One Pretty Good Bookstore

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.