Matthew Tannenbaum At The Bookstore Celebrates 25 Years In Lenox

12:00AM / Wednesday, March 21, 2001Print Story | Email Story

The Bookstore of Lenox has been "serving the Community since last Tuesday," as the motto over the antique cash register says, for a great many Tuesdays. Matthew Tannenbaum bought the business, and set it up as it is today, on April 1, 1976. This April Fool's day, The Bookstore will celebrate its gala anniversary with a party and a reading by poet and artist Belle Fox-Martin. Fox-Martin has just published a chapbook, Viva Vira Equinox, that Tannenbaum described as a blend of art and quips. 1976 was the country's bicentennial, and there was a "Republican" recession on, Tannenbaum said. Prep schools were closing: the Windsor Mt. School, Stockbridge, the Lenox School for Boys. Fuel was scarce. Tannenbaum counts off the Lenox businesses that were here when he came to town - Loeb's, Glad Rags, the Snack Shop and the bakery. The Bookstore has played a part in the local community longer than Tannenbaum has. He explained that David Silverstein started the store in the mid-to-late '60s, in his Stockbridge living room behind Alice's Restaurant CafÃ©. Tannenbaum met Silverstein at a poetry reading in the Cherry Orchard CafÃ©, also in Stockbridge. Tannenbaum had worked with books for years before he came to Lenox. He began in a Manhattan bookshop. He told of the first New York apartment he ever saw that had to do with books. A young woman who worked at the bookshop invited him to dinner in the apartment she was subletting. There were books over the transoms of the door, he said; shelves of books in the bathrooms, and books on every wall. Then he opened the fridge for a bottle of wine, and there was a modern library book holding up the butter dish. He later found out that the apartment was Alice Quinn's. Tannenbaum also worked for a wholesaler outside Washington, D.C. One of his jobs was buying small press books. One of the presses he bought from was The Bookstore Press, Lenox. David and his partner disbanded the press when they sold the store. When he was buying small press books, Tannenbaum said, he took an interest in small, independent publishers and literary magazines. These have reached a resurgent height recently, he said; they have not been so active since the 1920s.Tannenbaum inherited the children's section, mysteries, cookbooks and travel. He has added audio books, postcards, and magazines. He is interested in 20th century fiction and literature, American and foreign, and local authors. He still carries a lot of small press poetry. He explained to one customer that The Bookstore takes a soft approach to celebrity biographies. They stock some, because people like them, but he said he would rather stock small press literature. He complimented another customer buying Italo Calvino's Why Read the Classics. The Bookstore special orders books as well, and people are willing to wait for them. Joan Taylor, a local playwright and screen writer, came in to consult Tannenbaum, and praised his customers' loyalty. They agree that there is great strength in serving the local community. Tannenbaum's store has been a community institution longer than he has been here. In his first week here, he said, the bookshop's phone rang. He picked it up to hear a woman's voice say, "I left your number for the painter to call, because today's not a good day. Tell him to come on Thursday? Thanks; bye." He thought, she must not have realized the shop has been sold. Later in the day, the painter called, and Tannenbaum gave him the message: today's not good; can you come on Thursday? He considered it a community responsibility, he said. Tannenbaum has seen exhilarating meetings over books. He can also provide information about books. Readers' reviews on Amazon.com do not compare, he said: "You know the customer and the person he's buying a gift for." He took a phone call, and recommended James Lipton's An Exaltation of Larks to the caller. He can help make marriages of books and people, he said. He can also draw on a stock of experience in the field. He stays out of the way of commercial trends. Throughout the conglomeration of publishers, he has been able to follow new writers, and trace editors as they move from publishing house to publishing house. He can recognize a title, or a good product from a good old-fashioned publishing house, because he knows the history: who publishes good biographies, for example. And when Congden and Wheat left other publishers to form their own company, he knew both by reputation. He keeps abreast of popular trends, however. "Harry Potter didn't surprise us," he said, "because we know the power of children's literature." The store had a gallery in the basement for three or four years in his early days, an arrangement way ahead of its time, he said. He carried a book of Taylor's that came out in 1981. It was about a woman who went off to an island; the motif has been repeated many times since, but Taylor's was one of the first of its kind. "So much has been written about the demise of publishing and independent bookselling," he said, yet The bookstore keeps floating by selling literature to a literate community. The Bookstore's fame has spread outside the Berkshires as well. A professor from Syracuse called Tannenbaum because a friend of the professor's had been in the store last summer and remembered the poetry selection. The professor asked, with admitted audacity, if he might give a reading at The Bookstore. Last Wednesday, within an hour, a foreign winemaker's representative came looking for book on Massachusetts towns - the company plans to make wine labels for each town in the state, as it has in Quebec and France. And another customer asked Tannenbaum, "You don't remember me, do you - I was in here a couple of years ago. Rabbi Berg's friend?" Rabbi Alan Berg left Pittsfield for San Matteo, Calif. several years ago. His friend, who lives in San Carlos, had heard the Berkshires' Seth Rogovoy speak in California, and was on the East Coast to do some work in Lee. He left with Peony by Pearl Buck. The Bookstore has two part-time and two full-time employees, Tannenbaum said, and tends to keep them for many years. They all like reading, books, and people, he said. Jo Baldwin worked for Silverstein and works for Tannenbaum. "She does all the work," he said. Tannenbaum leaves the shop by 3 p.m. every day, to take care of his children after school. They are all looking forward to the April 1 celebration; The Bookstore's last party drew a couple hundred people, Tannenbaum said. They held it in honor of Paul Lipmann, a Stockbridge psychotherapist who published a work about dreams last fall. They have also had parties for William L. Shirer and Arlo Guthrie. "Lenox has changed in 25 years," Tannenbaum said. Last Christmas, he had a customer come in, a young man in his 30s with a child. Tannenbaum was coming from the back of the shop, and saw the man in the doorway when he was out of earshot. The man bent to his young son or daughter and pointed. Tannenbaum read from the gesture: that's the man I bought books from when I was your age. Tannenbaum said that moment brought him full circle. He had realized almost immediately, when he bought the bookstore, that he lacked one thing as part of the community: he had not grown up in Lenox. He and Lenox have done well by each other in other ways. The town put together a benefit dinner for him and his wife, when she was facing medical bills for cancer surgery. The bookstore runs on "a coexistence with customers," he said. And, as he added to a customer who called for advice, "we also dispense Buddhist wisdom over the phone."

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