She looked ordinary enough, as she walked in and started a circular browse of the book room. I visited with her mother and aunt, who were twins, about common interests e.g. Monhegan, growing up Midwestern, sons who went west. A bit later, the daughter/niece/ superior browser brought me her choices, and oh my!. She had in her hand, landscape historian John Stilgoe’s Alongshore, a gem of a book about the shoreline of Cape Cod that I bought in 1996. I had been waiting FIFTEEN YEARS for the perfect reader who would find and love this book, and here she was. MIND-MELD! She knew Stilgoe’s work in design, had tried to have him be part of her courses, but had never found his work in a bookstore before. Roseledge Books, a coastal bookstore, forever.
She also bought two books about place: Sarah Messer’s Red House : Being a Mostly Accurate Account of New England’s Oldest Continuously Lived-in House and Elizabeth Coatsworth’s Personal Geography: Almost an Autobiography which includes her life at Chimney Farm, Nobleboro, Maine, with her husband Henry Beston. Roseledge Books, like this very shrewd browser, thinks that both design and place matter. DOUBLE MIND-MELD.
The surprise of "just right" sometimes lurks in the understated bookstore.
Sometimes browsers need to see a favorite on the book shelves before they trust the mind of a bookstore, especially a bookstore with only one sign on the tree at the corner of Sea Street.There was the dutiful dad who walked in with the teenagers and sat down in the rocker to wait for them to be done. He looked up to the left and spotted Roy Hoxham’s Great Hedge of India. “I’ve never seen that book in a bookstore before. It’s a great book,” he said, as he left the rocker and began seriously looking at the six shelves of nonfiction. Naguib Mahfouz’s The Search was the magic book for another browser. Stove by a Whale: Owen Chase and the Essex attracted the godmother of the second author, but I’ve since sold the book and today’s Amazon.com listing has only one author, Thomas Heffernan. It’s a puzzlement.
It’s been wet and cool. I’ve even had the heat on in my fancy recliner. Hot and humid today, but with a life-saving breeze off the water. Blight is about again. I may only harvest seven sun-gold grape tomatoes this year. Few things beat a great mind-meld.