One Pretty Good Bookstore

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.