Constant Reader

With all the free booze and old friends reuniting, you could be
forgiven for mistaking the party in Bailey/Coy Books last Thursday for
a holiday gathering. But look past the crowd of people to the empty
bookshelves swathed in black gauze, and you’d understand that the
party was a wake; booksellers and longtime Capitol Hill residents
smiled wanly and tried to be funny as they said good-bye to their
favorite bookstore.

They also bought the last few items Bailey/Coy had to sell—a
few choice bits of memorabilia, like an autographed Annie Leibovitz
photograph and a pair of boxer shorts autographed by David Sedaris,
were auctioned to help reduce the debt Bailey/Coy owner Michael Wells
has incurred. Wells even sold the sandwich board that was used to
display the opening sentence of the day at Bailey/Coy. For the
occasion, of course, it had a last sentence (Wells chose the last line
off the top of his head—”For there she was.” If you don’t
know where it comes from, you’ve got some reading to do.)

In the corner of the room, where the magazines and greeting cards
used to be, someone set out a large, raggedy collection of
spiral-bound notebooks. In these notebooks, from 1990 to the
present, the staff communicated amongst themselves. Many of the
messages were the mundane, passive-aggressive notes we toss off to our
coworkers all the time—apparently, night crews often forgot to
shut off the air conditioning at Bailey/Coy during the summertime, and
a few cashiers often forgot basic register functions, much to the ire
of coworkers.

But peppered throughout the books, in the messy handwriting of
dozens of booksellers, the exceptional moments are there, too.
Employees pasted weird discoveries into the notebooks, like a typed
letter from a prisoner asking if any lesbian couples at Bailey/Coy
would like to take him in as part of a triad upon his release in a few
months. There were the customers who were completely intolerable:

Creepy Eric was in tonight w/ his new “bowl” haircut. He is the
super-freak of all freaks! I told him we wouldn’t order any more books
for him because he never picks them up. Don’t order anything for him!
He’s crazy + needy.

There were the customers who were famous; Tony Kushner and August
Wilson popped in one weekend, and Susan Powter “the diet guru” bought
Cunt and Traveling Mercies from Bailey/Coy, among other
books. The starstruck employee noted that “she had the
farts—must be from all the vegetables she eats.”

And there were the notes that seem strangely prophetic, like this
one, from April 11, 1995, announcing a new addition to the bookstore:
“Ohmigod! We have a computer section where gardening used to be.
Technology conquers nature. It’s all over now…”