FAYETTEVILLE -- Last week, Don Choffel died and Suedee Hall Elkins inherited the 46-year-old Dickson Street Bookshop.
She'd been working there since 2010 and became the manager over time.
Choffel, 90, was a co-founder of the store, which now has more than 100,000 used books and a passionate fan base of almost everybody who's ever walked through the front door and become lost in the store's labyrinth of rooms.
One day a few years ago, out of the blue, Choffel casually told Elkins, "When I die, the business will go to you."
"It was kind of shocking," Elkins said. "I was like, 'What now?'"
Elkins said she didn't feel she was worthy -- or that anyone was worthy -- of such a thing.
"It's a big thing," she said. "Trying to fill his shoes, I'll be lucky if I can fill up one pinky toe of one shoe. He was bigger than life."
On Saturday, April 6, Choffel went home because he wasn't feeling well. He died in his sleep Sunday night.
Elkins went to work that Saturday, but things weren't right. Choffel never took a sick day.
"He'd left me a note," she said. "It was just one day, but I was like, 'Man, I really miss our morning banter.' And that was just one day. And now it's the rest of my life."
She said Choffel was in good health. She talked to him later that Saturday and a couple of times on Sunday.
Choffel saw something in Elkins. He knew this time would come.
"I love this place, and I know that Don knew that," she said. "I don't think I took a vacation for the first six or seven years. I'm the kind of person that doesn't take a sick day and doesn't take a vacation because I want to be here. And Don is very much the same way. I think that he saw that in me. I don't know what he saw in me, but he saw something, I guess. And he had all that set up without my knowledge."
Choffel had many opportunities to sell the store and building, but he didn't want to see it turned into a restaurant or bar, Elkins said.
"He could have easily sold the building and made a million dollars and moved to Cuba or whatever, but that's not what he wanted," she said. "He wanted the bookstore to be here."
Choffel had three bookshops in Chicago before moving to Fayetteville in 1969 to sell books to community colleges that were setting up their libraries.
Choffel met Charles O'Donnell in Fayetteville in the 1970s, and the two got along well. Choffel wanted to open a bookshop, so he asked O'Donnell to partner with him in the business.
"I had books in a chicken house out at Cane Hill," Choffel told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 2014, referring to the seeds of their endeavor.
The bookshop opened on the north side of Dickson Street in 1978 but moved to the south side of the street when Choffel bought a building there in the early 1980s. The building had been a commercial laundry, and it still has a ramp that was used to push carts from one level to another.
Choffel and O'Donnell were born on the same day in the same year, 1933. O'Donnell, who was originally from Boston, died in 2019 of natural causes.
Elkins said there used to be a bullet hole in the front glass where, as the story goes, somebody had taken a shot at O'Donnell.
"I don't remember the story behind why the guy was angry," she said.
The store's used and out-of-print books are organized in sections from Aeronautics to Zoology, and sometimes Aardvarks to Zymurgy, according to its website.
O'Donnell liked to say "We're the best bookshop within 600 miles in any direction."
On Friday, the oldest book in the store was a 1648 edition of Helvetia Sancta, a German language book about the lives of saints and theologians, which was listed for $900.
After Choffel's death, the bookstore's Facebook page was inundated with messages.
"I am so sad to read this," Melissa Britt wrote. "Like so many others, the shop holds a special place in my heart, and my first visit is a core memory. I remember wandering through the shelves, smelling the paper, running my finger along the spines of books, turning the corner and thinking, 'oh, there's more, how delightful!' And then turning another corner, and thinking how marvelous it would be just to live there.
"We spent hours. When my husband and I took our son on a campus visit last year, I kept telling him, just wait, the best part isn't even on campus. He loved the university but still had reservations. Then we took him to the bookshop. He took one step inside, turned to me, and said 'this is where I am going to college.' I remember sharing with friends that the deciding factor was absolutely the Dickson Street Bookshop. What a wonderful gift Don has given the world, and I am so happy that his legacy will continue!"
Many who posted mentioned the magic of the place.
"One of Fayetteville's most magical places," wrote Kimberly V. Fulton of Harrison. "Thank you, Don, for what you gave us all. I'll be looking for books in your aisles all the rest of my life!"
It's a word Elkins also uses about the bookstore.
"I think this place, it sounds silly, but I think that it really does hold all kinds of magic," she said. "People come in and they'll ask for a book. And if we don't have it, I'll say, 'Call us tomorrow or the next day because now that you've come in the store and you've said out loud what you wanted, it will come to us.' And I mean, it's amazing how often that happens. I mean the book will walk in that day or the next day so often. It's like the universe hears and it answers."
She said first-time visitors often mention the magic, and she gets to relive that excitement over and over again.
"So it's like it never really gets old, it never really dies," she said.
In a way, all of this seems preordained.
When Elkins was 8 years old, she told her mother she wanted to work at the Dickson Street Bookshop when she grew up. Her parents had been taking her there since she was an infant.
Elkins, 41, grew up in Fayetteville and earned a bachelor's degree in ceramics at the University of Arkansas. She moved to Baton Rouge to do graduate work at Louisiana State University for a few years in the 2000s.
A friend there was looking to get out of Louisiana, so Elkins recommended Fayetteville.
Her friend moved to Fayetteville and got a job at the Dickson Street Bookshop.
"I said, 'You've got to be kidding me. That's my dream job,'" Elkins remembers.
"I was always too nervous to even apply, like I wasn't worthy of it," she said Friday. "It just seemed out of reach or above me somehow."
She said it wasn't that Choffel and O'Donnell were intimidating.
"It was more of like, this place is bigger than life, this place is bigger than any of us," she said. "I'm not sure any of us are worthy of it. I mean, Don and Charles, sure."
So she moved back to Fayetteville and applied for a job at the bookshop.
"I came in and met them," she said. "And I remember Don pulled me aside kind of over by the mythology of folklore section and he asked me a series of questions that were very low-key, like 'Do you mind cleaning the bathrooms? Are you OK with climbing ladders?' Just very basic things. And I replied, 'Yeah, I'm good with all of that.' And I remember, he turned and he looked at my friend Hanna and he goes, 'I like her.' And that was that. I started in January of 2010."
Elkins said the store has 11 employees, all of whom she hired. Some of them have been there more than seven years.
"You can train a lot of things, but just the experience and knowing what sells, what to pick up and what to refuse, I can't teach all that," she said. "You just have to be around long enough to absorb it. So it's good to have people that stick around, for that reason. And also I think it's good for any business when people come in they see the same faces over and over for years."
Elkins said the store doesn't normally sell books online, but it does have about 500 titles listed for sale on Amazon. She said those are very specific items that people wouldn't normally come in the store looking for.
"I like to keep all the really fun stuff in the store," she said, "and I really want people that are making the effort to come in here to be the ones who find the gems and the ones to see the cool things and be able to experience those things. If you put all the good things online, then all the people who are making the effort to come here won't get to enjoy it."
Elkins said she worked closely with Choffel for 15 years and will continue to do things at the bookstore the way he did them.
"My plan is to never retire," she said. "I hope I live to be 90 and still have my body and my mind like Don because, what a dream, right?"
Harrison Lowe, an employee at the Dickson Street Bookshop, shelves reference books Friday while working at the shop on Dickson Street in Fayetteville. The founders of the 46-year-old business have passed away. Suedee Hall Elkins, who has managed the bookstore for several years, is the new owner. Visit nwaonline.com/photo for today's photo gallery. (NWA Democrat-Gazette/Andy Shupe)
Suedee Hall Elkins, seen Friday, is the new owner of the Dickson Street Bookshop in Fayetteville. The founders of the 46-year-old business have passed away. Hall Elkins, who has managed the bookstore for several years, is the new owner. Visit nwaonline.com/photo for today's photo gallery. (NWA Democrat-Gazette/Andy Shupe)
Harrison Lowe, an employee at the Dickson Street Bookshop, shelves reference books Friday while working at the shop on Dickson Street in Fayetteville. The founders of the 46-year-old business have passed away. Suedee Hall Elkins, who has managed the bookstore for several years, is the new owner. Visit nwaonline.com/photo for today's photo gallery. (NWA Democrat-Gazette/Andy Shupe)