Somehow it had escaped my notice that Stuart Brent died in late June at the venerable age of 98. Since his book The Seven Stairs was originally published in 1962 and signed by him in my 1989 edition, it never occurred to me that he could still be alive. But as I was researching something entirely off-topic on google yesterday up popped the news that this legendary Chicago bookseller had reached his final chapter.
The names of rock star booksellers of the past rattle around in my brain like loose marbles, so Stuart is more familiar to me, perhaps much more so, than most of the acquaintances I’ve accumulated over a lifetime. To hear that he had died sent me flying to the bookshelf for my copy of The Seven Stairs. Once I had it nothing would do but to sit down and visit with its author – never mind that I had new books from the weekend estate sales to list and had done nothing last week while I took care of my sick cat. Stuart is such a kindred spirit – so naïve, hopeful, perfectionistic, anti-corporate, and passionately in love with books and readers it could make you curl up in a ball and weep. But the thing about Stuart I love most is the way he clung to his chosen profession like a squirrel on a limb in a windstorm, Even when his accountant told him early on that bankruptcy loomed Stuart would have none of it. “Pretend you never told me that,” he said.
The story of how Stuart Brent came to open his original little bookstore (think 15’x9’) reads like a fairy tale – comforting, romantic, nostalgic and absolutely terrifying. Fresh out of the military after WWII he took out a G.I. loan and with three hundred dollars and “a pocketful of dreams” stocked his first shelves. The funny part is he named the store for the seven steps that led to it only to find that he’d miscounted them and there were actually eight. The first time I read it, the strongest thing I took away from the book was the image of Stuart in 1946 sitting in his tiny empty store, listening to Mozart on his phonograph, engrossed in a lofty tome (no beach reads for this guy) in front of the burning fireplace as he waited for someone to come buy a book. All he lacked was the velvet jacket he had imagined himself wearing and, of course, the customers who would engage with him in literary conversation that flowed like the richest wine, the color of the heart. Whenever I experienced a momentary slump in sales over the years this image would drift up from the ether to calm me (well, as much I am EVER calmed).
So I returned to the book yesterday expecting to be lulled by his eventual success which branched out in as many directions as Longfellow's spreading chestnut tree. I was not. Instead I got what you would get if right this minute you licked your finger and stuck it in a light socket. In fact, it was nearly impossible to read it without body armor and a hard hat. Sentences not only refused to march lockstep across the page – they got downright militant.
Take for example these: “Most of the things I learned to value are being systematically undermined in an economy based on the ‘bottom line’ and a culture devoted to the coarsening of taste. But I have never lost faith in my calling as a bookseller. Quite often I feel that I am crying in the wilderness.”
The type rose up off the page, zinged around the room like a poltergeist, dislodged a beam in the ceiling and sent it crashing down on my head. Then almost immediately these six sentences curled up together, formed one hard little ball, and took out the window behind me.
“Does experience teach? Is it possible that a human being may be altered or set free by the written word? Are books important? Is it important to be a bookseller? Even though you are going broke? I had been turning like a worm in an apple for so long that it seemed a little more turning could scarcely hurt me.”
If you are a bookseller – a REAL bookseller (and you will know this with no need for further amplification) – get this book. If you are a reader who aspires to a different dream, perhaps music, or art, or inventing a better type of concrete, get this book. Then go somewhere and have a cup of coffee, maybe a nice turkey and artichoke sandwich at the neighborhood Panera with Stuart, and see if you aren’t better for having done it.
In a world and an economy that threatens our belief in who we are and what we do, there is an enduring message here. It's not that change doesn't happen -- Stuart readily admits that change is inevitable. It's not about magical thinking. It's not even about positive thinking and all that Norman Vincent Peale stuff.
No, Stuart Brent had a different card up his sleeve. It's simple, direct, yet almost Shakespearean in its insistence on being true to "thine own self." His trick is that even though he held very strong views he doesn't preach about a darn thing -- no self-help, not even much specific insider info on how to sell books. It's his story, who he is, that does all the heavy lifting. Philip Roth once called him a cross between a Chicago intellectual and a Persian rug dealer. I love it!
In the end, Stuart had to close his shop, a victim of the tsunami of megastores that wiped out so many independent bookstores in the 1990's. At the time he called himself an anachronism and perhaps he was. But what he was not was a failure. Stuart Brent survived the slings and arrows of bookselling for half a century, a feat worthy of the Purple Heart -- or at least a velvet jacket.
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