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and across the store like a beeline.”
Yet another bright light, Dale Woolery,
used his photographic memory to open
a book to the right page for a particular
quote or to find a relocated book when
a customer said, pointing, “It was right
here six months ago.” Someone would
come in asking for “this book about a
Greek guy,” Ibur recalls, and he’d say,
“No, he’s Italian, and it’s this book.”
When he pulled it from the shelf, he
might have found one of the 35 glossies
of Malcolm Gladwell—sent by an over-
excited publicist in Gladwell’s big-hair
days—that somebody had hidden around
the store. Staffers also periodically hid a
children’s book that chirped like a cricket
so that whoever was at the desk would
have to go hunt it down and close it. Jim
Reed remembers, in the ’80s, writing
the name of every book sold on a clip-
board at the front counter so it could be
reordered. “There was a series of board
books about a little dog, so we’d add fan-
tasy Spot titles like Spotacus and Spot
Goes to Jail.”
“We really had an incredible amount of
fun, for a business,” remarks Malley. “We
had some passionate disagreements, but
it was people who respected each other
arguing about things they cared about,
not some weird hierarchical corporate
situation.” Book returns, for example:
What beloved tome did you keep on your
shelf even though it hadn’t sold in years
and was stealing space from a bestseller?
Where was the line between principle
and self-indulgence? “We were all trying
to keep the store afloat,” Malley contin-
ues, “and there were a lot of strong per-
sonalities figuring out their roles.”
At the center were Leibman and
Kleindienst, who shared values but not
temperament. “Barry was quiet and
understated, sometimes to the point
where it was hard to suss out what he
was feeling,” Malley says. “Kris, you don’t
ever walk away from a conversation won-
dering what she meant or how she felt.”
OH MY LORD I AM ABSOLUTELY
SO BUSY I DON’T KNOW HOW I CAN
POSSIBLY GET EVERYTHING DONE.
–ELOISE
In 2002, Kleindienst hired the woman
who’d become her husband. At the time,
Jarek Steele was female in the world’s
eyes. He was terrified to transition to a
male body; he’d only dated lesbians, and
they loved women. Who would love him
as a man?
But Kleindienst focused on the soul,
not its container. To make space for their
relationship, she started defining herself
as queer rather than lesbian. When they
married, they quipped, “So queer we’re
straight again!”
Colleagues at Left Bank rode the waves
with them, tossing pronouns overboard
and ignoring the 20-year age difference.
Clearly, these two were good together.
Also, Steele was good for the store.
“He’s managed to handle the finances in
a way that we’re—we’re fine,” Kleindienst
says, sounding dazed. “We figured it out
through Borders and Barnes & Noble,
through various recessions, through
Amazon, and now we’re, like, stable.”
Steele hadn’t even expected to get
hired. When they sprang the infamous
Left Bank hiring quiz on him at the end
of his interview, he’d just taken an inde-
pendent study on Virginia Woolf, but he
froze, couldn’t think of a single title by
Woolf. The store hired him anyway—to
work on the website. When he’d proved
himself, he was given the keys to open
up. In the morning quiet, he stood at the
top of the stairs and thought, I could stay
here for a very long time.
“I came from a very poor family and
watched my dad struggle with his men-
tal health and with his work,” Steele
explains, “so I equated making a living
with being miserable. I thought work was
something you just endured. I didn’t real-
ize you could land at a place that would
value what you did—a place where you
could be happy.”
He jokes that what he’s learned is to
tolerate debt, but it’s his instinctive
thrift that’s helped save the store. “I’m
one of those people who, when I die, you’ll
have to go through every scrap of cloth-
ing looking for the tucked-away dollars
and quarters,” he says, “and I manage the
money in a creepily similar way. I try to
squirrel it away, and I don’t overextend.”
The industry’s tough: “For every hard-
cover book we sell, we probably see a dol-
lar,” Steele estimates. “In other retail, if
your taxes or costs go up, you can raise
your prices. But you can’t raise the price
of books. We are paying not quite half
the cover price, and with the difference
we have to pay the rent, electricity, gas,
salaries, everything.”Left Bank’s had a few failed experi-
ments—a café next door; a downtown
location that opened right when the
2008 recession hit and closed six years
later. But Kleindienst and Steele redi-
rected all energy and resources to the
flagship, and by December 2014, they
reported sales up 40 percent over the
previous December’s.
Asked why, in this day and age, a book-
store should even exist, Steele says the
combination of intelligent curation and
free-range browsing allows a kind of
exploration that can’t be done the same
way online. “Amazon can tell you what
happened in the past; a bookstore can
predict what might happen in the future.
“I like to think we’re becoming more
important,” he adds. “This has to do
with the way truth is being handled at
this moment. Somebody can come into
this bookstore and find a lot of differ-
ent ideas, not just surface social media
headline sorts of ideas. People have to
have a quieter, more focused, in-person
physical space to do that. And actual
human connection is more important
now than ever.”
Malley notes that “at bookstores,
people talk about ideas and knowledge
and emotion and life at a frequency that
doesn’t happen in daily life very often.
There is not a lot of posturing. People
walk in with good intentions or real human
need—like a medical condition their child’s
just been diagnosed with. They don’t usu-
ally come into a bookstore to impress
other people. It’s a safe space nobody
intentionally designed to be a safe space.”
The American Booksellers Association
now counts 2,470 indies—up from 1,651
a decade ago. “There’s this new genera-
tion of folks who are taking over or start-
ing stores,” Kleindienst says, “and the
phrase they are using is ‘mission-based.’
They’re talking about doing things that
are social justice–oriented, of being
mindful of the communities they serve.”
For decades, Left Bank was one of
the only such bookstores in the coun-
try. Why’s the concept catching fire now?
“I think people want authenticity,” she
says. “The age of computer screens is mor-
ally and spiritually bankrupting, and peo-
ple are lonely. We need the serendipity of
stumbling on things, of saying, ‘I went here,
and this thing happened to me.’ Nothing
ever happens to you on a computer screen,
and nobody cares who you are.”