U. City was
multiracial
and open and
full of possibility.
And around the
corner was a new little bookshop
called Left Bank Books. It had opened
July 11, 1969, started by a collective of
Washington University grad students
who were antiwar and pro–civil rights
and so haughtily serious, one informed
Kris’ mom that Leonard Cohen’s poems
were lowbrow. Left Bank stocked politi-
cal books, gay and lesbian literature, and
magazines—including Rolling Stone—
that you couldn’t buy anywhere else.
Kris read Shulamith Firestone on
feminism, Amiri Baraka on race. She
also reached, without knowing why, for
De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde. The title
revealed nothing. But Kris had begun
to wonder about her sexual orientation,
and ever since Eloise, the right books had
always seemed to come along when she
needed them.I am a city child.
–ELOISEIn 1974, Kris applied for a job at Left
Bank. The collective was starting to split
up; she would be the first “employee.”Kleindienst had no idea she’d spend her life
finding books that would patch the holes
in people’s souls, smash open windows
in their minds, bring them out of musty
apartments into a welcoming community.
She just knew she liked Eloise.
The 6-year-old heroine of Kay Thomp-
son’s books was introduced as “already
a Person. Henry James would want to
study her. Queen Victoria would recog-
nize her as an Equal. The New York Jets
would want to have her on their side.”
Eloise lived, with panache, at The Plaza,
which wasn’t a bit like Maryville, Tennes-
see, the town at the foot of the Appala-
chians where Kris’ family lived, and her
father drank, and her mother seethed.
But an elegant aunt had bestowed the
Eloise books, and Kris, also 6, had fallen
in love with the plucky little girl who man-
aged pretty much on her own.
Eloise was intrepid. Independent. Curi-
ous about the world. Her influence came
in handy a few years later, when Kris’ fam-
ily moved to St. Louis and her parents
divorced and her mother took a consult-
ing job out of town. Kris and her brother
lived alone her last year of high school.
By then they were in University City, a
move Kris had pushed for after her South
County principal announced his approval
of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
Except they almost didn’t hire her.
“They were leftists,” she explains, “as
in Marxism, as in homosexuality being a
bourgeois affectation that will wither with
the Revolution.”
Like Eloise, she toughed it out, throw-
ing herself into the job she shared with
Barry Leibman, a gentle sort who’d come
to St. Louis with Teach for America after
a stint in the Peace Corps.
The bookstore was in trouble. Paul’s
Books had opened at the other end of
The Loop, and Wash. U. now ran its own
full-fledged bookstore. Left Bank had
to move or die, and it couldn’t afford to
move. A loyal customer, a rabbi, offered
$100, and others followed suit—“the orig-
inal Kickstarter,” Kleindienst would later
dub it—and a bank issued a loan with
goodwill as the only collateral.
By now, the original collective had
dissolved and the two brothers who’d
bought the store had fought each other
to the point of exhaustion. Kleindienst,
Leibman, and a third employee, Justin
James, said, “We’ll do it.” All those small,