A Very Special Hometown Book Shop in VT

Our next guest blogger is GREG DENNIS. Greg and I go way back. Probably 20 years ago, when we both lived in a kick-back beach community in Southern California, Greg was the editor of a local newspaper and published one of my very first travel articles about a trip to Egypt. He and his wife are now living happily in Vermont, enjoying the change of seasons. But you can’t keep an old newspaper guy down and he recently was kind enough to agree to post here for FEAST. Welcome Greg!


Page Turns at Middlebury’s Vermont Book Shop

For lovers of books and music, the Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury, VT, has always been a kind of temple. Entering it was like going to church—a high tin ceiling, walls lined with books straight down to the floor, bursting record bins, bleary northern light leaking through windows in the back.

And, most of all, the creaking wooden floor. A single step inside the big front door and the old floor gave a reassuring squeak. God was in his heaven and, inside the four walls of this old emporium, were treasures to be discovered: a new book by a favorite author, a long-out-of-print jazz album.

It was with great trepidation this year that many of us contemplated new owner Becky Dayton's announcement that she would be remodeling the temple. Wasn't it enough that the long gauntlet of nonfiction had been moved? Why some of the world’s most turgid tomes by Herbert Marcuse, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky had sat collecting dust on those shelves for years. Wasn't that worth something?

You could spend 10 minutes there and catch up on all that was wrong with America, just by reading the dust jackets. And then you could wend your way to the back for a novel or an album and be reminded of all that was right with the world. One shelf always held the New York Review of Each Other’s Books.

The music bins were full of LP's by obscure bluesmen. But the Stones’s original “Sticky Fingers” LP—the one with the pulldown zipper on the front cover that many stores refused to carry—was also on especially prominent display.

One inevitably encountered the bullpen island where the sales staff resided. The cast of staff characters changed a bit over the years, but very slowly. As the days approached before the VBS would temporarily close for renovation, I was prepared for the worst.

And, it’s true, in the “new” store the creaky old floor has disappeared. Too worn to refinish, it's been replaced by an attractive carpet. But there's still a spot where you can step and hear the gratifying squeak of the old floor underneath.

The VBS now feels like a small, homey version of Barnes & Noble. There are now actual chairs where one can contemplate a next purchase, or just read a favorite Robert Frost poem pulled from the Vermont section. During the renovation, there emerged forgotten walls of brick and A&P green tile. The windows at the back were opened to the sky, and multiple layers of paint were scraped off the old oaken moldings. The crew even discovered a long forgotten fourth window on the west wall, which had been buried for decades behind a bookshelf.

So why would Becky Dayton commit so many of her waking hours to reviving a bookstore that has yet to generate its first dollar in profit since she bought it? Along with the other small-town heroes who keep America’s downtowns alive, she's on a bit of a mission.

“It's very important that a good small town have a bookstore,” she says. “It's the Third Place, after home and work."

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Gregory Dennis is a writer and marketing consultant who lives in Middlebury, Vermont. In addition to advising healthcare technology companies, he's a columnist for the Addison Independent and contributing editor of Vermont Ski & Ride. His travel writing has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, among others. He's been a Vermont Book Shop customer for more than 37 years. Dennis blogs at http://middlburyvt.blogspot.com/.

Book Review by Claire Walter - Beserk in the Antarctic

Berserk in the Antarctic
By David Mercy
Lyons Press 2004

David Mercy and I keep crossing paths—figuratively, not literally. Our most recent encounter was in the pages of Berserk in the Antarctic. I bought the book about crossing the stormy Drake Passage in a 27-foot sailboat at London’s Heathrow Airport for transatlantic reading. I knew about the hair-raising experience that David wrote about because Telluride Mountain Film had presented a primitive Norwegian documentary about it a few years ago. (The film won the People’s Choice Award at the 2001 Banff Mountain Film Festival and, if I could have voted at Telluride, I would have selected it too.) In any event, that film particularly resonated because when the Berserk made it to Antarctica, the trio encountered a red-hulled ship called the Disko. My husband and I had traveled to Antarctica across the Drake Passage on the Disko a few years earlier.

David is the kind of traveler I kind of wish I were (or at least wish I had been when I was younger). In truth, I never have had the courage to backpack to places just because I have never been there. David is. He seizes any cheap opportunity to achieve his travel desires, like climbing aboard the Berserk. His opportunity came in Ushuaia, Argentina, where he met Jarle Andhøy, the 19-year-old Norwegian owner of the boat, who had already single-handedly sailed across the Atlantic, and an Argentinean named Manuel, who turned out to be prone to seasickness.

After Berserk’s near-death crossing of the Drake Passage, Manuel sought asylum on the Disko, willing to do anything to avoid setting out again on the 27-footer. Even after Manuel bailed, so to speak, Jarle and David kept sailing through Antarctic waters, dodging icebergs and getting up close and personal with whales, seals, and penguins. Eventually, the Berserk limped back to South America. Jarle kept on going. His boat finally sank off the Chilean coast, with Jarle escaping in a rowboat. Ironically, the Disko later ran aground off the coast of Greenland, 155 miles north of the Arctic Circle, also with no loss of life.

David Mercy’s telling of this whale of a tale is funny, colorful, and occasionally poignant, and his book is a quick, easy, and compelling read. There might be another book in his future. It seems that he, Jarle and a couple of other Norwegians are now on a round-the-world adventure. They are sailing on Jarle’s new steel-hulled boat, the Berserk II, with a comically menacing shark face painted on the bow. Videos and the Captain’s log are available at www.wildvikings.com, for this is a considerably higher-tech voyage.

– Claire Walter

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CLAIRE WALTER is an award-winning Colorado-based journalist and author, specializing in travel, snowsports and food. Her website is http://www.claire-walter.com/ and her highly regarded travel blog is at http://travel-babel.blogspot.com/.