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.