Like an alchemical transformation right out of the pages of a Harry Potter novel, The Book House has seemingly died and been reborn, and the new space is, well, glorious.
The community mourned when the charming, 150-year-old home that housed the 30-year-old bookshop was leveled to make way for the most banal and un-romantic of enterprises, a storage facility.
Somehow, owner Michelle Barron was able to marshal her forces and secure the moving of the bulk of the books to a new space, right in the heart of Maplewood's hot-as-heck main drag along Manchester Road near Sutton Avenue.
The new retail space, still called The Book House, is big. It's 2,000 square feet now, said Barron, and it will double to about 4,000 square feet in about two months, when the basement level opens. Barron actually has 8,000 square feet to play with, she said, if she's eventually able to secure funds to renovate all the areas the Book House now oversees in the cavernous building, a former J.J. Newberry's five and dime that sat empty for last 20 years.
Barron and staff are putting out used- and new-book inventory as fast as they can, she said, but one look at the mountainous stack of full boxes of books downstairs gives an idea of this monumental task. (The virtually unending wall of boxes is reminiscent of the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.)
Shoppers may recognize fixtures from the old Book House—including the store sign hanging from the eaves, now mounted at the entry to the children's books room—plus shelves and such acquired from Puddn'head Books, The Archive and All on the Same Page. The recycling of furnishings from three other bookstores that could not ride out the economic recession and the sharp contraction in the non-Amazon bookselling world is more than symbolic. It feels like the last act of a soldier backed against a wall, surrounded by enemy forces, armed with the bullets of many fallen comrades and determined to fire them all in some final reckoning.
But the desperate times are over, intimates Barron, who, after an improbable survival, is celebrating some benefits the Maplewood space has that the Rock Hill manse didn't.
“We have more space now, more room for events, great foot traffic, and we won't be packed to the gills in here like at the old place,” she said.
Future plans include rolling ladders so customers can help themselves to books perched at Andean heights on the floor-to-ceiling shelves, and maybe even a small cafe.
The Book House no longer feels like a house. It feels like—or, will shortly feel like—a huge bookstore, reminiscent in size of South Grand's Dunaway Books or perhaps the lamented Library Ltd. in Clayton, or even Downtown's insanely huge, shuttered Amitin Books. More to the point, in a world where precious bookstores continue to die off like honeybees from Colony Collapse Disorder, it feels like a spot of hope for the culture.
The Book House is located at 7352 Manchester. For more information, call 314-968-4491 or visit bookhousestl.com.
Photographs by Byron Kerman
