The Bookshop of Yesterdays by Amy Meyerson

Author:Amy Meyerson [Meyerson, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Within a week, we had flyers and postcards tacked to every corkboard in every coffee shop and public library in Los Feliz, Silver Lake and Echo Park, complete with famous literary quotes and Prospero Books’ insignia.

To learn to read is to light a fire. —Victor Hugo

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. —Mark Twain

We read to know that we are not alone. —C. S. Lewis

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. —Jorge Luis Borges

Once you learn to read, you will be forever free. —Frederick Douglass

I cannot live without books. —Thomas Jefferson

I contributed the last two.

On our front door, Malcolm tacked a poster for our newly formed book clubs, four in total. One for small presses and debut authors we hoped to lure to the store. One on literary LA, at Malcolm’s insistence. One on world literature, at Lucia’s. One on the classics, old and new, which at a store named after Shakespeare seemed to go without saying.

We had finalized the details for our gala: Saturday, September 28. Literary costume. Twenty dollars a ticket. Two hundred tickets in total. Tickets alone wouldn’t cover the average monthly loss, but it was a start. We’d have a silent auction to account for the rest. Malcolm put calls into a local furniture store, a few salons and bike shops to solicit sponsors. I drafted a press release, which we would send to local newspapers and blogs. Lucia and Charlie commissioned their friends, bartenders and waiters across the east side, urging their bosses to donate free platters and cocktails for the gala, to auction off prix fixe meals. We needed these donations; more so, we needed the support of the neighborhood, the insistence that everyone from the local florist to the clerk at the hardware store couldn’t bear to see us close.

Malcolm had a friend who worked at KCRW and managed to get us at fifteen-second spot on the morning music show to advertise Sheila’s reading, so long as we agreed to be part of the station’s benefits program. While Malcolm scoffed at the words ten percent off, the entire arrangement was a win for us. It would introduce a new cast of public radio-listening Angelenos to Prospero Books.

Of course Sheila’s reading had to be on Sunday, at 7:00 p.m., smack in the middle of the Brooks Family Cookout. A few days before Sheila’s reading, Dad texted one of his orders, and I knew this one was meant as a command: come sunday. When I wrote back, I’ll try, he added, make your mother happy. I wanted to write back that she should make me happy, too. Instead, I told him that I’d do my best to make it. I didn’t want to imagine what type of command Dad would issue if I texted to tell him I couldn’t come, after all. Besides, the person I really wanted to talk to was Mom.

It had been three weeks since I talked to her.

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