THAT’S BUSINESS

The next chapter of That Bookstore in Blytheville unfolds

— Grant Hill has a short resume and a long reading list. The former is because he’s only 22. The latter reflects his passion for books.

EXTRA

http://www.arkansas…">"That Bookstore in Blytheville" - an essay by John Grisham

Asked if he is a bibliophile, he responds: “absolutely - probably maniacally so.”

That should serve him well as he takes over at That Bookstore in Blytheville. He has bought the store from founder Mary Gay Shipley, who built its reputation with her keen instinct in what people want to read, and discovered major talent.

The name of the store shows her savvy. It claims and yet transcends the town of 16,000 set in the Mississippi County cotton and soybean fields, former home of an air base for a half century before the arrival 20 years ago of a steel-making complex nearby.

Before the closing of the base and the arrival of blast furnaces, the bookstore was established in 1976 by the Blytheville High School math teacher.

Fast forward to 1989 and in walks a tall, handsome Mississippian trying to sell his book, A Time to Kill.

John Grisham was making the rounds with the trunk of his car filled with copies of his first novel and his head filled with dreams of leaving lawyering behind for fame as a writer.

“After a month or so of miserable sales, I had learned the painful lesson that selling books is far more difficult than writing them,” Grisham writes in My Bookstore, in which authors tout their favorite booksellers.

The volume was published Tuesday, the day Shipley and Hill signed the sale contract.

Grisham was not there in person, but he was in word and spirit. A reading of the essay by Grisham was to be a toast.

Shipley said afterward that she knew she couldn’t get through the reading of the short, sincere piece without losing her composure. Had she not found a buyer by the end of the year, she was going to lose more than her composure. She would’ve closed the store.

In a changing of the guard, Shipley, 68, let Hill read Grisham’s tribute, which continues:

“I soon abandoned all dreams of seeing my first novel on the best-seller lists. However, a handful of wise booksellers saw something the others did not, and enthusiastically pushed A Time to Kill. There were five of them; one was Mary Gay Shipley.

...

“... I concentrated on finishing my second novel, The Firm. Mary Gay read an advance copy of it and said things were about to change.

“I agreed to do a signing in her store and arrived there on Sunday, March 17, 1991, St. Patrick’s Day. Her husband, Paul, had found some green beer to go with the green popcorn and the like. The day was significant for another reason: The Firm debuted that Sunday on The New York Times bestseller list at No. 12.

“Book tours are not that enjoyable. However, it’s always been easy to remain loyal to those first five stores, especially That Bookstore in Blytheville.

“I returned the following year with The Pelican Brief, then The Client .... Eventually, we stopped them altogether, and for the past several years I have sneaked into Mary Gay’s back door and signed 2,000 copies of each new book ....

“With independent bookstores vanishing at an alarming rate, I wonder how long she will hang on, or if someone will take her place.”

Wonder no more, John. He’s living in the attic above the store at 316 W. Main St.

Hill figures that’s his fourteenth address in the past five years since he left his hometown of Mountain Home. After one year at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia studying mass communications, he joined AmeriCorps for two years and lived the self-described life of a vagabond volunteer coordinator across the South. Then he moved to Little Rock and worked as a salesman for Computer Automation Systems of Mountain Home, where his father is vice president and director of technology.

His tastes range from science to contemporary avant garde novelists such as Haruki Murakami, to the classics, whether masters such as Albert Camus or Fyodor Dostoevski. And William Faulkner. If he had to limit himself to three books on a deserted island, he’d take either Absalom, Absalom! or Light in August, both by Faulkner; The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery; and The Magic of Reality by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

He’s not a big fan of fantasy books, but he admires J.K. Rowling, author of the phenomenally successful Harry Potter series, for standing up to Amazon.com, which offered her a deal only if the digital versions of her books were available on its exclusive Kindle readers and apps.

She declined and set up her own Pottermore.com website.

“Amazon has got a choke hold on the industry and is responsible for the disappearance of stores like the one that is now responsible for me being able to eat,” Hill said.

The bookstore is not oblivious to the new world of publishing.

It sells Kobo e-readers, on which any format can be downloaded except for Kindle, he said.

Hill acknowledges the physical book as an endangered species. And in his backpack he carries a Kobo with 35 books on it, but also a paperback and a hardback that he wants to give to someone.

“It may be that I’m an ultra traditionalist,” he said. “It’s not a replaceable feeling of being able to hand somebody a book.”

Shipley is not going anywhere. She’ll be “seven blocks away” at her house, where she lives with her husband.

She’ll mentor her protege as he and his bookstore make their transition into a new era. If you have a tip, call Jack Weatherly at (501) 378-3518 or e-mail him at

[email protected]

Business, Pages 73 on 11/18/2012

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