This is a subject I hate broaching, but it is true, all good things must come to an end. Fred Smith announced he is closing Choctaw Books in September. Many Jacksonians have called the antique bookstore our literary home, but the internet and suburban flight hammered Choctaw one too many times for it to survive. I'm writing my own post about this misfortune, but Jesse Yancy penned this article about Fred and his labor of love. Fred reduced all prices 30%. Please like the "Choctaw Books is closing" Facebook page. It also wouldn't hurt to make a trip to Choctaw and buy some books while it is still open. Mr. Yancy wrote:
In January, 2010, a book written and illustrated by a man who lived and worked in Mississippi sold for a record-setting $11.4 million in a Sotheby auction; another copy of the same work sold for $9.7 million this year. Fred Smith, owner of Choctaw Books in Jackson, says he wouldn’t be at all surprised if there weren’t still a folio of “Birds of America” in Natchez, where Audubon lived in 1832.
“He would have known people down there,” Fred says, “And Natchez had more millionaires per capita than anywhere in the country before the war, so they certainly could have afforded to subscribe to the book.” Smith knows, since he has spent over a quarter of a century dealing with collectors, estates and institutions as a buyer, seller and appraiser of books, manuscripts and documents of every description, but primarily works about or related to Mississippi, the South and the Civil War; in short, every aspect of our multi-faceted regional history. As a result, he has become a one-man institution in and of himself, the go-to man for anyone in (or out) of the state wanting a set, subset or full collection of volumes of pages you’re unlikely to find at Books-a-Million or Barnes & Noble.
John Evans, owner of Lemuria Books in Jackson, has known Smith for over thirty years; he calls Fred a compadre, and after reflecting back to the times when they’d alert one another to a shifty customer, says, “A great used book seller is there to provide information you can’t find anywhere else. Oh, you can google a book on some obscure moonshiner in the Delta, but Fred’s going to tell you if you really need that book at all, and if you’re lucky, he’ll know of a book you ought to have instead of that one. Fred’s father Frank knew the past seventy-five years of the culture of Mississippi, and he handed that down to his son Fred.”
Frank E. Smith was a managing editor of the “Greenwood Morning Star”, served as an aide to Senator John Stennis, as a member of the Mississippi state senate, in the U.S. Congress and as a director of the Tennessee Valley Authority. He and Fred began thinking about opening a business in the 1970s. “We figured the state needed a used bookstore. Our literary culture was so important that someone needed to make them available for people here to own and to treasure,” Smith says. “The goal was that we’d pull together an inventory and open up a store in 1983. Then my aunt, who had an antique store in Vicksburg where we’d place books to see how they’d sell, had an accident and had to close her store. All of a sudden, we had a lot of nice furniture. When we opened up, we were half antiques and half books.”
“That first year, Eudora Welty bought a piece of furniture for $700,” Fred remembers. “Now, selling a few books here and there is one thing, but that was by far my biggest sale. I wanted to keep the check, but the furniture was not mine, so I had to go ahead and cash it. Years later, I did two appraisals for Miss Welty, one on the letter that Faulkner had written to her and another on some other correspondence. I called up her lawyer, Carl Black, and asked him if it would be alright to keep one of the checks (for $250) and he said that she’d never know. I kept the check.”
“I don’t always make people happy,” Fred says, though it’s hard to imagine, since Fred has a jovial, Dickensian presence, the proprietor of a modern-day curiosity shop, an unpretentious clapboard building at 926 North Street in Jackson’s Belhaven Heights neighborhood that’s chock-a-block with books, maps and manuscripts. But Fred, because of his unique knowledge and sincere appreciation of Mississippi’s history, literature and bibliographic legacy, is also the premier appraiser of the state’s books, manuscripts, maps and other assorted documents, making him a unique denizen of Mississippi’s bibliophilic Parnassus.
“My job as an independent appraiser is to put a value that I consider to be valid on materials I’m asked to consider. Most of what I do is for tax purposes because people are donating materials for tax breaks. But a lot of folks think their stuff is worth a lot of money just because it’s theirs, and that’s not necessarily the case. I have done many appraisals over the years, and have not been called into question on any of them; people know to call me.”
Hugh McCormick, who started McCormick’s Book Inn in Greenville in 1965 and closed the business last year, says, “I admire Fred a lot. As far as I know, he’s the only person who occupies the sort of role he does in the Tri-state area. People who come to Fred are looking for something very specific and generally very hard to find, and he knows what they’re talking about.”... Rest of article
Thursday, August 1, 2013
All good things do indeed come to an end.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
20 comments:
"Suburban flight causes downtown bookstore to close". Right. Book lovers and those who frequent quaint shops won't drive six miles to shop? Barnes & Nobles moved from Jacktown to Ritzi Ridgeland and is struggling tremendously.
Mom and Pop hardware stores have closed across the country. Microwave & TV repair shops no longer exist, anywhere. Wal Mart and Best Buy have pretty much done away with Radio Shack. Very few people buy spark plug kits and cans of thirty-weight oil anymore.
Progress, no matter how painful for the few, takes place at the insistence of the many.
Disposability and the hyper-gluttony of the consumptive model could hardly be construed as progress no matter how many have been brainwashed into thinking the same will make their lives "better".
We should no more be surprised by bookstores having financial problems than we are at similar issues among newspapers and magazines and record stores. People who are used to using those outlets for their information and entertainment are a dying breed - literally - and the ones coming behind us have less and less use for anything that can't be put on a smart phone or iPad. Sad...
And the ones coming behind us are more stupid and illiterate. Sad and predictable.
Great post and also a wonderful article by Yancy. Choctaw Books is an iconic institution for central Mississippi, and I along with many others will be sad to see it go. Hopefully something good will happen and there will be found a way to reverse this and keep it open.
This makes me sad.
At its most enjoyable, the pursuit of knowledge is a tactile experience as well as an intellectual one. Old books provide both. You grasp an old book and take in the materials -- the type of covering, the binding, and the quality of the pages. Are the smooth like satin or are they rough, like homemade paper? Are the edges jagged or so expertly cut that some sort of image was imprinted on the outside?
Did the previous owner have his or her name engraved in the book? When you hold an old book, you can't help but wonder about the people who owned it before. Was this book precious to them for some reason? Did it impact their lives? How did it end up out of their hands, or the hands of the family, and in this used book store?
I love the smell of old books. In my mind, that's what history smells like.
Owning your own "library" is a recent phenomenon. Each book that someone owned even 100 years ago was a treasure. Adding a $.99 file to your Nook just isn't the same.
I am already sad for the kids in this generation that they don't know the thrill of going to the mail box and getting a fat letter, maybe from someone you met at camp or a boy/girlfriend who is at college. They think Twitter is a suitable replacement. It's not. And browsing Amazon will never be as enjoyable as spending an afternoon wandering through Choctaw Books.
the internet and suburban flight hammered Choctaw one too many times for it to survive.
The internet? Yes. Suburban flight? Please!
That's like saying that BeBop went out of business because people left NE Jackson (the same NE Jackson that is about to turn into Boomtown GroceryStoreLand, according to some).
Times change. It's sad, but true. I remember when WSLI fired Farmer Jim Neal and David Hampton (or one of those guys at the Clarion Ledger) bemoaned how terrible it was and how wrong the station was for doing it. My immediate thought was, "I wonder if he listens to Farmer Jim every morning?" I can't almost certainly bet he didn't, and neither did many others who were just put out at WSLI management.
Same when BeBop closed. I heard people who hadn't set foot in the Maywood store in over a decade whining about how sad it was and cursing Wal-Mart/Best Buy/Amazon etc. If BeBop was such a great place, then why weren't those people in there weekly or even monthly buying music and, by extension, allowing it to persist?
I think we all like the notion of a local record store or an antique bookstore or a septuagenarian AM throwback deejay, but if we don't patronize such things, they don't perpetuate simply because they're nice things to have. Even a core group of regulars is often not enough.
A place like Choctaw Books is a destination and, as such, it draws from the region. It always has. It has never been primarily dependent on the neighborhood residents for its sustenance, and to suggest that people moving from Ridgewood Road to Hoy Road killed it is ridiculous.
Have any of you been in there? It looks like something off the TV show "Hoarders." Go to a used book store in NOLA--it looks like the books are cared for. The books at Choctaw are just seemingly heaped onto one another. I think a nice used book store would do well, but that's not a nice store.
BeBop employed some a$$holes, if you were not one of their buddies they mostly ignored you.
I probably bout two to three LP's every trip, and the guy at the check out always said "You need a bag?"
Farmer Jim's fiest dog would always hide under the chifforobe when a thunderstorm was in the forecast.
Be Bop had some really cool three chambered bongs.
I've lived in Jackson for 7 years, and never heard of this place. Perhaps a little advertising might have helped?
12:10pm is right. Go to the Facebook page linked in the article and view the Mississippi Authors collection photo. Crap stacked everywhere. Several books have rubber stamped words on the leafs, making them look like old, discarded library books. It doesn't have the look of a cared-for place.
The street view on Google shows what looks like junk on the porch. Old boxes, a refrigerator maybe, and even what looks like a couple of beer cans.
Add to this the fact that it's in an old house with bars on the windows and a foreboding iron fence and it's no wonder people aren't beating down the doors.
This is not a bookstore on the order of Lemuria. If Lemuria is Antiques Roadshow, Choctaw Books would be Junkin'.
Whatever "Choctaw Books" was, it wasn't a business. It was a hobby.
I'm sure the sky also fell when 78 RPM records were rumored to be coming to an end. The same was true when Ritz Crackers no longer came in a waxed sleeve that you could twist and close without a baggie tie. And who among you thought children could ever survive without Flintstone vitamins?
Meanwhile, May & Co. is still open after almost a hundred years on Capitol Street.
Sorry the bars on the windows & fence are a problem - they were put in place after the fire caused by vandals several years ago.
Hear, hear, 9:26! I adored the Dickensian clutter and Fred's affable style. Many enjoyable hours were spent there, and I'll be sad to see him go.
Always loved Choctaw, but was never an antique book collector, so never could really put Fred's expertise to use - sorry it's going away
I've collected signed first editions for more than 25 years. Before the internet, the only way to search out books was to purchase private collections, go to estate sales, peruse catalogs prepared by established rate and antiquarian booksellers or to visit store like Choctaw Books. As another poster mentioned, Choctaw Books was not user-friendly and often Fred didn't know if he had a particular book or not. Instead he would point you to some cluttered corner of the store and leave you to your own devices. Now even the most obscure signed titles can be found with a few clicks on the computer. Fred's business model has come and gone. And I once asked if he would be interested in conducting a new appraisal of my collection for insurance purposes and he spent 10 minutes telling me why he was too busy to do so. Despite this, he was always friendly, but I agree that Choctaw Books was a hobby for Fred.
having been a customer of Be-Bop Records for years,beginning with the store next to the Capri theater on State street,where the $1.99 used records and trade-in for credit system began,to Maywood Mart,I would have to agree with 12:11 that if you were not one of the in crowd with most of the Be-Bop employees,they could care less if you did business there or not. If it were not for the used album section and the trade in for credit thing going on,I would not have gone in the Maywood Mart store at all.
"homemade paper"?
Post a Comment