The Magic Shop     

Published in the September 2024 Brazos Monthly magazine

Back in my wandering days I ventured pretty often into bookstores.

A couple of my favorites were Book People in Austin and The Twig in San Antonio. Closer to home I still sometimes visit Murder by the Book, on Bissonnet Street in Houston, which regularly fuels my guilty habit of reading whodunits, and I often stop in just down the same street at Brazos Books.

Over several summers in the 1980s I organized and led student tours to Europe (my trip being free after signing up a minimum number of kids and their parents) and I made sure two bookstores were always on the agenda. One was a cozy shop in Oxford, across the street from the thousand plus years old university. The other was  Shakespeare & Company, in an old two story building at 37 rue de la Bucherie in Paris. Its rooms were crammed full with volumes, almost all in English, not only on the seemingly miles of floor to ceiling shelves but in piles on the floor and stacked precariously on the edges of staircases. 

But, as enticing as those places were, none of them come anywhere close to being my absolute favorite bookstore.

Book Ends was once nestled in a comfortable shady spot on Oyster Creek Drive in Lake Jackson, and it was run by a wonderful lady named Becky Dorrah.   

Back when I was a weekly newspaper columnist Becky and her store popped up in my pieces on several Sunday mornings. One time I wrote about noticing, wedged tightly into one of the shelves of previously owned books, a slender volume with this title on its spine: Oakwood Methodist Women’s Club 1962 Cookbook. In the soups and salads section I found my mother’s recipe for corn chowder.

There are two things you should know here.  Oakwood is several hundred miles removed from that bookstore. And 1962 had run its course at least four decades before this little miraculous discovery was made.

Yet, when I thought about it, it really wasn’t that miraculous at all. Because Book Ends was the kind of place where such treasures could be found in abundance.

And Becky made sure the trove was always kept full.

Not long after she handed me that little book (refusing to let me pay for it) Becky, having fought an uphill battle for years to compete with online booksellers and big Barnes & Noble stores, closed Book Ends and moved away.

            That week I said in that column that I wouldn’t babble on about the ongoing national demise of the independent bookseller.  But I did (babbling a bit) make a prediction: that it wouldn’t be too long until most  locally owned and operated bookshops would be as hard to find as a video rental store. Because they, employing a particularly heavy literary allusion, will be gone with the wind.

And I wrote ‘that will be a sad day indeed. Not only because such stores are not likely to have copies of old books that are out of print or hard to locate (Amazon is actually a good source for those, though as of this writing they don’t have a copy of Oakwood Methodist Women’s Club 1962 Cookbook in stock) but because stores like Becky’s almost always have somebody like .  .  .  Becky’. 

Here are some cases in point to prove my assessment in that column.  When I once asked Becky if she had a biography of Thomas Jefferson in stock she’d stepped over several kids sprawled out on the floor reading in the young readers section, around one of the two bookshop cats – Fia (short for Ophelia) and Princess Buttercup – that lived in the store, and past a couple of old friends on the sofa who were catching up on each other’s news before Becky showed me two choices, pulling down the one by John Meacham since she knew he was one of my favorite writers of nonfiction.

Another time I put down a used copy of The Yearling by Majorie Kinnan Rawlings on the counter and pulled out my wallet and ended up, a few minutes later, paying for both that novel and Cross Creek, Ms. Rawlings beautiful nonfiction account of how she came to write it that Becky thought I’d like. 

And there was the day I told Becky I’d noticed someone carrying a James Michener novel that was uncommonly thin compared to his usual massive tomes but I couldn’t see its title.  She led me back to one of her overstuffed shelves and showed me two used paperback copies of Caravans. I bought one of them, along with Michener’s autobiography The World is My Home, which I’d never heard of until Becky handed it to me.

My friend Becky passed away a few weeks ago, after a long courageous battle with several serious medical conditions.  I’d first met her when she was the manager of a book store in the mall and I treasured especially her welcoming miles and knowledgeable assistance in the place she later opened and called Book Ends.

My life, and countless others’, are infinitely richer because she and her magical shop were in them.