Hugh Ferrer

For as little as $140, anyone now can now buy his or her own little bookstore—for that is essentially what an e-book reader is: a combination of book and private store, a boutique, almost, with minimal overhead and a vast selection, a distant warehouse’s franchise outlet, scaled for the hand, serviced by a single employee, who is also the owner and the store’s sole customer.  And, contrary to inherited wisdom, the success of these handheld machines suggests that there are actually armies of people who have wanted to work in a bookstore, but had never before had the chance.

In the meantime, beautiful independent bookstores like Prairie Lights (est. 1978) have become multi-layered symbols: as bookstores, they resist the unwanted apotheosis of “book culture” into the cloud; as “independents,” they are the victims of the latest corporate assault on “local business,” the lifeblood of “main street,” which big-box malls and now online retailers have been relentlessly siphoning off.

But when I begin to think like this, there is only one place to go.

The high ceiling on the first floor is wired with a softly bright, shadowless, alert lighting scheme, and the floor-plan, which seems wide open at first, carries you in, swallows you, and the reading chairs scattered about feel wonderfully secluded.  Like all great bookstores, Prairie Lights feels secure and comforting.  There are many sections I never browse—it’s healthy to feel limited; and, given the store’s 40,000 titles, inevitable.  A staircase rises to the natural light of the second floor, where a café buzzes, and the bookcases roll away for the almost-nightly readings.  On a recent Sunday afternoon, it was overflowing with a crowd of young and old who had turned out for a reading by the most recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction; at the end of an hour, it seemed as if absolutely everyone were standing in the lines for an autographed copy.

It is at such moments, and not only during a bad day at work, that I wonder why I didn’t, fifteen years ago when I arrived in Iowa City, apply for a job.  I wouldn’t mind unpacking and labeling and section-coding and alphabetizing new arrivals, or learning the art of buying from a publisher’s backlist.  When I walk past a case, my hand, of itself, aligns a spine reshelved too deeply.  And I’ve come to notice that these opportunities to surreptitiously straighten are rare, because the shelves tend to be immaculate, resonating with the loving attention paid to them.  And then I can’t help suspecting that there are more hands at work than just the staff’s—that many, if not most, of the customers are, like me, always working there in spirit; and that this is why Prairie Lights feels like everyone’s store.

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 15 South Dubuque Street – Iowa City, Iowa

Hugh Ferrer is the Associate Director of the International Writing Program, a senior editor at the Iowa Review, a lecturer at the University of Iowa, and a faculty member of the Iowa Summer Writing Program. His first exposure to Latin American literature was his father’s full shelf of 1970’s Avon Bard paperback editions of Gabriel García Márquez. Later, after college, reading broadly in world literature led to an immersion in Borges and Machado de Assis, among many others. And now, at the International Writing Program, he has the regular opportunity to meet and work with dozens of leading Latin and Central American writers, including many from Buenos Aires and Argentina, such as Martin Rejtman, Guillermo Martinez, Leopoldo Brizuela, Carlos Gamerro, Román Antopolsky, Pola Oloixarac, Maria Cristoff, and Federico Falco.  Two Central American authors whose work in translation he’s enjoyed in the last year are Horacio Castellanos Moya, from El Salvador, and the Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon.