Read The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap for Free Online Page A

bill in the ditch.” The other economist doesn’t even look. “No, there isn’t. If there were, someone would have gotten it by now.”
    That’s rather like book prospecting: a juxtaposition of what seems to be in front of your eyes balanced against everything you know (and have spent nights on the Net researching) about books, authors, current reading trends, classic literature, and physical book conditions. It’s a small wonder some people in the used book business resort to scanners, those handheld devices that read bar codes and spit out their going market value. Still, call me old-fashioned, but I have no respect, professional or otherwise, for those nasty book prospectors found at library sales. With precious few exceptions, they scoop anything promising into a pile and check bar codes like automatons, then leave their discards in unsorted heaps where those who would have liked to find them can’t. My mama didn’t raise me to be a rude machine.
    I have always wanted to walk up to those kids and smack the scanners out of their hands. “It’s a book, son, a book. That means it’s valuable in and of itself, because it’s about ideas. Have you read Light in August ? Do you know the difference between Sylvia Plath and Iris Johansen? Now put that thing down and read something!” My secret fantasy, revealed.
    Some dedicated souls do beat the book fields’ bushes for a living, but it parallels prospecting for gold in terms of economic stability; over the long haul, the search costs more than the nuggets garner. As with anyone trolling for treasure, some days turned out lucky for me, others mucky. Mining for books burned a lot of gas, not to mention precious weekends. With little enough time during the week to help Jack prepare the shop, I spent weekends running around to sales, sometimes scoring, sometimes wasting hours that could have been spent on the house. We didn’t even have curtains upstairs yet. I did not want to end up like one of those poor oddball rare book dealers people avoid at parties, who mutters to herself as she loads her plate with free food.
    I often visited sales with Fiona, another member of the Church of Artists and Weirdos up the street. True to type, she is artistic. A transplant from Europe many years ago, Fiona runs a pottery and weaving studio on the town’s main street, and her designs command international respect. Not quite five feet tall, she sports a pixie cut of magnolia-blossom white hair. Her smiling eyes hint at mischief bobbing just beneath the surface. I couldn’t say what it is about her—her pixielike figure, baby face, or charming upper-class British accent—but sellers knock themselves out to throw discounts at this happy-go-lucky grandmother.
    Her daughter, who owns a farm nearby, told us some of the stories. Once Fiona walked up to a Christmas tree lot and, being told the price, said, “Oh, I don’t think so.” As she turned to go, the man said, “Never mind, ma’am, I’ll give you one.” A car salesman followed her across a lot one afternoon, discounting a Mazda down to practically nothing. Fiona hadn’t been shopping for a car, just taking a shortcut. “It’s weird,” her daughter Kirsty concluded, “but I didn’t inherit that gene. So I always take her with me when I buy livestock.”
    Fiona’s powers came into their own at yard sales. “That bureau is five dollars? How annoying, I’ve only three dollars left. What a pity.” And I would find myself loading the dresser into the back of her SUV while the seller gave her fifty cents in change. Going to sales with Fiona reinforced the age-old adage that little white-haired women can get away with anything. And she got me some really good discounts on boxes of books. Although we believed my garage sale summer was time well spent at the time, in reality I was bringing home quite a bit of what we would later learn to identify as “crap sellers.” Still, I was also making friends in the community,