I Like Books

[flummery]

I like books.
I like the way a book feels.
I like the way a book smells.
I like to turn each page,
read each word,
look at the pictures.

--Aliki, How A Book Is Made


Here we have a little ramble down memory lane, just because I was wandering down memory lane the other day, and missing this location very very much. The location in question is the Cheshire Cat Children's Bookstore, which no longer exists except in the minds and hearts of the people who knew it.

The Cheshire Cat was the dream of four women (Greenie, Jewell, Jody and Pam) who basically got together, looked around, and decided they could do it better than what was out there. And they were right. They found themselves a narrow little storefront on the border between D.C. and Maryland, and they set about converting it. Bookshelves all along the walls and down the middle, a nice soft bench for sitting and browsing through books at the back, and a cubby area full of soft pillows and muppets and a round hole of an entrance only big enough for the very smallest visitors, dubbed "The Rabbit Hole."

I found the bookstore when I was about twelve or thirteen, and on a desperate quest for new bookstores in my area. I'd exhausted the basic ones, like Walden Books, and found them to be unsatisfactory. Chaos, Unltd. was the best for used Science Fiction and Mystery, but not very close by. Ditto the one true Science Fiction store for new books, which was run by a miserable old man who watched anyone under eighteen everywhere they went with the certainty that they were a thug, and who was still mistaking me for a boy by the time I'd turned sixteen. The Cheshire Cat was just on the limits of my walking range, it was a good chunk of ground to cover, but it was worth it. It had, most importantly, all the overseas imports and lesser known authors that mainstream bookstores with their one or two shelves for children never bother with. It had the complete Swallows and Amazons, and Enid Blyton books, and all the others you would be hard pressed to find anywhere, these days. And of course, it had my precious Diana Wynne Jones books as soon as they came out.

Not actually having enough money to buy the place out, I would discreetly tuck myself away on the back bench, and carefully read as much of a book as I thought I could get away without anyone noticing. I was a fast reader. I was sure I was terribly cunning. Eventually, of course, they got tired of rolling their eyes at the front of the store over me, and when I hit fourteen they pressed me into service by giving me a job. There was pretty much no way I was turning down an offer that got me 35% off any book in the store, plus the right to take home proof copies the editors sent us. It was my dream job.

This, of course, was back in the day before computers (yes, there WAS such a day) and so the part of our job that didn't involve replacing books on the shelves as they were purchased, was mainly comprised of crouching over a long row of boxes that held index cards. Each card held the title of a book, and on each book, you carefully marked another strike for each sale. We worked away in the basement; the area was made up of a small office room filled with the index cards, another small area for the billing, a larger room filled with books, a bomb shelter, and a long, narrow hallway shaped like an L that held the bomb shelter it its arm. The hallway and bomb shelter both held nothing but but books. Occasionally, it held nothing but student employees reading books. There were days when I and my fellow co-workers, called over to discuss something with one of our four bosses, would cast guilty, anxious glances at one another to see if this would be about our reading chapters in-between shelving, something that we engaged in, off in the corners, when we were sure no one was looking.

It's a dangerous thing, hiring bookworms to work a bookstore, but they were pretty good bosses. Jewell was the one I knew the best at the time, and who was the calm, level headed one we were all comfortable with. She had started the business with Greenie, and Greenie, on the other hand, was sharp-tongued and had a low tolerance for fools and scared me, a bit. This is a pity, since I suspect myself of having turned into a far, far sharper version of Greenie than I could ever have imagined. In fact, I'm betting she was a tolerant sweetheart by comparison. Every memory I have of Jody involves her laughing and full of good cheer. Pam, alas, I cannot remember as much of as I would like. Regular store duties, besides shelving, and making check marks, were gradually extended to handling the register, helping customers, learning to gift wrap (a skill which I've since lost) and of course, the all vital run up the street to buy everyone fries and/or ice cream. On occasion, you would find yourself wearing a giant Arthur costume and greeting kids on the street.

The Cheshire Cat had various authors in on a regular basis. Somewhere, in storage at my parent's place, is a box of books all signed by the authors that I itch to get my hands on. I know I didn't appreciate enough who we were having through at the time. On the other hand, I'm happy in the knowledge that somewhere, I own a signed copy of Where the Wild Things Are, by Sendak. Similarly, hopefully still in good condition is my copy of Jumanji. I believe I remember Cynthia Voigt coming through, and foolishly, when Tomie de Paolo came, I had him sign a Strega Nona doll for my cousin, and not myself. I'm sure he didn't appreciate his birthday present anywhere near enough that year.

By far the largest turnout we had for a young children's author was for Peggy Parish, of Amelia Bedelia fame. On this occasion, we reached the point where a decision had to be made. The decision was to forcibly eject all the adults from the store, so there'd be enough floor space for the children. Despite this, we still managed to break a few fire ordinances, and at the end of it all, we found ourselves faced with picking up small child after small child, carrying them out, and holding them up to the crowd in order to find the matching larger version.

It's hard to explain just how wonderful the Cheshire Cat was as a bookstore. Jewell found herself stumped with the same question once, when taking a phone interview. Sure, you had the careful dedication to picking out the very best books -- not just the trite series crap that was being churned out, even then, but the books you had to search to find, or even bring from overseas, but that's still 'just books.' She explained about the store, the owners, the Rabbit Hole, the guest authors, and then she turned to me with her hand over the receiver and asked, "what makes us different?" looking for some tangible evidence to provide the reporter. I mulled it over for a moment and said "the butterfly tree."

The butterfly tree was a yearly event. While the public only ever saw the end result in the fall, we lived with the process for most of the spring and summer. It went something like this. The owners piled into a car (Probably Dauntless, so named for being over 20 years old, taking on water through the floor during storms, and never failing to start) and out to a likely field to hunt caterpillars. They would return laden with many, MANY boxes full of tiny baby monarch caterpillars, and ten times that number of leaves. All summer long, those caterpillars would sit in those boxes and keep us company in the basement, and they would munch, and munch, and MUNCH, while we supplied them with fresh leaves, and clean boxes. Along towards late summer, they'd begin to look fat, and lazy, and ready for a change. Someone would find a promsing looking branch, with plenty of limbs on it, clean it off, and set it up as a small, naked tree in our front window. When the caterpillars were ready to spin, we'd introduce them to the tree.

Some spun their cocoons while downstairs, and were carefully transplanted. Some made it to the tree itself, and then spun. These cocoons, for those who haven't seen them, are the very lightest, pale shade of green, with a fine gold rim around the top where the caterpillars seal themselves in. When the butterfly is ready to hatch, the cocoons grow darker, and darker, until you can actually begin to see the colors and shape of the butterfly through the cocoon. When they finally break free, sticky and exhausted, they need a couple of hours to simply cling to the tree, slowly flap their wings, and take stock of their surroundings.

At any given time during late summer, we would have all the stages of the process on display in the front window. We would also have a large number of small children with their faces pressed to the glass, and an equal number of fascinated parents. When a butterfly looked sufficiently recovered from the whole hatching process, we would place it on the hand of a small child to take outside, to carefully introduce it to the world.

We sold a lot of books about caterpillars every fall.

The Cheshire Cat closed down when I was out of state, and hadn't been back to visit in quite some years. By then, at least one partner had already had to move on, and a new person had been brought in. They made the decision to close, rather than sell, very intentionally. I'm sure there were plenty of offers, but this was a store they wanted done right, or not at all. I believe it was just too personal an enterprise to hand off in that way.

When I started thinking about the Cheshire Cat Children's Bookstore again, and perhaps about writing up a bit about it, I did a bit of a websearch on it, for pictures. I was slightly pained to realize that the timing of the Internet was not in my favor. There are no pictures, and very few (although all favorable) references to the store. I have no old bookmarks or bags from the store with the logo. I searched through my memory for anything that could help and came up with exactly one idea -- a Reading Rainbow book by the author Aliki, titled, How a Book Is Made. Aliki was one of the many authors to do book signings at the Cheshire, a repeat guest. Somewhere along the line, she decided to write How a Book is Made, which is a startlingly good basic explanation of the process for young children. The characters in the book are all cats, and on the last two pages of the book, you reach the point in the process where the books are being sold in bookstores. The bookstore in question, "Meow Books," is the Cheshire Cat Children's Bookstore. Although the image is a bit grainy, and more squiggly than it was in real life, the icon I have used for this post is the logo for the Cheshire Cat (albeit with Meow Books substited for Cheshire Cat Children's Bookstore), as scanned out of the last pages of Aliki's book.

I'm very grateful that this reference to the location still exists. I miss my bookstore.