đĐĒ stlmag.com July 2019
Kleindienst respectfully declined. “It
would really be confusing to our custom-
ers,” she explained. Soon after, a staffer
poked her head into the office and told
Kleindienst, “Jerry Berger’s on the line
for you.”
“Oh, f—k,” Kleindienst groaned.
She wasn’t sure why Berger was call-
ing, but she knew it couldn’t be good.
She remembers saying, “You know,
he’s a war criminal,” and seeing Leib-
man cover his face. Sunday morning,
she opened the newspaper to a big
headline: “Left Bank Books Says No
to Henry Kissinger.”
She held fast against a flood of criti-
cism, saying evenly, “Discriminating
about what you do in your business is
not censorship. If you want his book, we
will make sure you have it. But you will
know when you come here who we are.”
Even a few Left Bank staffers wished
Kleindienst had been a little less outspo-
ken. Finally, she snapped, “The man who
hired me went to prison for his antiwar
activism. Has something changed here
that I’m not aware of ?”
SOMETIMES I AM A MOTHER WITH 40
CHILDREN. –ELOISE
Left Bank cheered on local artists, hang-
ing Michael Eastman’s photographs and
urging a bookish, quirky, and colorful
young woman named Mary Engelbreit to
show her work. For years, literary nerds
gathered there on Bloomsday (June
16) for a 24-hour reading from James
Joyce’s Ulysses. People got married at
Left Bank. They discovered or rediscov-
ered whole chunks of their identity. The
LGBTQ section “was a huge part of many
people’s coming-out process,” Kleindi-
enst says.
The day after 9/11, she constructed a
reading list about the Middle East. After
Michael Brown’s death and the Pulse night-
club shooting, she did the same: “And in all
these lists, there was room for books on
grieving and on explaining death to chil-
dren. Explaining anything to children.”
Even the death of Spike, Left Bank’s
third cat.
The first cat, of course, was Cap-
tain Nemo, rescued by Leibman, half-
drowned, in Forest Park. The second
was Jamaica Kincaid, named by the
store’s customers. Malley remem-
bers the night Jamaica came upstairs,
uncharacteristically, during a crowded
reading: “She walked to the front row,
jumped into somebody’s lap, and
kneaded a little, testing. Didn’t like
that lap. So she proceeded down the
second and third rows, testing laps one
by one. She tested every lap in the audi-
ence, and not a single one of them met
her requirements, so she jumped down
and went downstairs. Everybody was
laughing so hard, the poor author had
to stop.”
Spike “was named totally for himself,”
Leibman says. Sarah Holt, children’s and
teens’ specialist, remembers one partic-
ularly tense, wearisome Inventory Day.
While the preoccupied humans counted
and cross-checked every book, Spike sat
down on a keyboard and accepted Win-
dows 10.
Which was incompatible with the
store’s inventory system.
Spike survived the aftermath, but
he was eventually found to have an
advanced and untreatable cancer. He
died on December 21, the third-busiest
day of the year.
“Everybody was crying all day but wait-
ing on customers,” Kleindienst says, “and
I was really worried about the parents
who used to bring their kids in, saying,
‘We’re going to see the cat! You get to
see the cat!’ No, you get to explain death
to your child.” She brings up her fist, à la
Shirley Temple: “You’re welcome!”
The next day, they were “fielding a
lot of sympathy and offers of kittens,”
says Holt, “and a woman came in with
this tiny kitten, and I thought, Oh, no.
She’s going to try to get us to adopt it.
She said, ‘This is Turkey’—she’d found
him on Thanksgiving—‘and we need to
pay our respects.’ She’d rescued him as
an orphan, so she’d been bringing him to
the store to interact with Spike.
“It’s only tangentially related to
books,” Holt adds, “but it means the
store was a safe place. It provided a sense
of community. Even for a kitten.”I ALWAYS SAY WHAT’S IN MY HEAD.
–ELOISEThe chore of closing time was prying rapt
customers away from the used books in
the basement and shooing them out the
door. One night, Janie Ibur told a new col-
league, “There’s a guy downstairs still.
Don’t worry, I’ll get rid of him.” A min-
ute later, Ibur was screaming at the top
of her lungs, “Don’t you know we have
lives, too?” The customer yelled right
back, and they both stomped upstairs.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Ibur said to her aghast
co-worker. “Have I not introduced you to
my brother Jim?”
Now St. Louis’ poet laureate, Ibur
overcame her shyness at Left Bank and
became its comedic genius. If some-
body came in asking for Kleindienst,
Ibur would say gravely, “She’s having her
medication adjusted” or “We’ve put her
on administrative leave.” Later, Klein-
dienst would find people asking her the
strangest questions, then realize: Janie.
Ibur loved the store’s guarantee that
“if you’re an outsider, you don’t have to
be one here.” Nobody who worked at Left
Bank made much money, but whenever
cash flowed, the owners shared it. Kirsten
Jacobsen remembers a long, festive late-
’80s holiday meal at Balaban’s with a
bonus envelope at every place. She sailed
out the door without her envelope, and
when she got home, she called Kleindi-
enst in a panic: “Tell me that was a check.”
Nope. $300 in cash. All gone. But
because Jacobsen was about to leave
for Guatemala, Kleindienst organized a
quick collection and bought her a pair of
sturdy hiking boots.
The booksellers at Left Bank were a
quirky mix, as smart and curious as Elo-
ise. A birthday was celebrated the way a
big, fond, boisterous family would cele-
brate it—not always on time but lavishly,
with exquisite French pastry or delib-
erately bad poetry or very good poetry
by Phil Barron, one of those luminous
souls who died too young and can’t be
forgotten.
In his obit, Barron was identified as
“writer, bodhisattva, champion of the
vulnerable.” Another close friend and
co-worker, Holly Silva, remembers how
“people would walk in and say, ‘There’s
this book with a purple cover,’ and before
they’d even finish the sentence, he’d be
stepping down off that little platformThe Bookstore With a Face
Continued from p. 95
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