure and buy. “I think maybe he only knows the title and not what they are,” she says. Zumberge hides them near the back.

More important than the labels on the shelves is the evidence of good taste throughout. You can buy a boxed set of Robert Fagles’s translation of The Iliad and the Odyssey, but nothing by Dan Brown—a “point of pride,” according to Schmutterer. When Rhonda Byrne’s preposterous self-help book, The Secret, was huge last winter, Zumberge took a pass. The joke behind the counter was that if fans came in and asked for it they would be invited to close their eyes and wish for it to appear.Today I’ve invited my friend Sarah T.—Sally—Williams to join me at Common Good Books. The books editor at the Star Tribune, Sally knows more about books than I ever will and is one of those rare people who love their job unconditionally. “It feels like I’m getting away with something every day,” she says.

Sally lives not far from Keillor’s store, where she and her husband, writer Jim Heynen, are already regulars. They’re just back from England, where Sally was sent to write a profile of the poet Josephine Dickenson in advance of Dickenson’s appearance on Talking Volumes, the literary show the newspaper produces with Minnesota Public Radio and The Loft Literary Center.

After lunch at Nina’s—it’s connected to the bookstore by a narrow stairway that makes each business feel like a natural extension of the other—Sally leads me through the books downstairs. She says that, except for several used- and rare-book dealers and the Red Balloon children’s bookstore—each wonderful in its way—the lack of a bookshop “for grownups” has been a terrible thing in a neighborhood where “you’re within walking distance of five colleges and universities.” What she’s missed most about a store like Ruminator, she says, is its stubbornness: “They would hang onto one copy of a beautiful little book of poetry for years, until somebody bought it.” She’s pleased to learn that Common Good Books does not follow the industry practice of routinely returning books that linger too long on the shelves. Keillor would rather not ever send a  book back to the publisher, and Zumberge says she does so only reluctantly. The objective, she says, is to order books that will find their way out of the store with a paying customer. “We don’t rent books,” says Schmutterer.

Sally loves the big poetry section, which, she says, shows a lot of “thought and care” in its blending of scholarly and popular material. She picks up Galway Kinnell’s Strong Is Your Hold and says how great it is. She gushes over a pile of Dave Eggers’s novel What Is the What and is amused to see Crichton shelved only inches from Dickens in the fiction section—in a curving, cavelike alcove at the rear of the store. “I deeply appreciate what Keillor is doing here,” Sally says. “I couldn’t think of a better gesture toward the community. Everyone knows how difficult this business has become.”

Keillor obviously doesn’t need to earn his living from Common Good Books, and he won’t. But it hasn’t turned out to be an entirely charitable enterprise either. Zumberge says business over the holidays was strong, and she and Schmutterer anticipate a lot of traffic this spring and summer. In fact, they admit to great expectations for the store, not only as a fixture in the neighborhood, but as a going concern. “Garrison may not expect to make money at this,” says Zumberge, “but I do.”

Keillor’s books are among the store’s strongest sellers, but Zumberge says there’s been a conscious effort not to turn the place into the Lake Wobegon Gift Shop. “He’s shelved where he should be,” she says. There are trace elements of Keillor around the store—photos, a director’s chair with his name on it, a desk at which he wrote some of his books, lines of verse he scrawls from time to time on the white board behind the front counter—but the effect is underwhelming. Keillor’s name undoubtedly draws some people through the front door, but the books bring them back.

Sally tells me she never goes into Common Good Books without running into someone she knows or meeting somebody interesting for the first time. “That doesn’t happen on amazon.com,” she says. Zumberge says the best thing about her work is just “talking with people about books.” She says it’s a two-way street. “You learn from your customers—about books you never heard of or books you think you wouldn’t like and then you read them and it turns out that you do.” And this is how Zumberge strives everyday to—as she puts it—close the gap between “what you envision and what materializes.”

“Everything we do here is secondary to being a bookseller,” she says. “There’s a difference between that and just being a bookstore.”

Former Mpls.St.Paul Magazine staffer William Souder’s most recent book, Under a Wild Sky, a biography of John James Audubon, was a finalist for a 2005 Pulitzer Prize.