Kris 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.
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The 6-year-old heroine of Kay Thompson’s books was introduced as “already a Person. Henry James would want to study her. Queen Victoria would recognize 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, Tennessee, the town at the foot of the Appalachians 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 managed pretty much on her own.
Eloise was intrepid. Independent. Curious about the world. Her influence came in handy a few years later, when Kris’ family moved to St. Louis and her parents divorced and her mother took a consulting 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. 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 political 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. –Eloise
In 1974, Kris applied for a job at Left Bank. The collective was starting to split up; she would be the first “employee.”
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, throwing 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 original 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, earnest donations had sent a message: People needed Left Bank Books to exist.
Clueless about bookkeeping, taxes, and management, the new owners took advice anywhere they could find it. “We were beautifully naïve,” Leibman remarks, “and I think it was that naïveté that kept us going forward.”
Getting bored is not allowed. –Eloise
Left Bank was one of the first indies to regularly bring in authors, and one of Kleindienst’s favorite readings was an early one by Cornel West. He spoke, to an embarrassingly small audience, in the middle of a raging thunderstorm. “Everybody was hanging on every word,” she recalls. Then lightning split the sky and the computers went down. She tiptoed downstairs and found the office flooding, electrical cords submerged. Somehow, she got the computers back up. At the next deafening crack of thunder, West asked, “Should we stop?” and all 20 people exclaimed, “No!” So he kept going, his thoughts converging in a brilliant climax, and just as he finished, the storm stopped. “Right that second,” Kleindienst recalls. “Like God flipped a switch.”
Celebs staying at the Chase often dropped in: Tom Baker, better known as Dr. Who; Tom Hulce, who played Mozart in Amadeus; the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko; Jerry Garcia; Andy Williams; Gregory Hines. Toni Morrison read at Left Bank before she won the Nobel. Larry McMurtry spent hundreds of dollars there on poetry books.
Former staffer Nikki Whittaker Malley, whose parents owned an independent bookstore in Indiana, remembers “somebody asking Anthony Bourdain, who was just unabashedly going after vegetarians, ‘Aren’t you worried about offending people who don’t eat meat?’” She switches to his easy cadence: “‘Nah. There’s so little protein in their systems that they’re never going to be able to defend themselves.’
“When someone has created art that moved you, you actually already have a relationship with that person,” Malley says. “It’s just that they don’t know it. And in those minutes of meeting them in person, you get to realize that relationship. You can connect the person to all the ideas and emotions that person has sparked in you. That’s why it’s such a powerful and delicate experience. When they are gracious, it makes their art even more powerful for you. And if the artist does not have that kind of generosity and grace, it can be devastating.”
I make as much noise as I possibly can. –Eloise
One of the bookstore’s original founders, Larry Kogan, had gone to prison for throwing a firecracker during an antiwar demonstration at Washington University. His incarceration was later found unconstitutional. But Kleindienst says “the Red Squad” of the city police department—Bomb & Arson—paid regular visits for years. And in early fall 1979, a detective called to ask whether Kleindienst knew where Mac McCann was.
McCann ran Mor or Les, a lesbian bar on South Grand that had just been firebombed. The word twining through the grapevine was that for some inexplicable reason, police suspected that she’d bombed her own bar.
“I have no idea where she is,” Kleindienst said, taking the long way around the truth. Then she panicked. The bookstore was the signup spot for bus rides to the upcoming National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights. What if the police showed up and seized the clipboard that held everybody’s name and phone number? She ran across the street and thrust the clipboard at Karen Duffy, owner of Duff’s Restaurant. “Can you hold on to this for a while?”
In 1998, after the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was thought to have been lifted—though no one knew for sure—Left Bank invited him to do a reading. Chain bookstores had pulled The Satanic Verses from its shelves; Left Bank had not.
In 1999, a publicist called to offer Henry Kissinger, and Kleindienst respectfully declined. “It would really be confusing to our customers,” she explained. Soon after, a staffer poked her head into the office and told Kleindienst, “Jerry Berger’s on the line for you.”
“Oh, f—k,” Kleindienst groaned. She wasn’t sure why Berger was calling, but she knew it couldn’t be good. She remembers saying, “You know, he’s a war criminal,” and seeing Leibman cover his face. Sunday morning, she opened the newspaper to a big headline: “Left Bank Books Says No to Henry Kissinger.”
She held fast against a flood of criticism, saying evenly, “Discriminating about what you do in your business is not censorship. If you want his book, we will make sure you have it. But you will know when you come here who we are.”
Even a few Left Bank staffers wished Kleindienst had been a little less outspoken. Finally, she snapped, “The man who hired me went to prison for his antiwar activism. Has something changed here that I’m not aware of?”
Sometimes I am a mother with 40 children. –Eloise
Left Bank cheered on local artists, hanging Michael Eastman’s photographs and urging a bookish, quirky, and colorful young woman named Mary Engelbreit to show her work. For years, literary nerds gathered there on Bloomsday (June 16) for a 24-hour reading from James Joyce’s Ulysses. People got married at Left Bank. They discovered or rediscovered whole chunks of their identity. The LGBTQ section “was a huge part of many people’s coming-out process,” Kleindienst says.
The day after 9/11, she constructed a reading list about the Middle East. After Michael Brown’s death and the Pulse nightclub shooting, she did the same: “And in all these lists, there was room for books on grieving and on explaining death to children. Explaining anything to children.”
Even the death of Spike, Left Bank’s third cat.
The first cat, of course, was Captain Nemo, rescued by Leibman, half-drowned, in Forest Park. The second was Jamaica Kincaid, named by the store’s customers. Malley remembers the night Jamaica came upstairs, uncharacteristically, during a crowded reading: “She walked to the front row, jumped into somebody’s lap, and kneaded a little, testing. Didn’t like that lap. So she proceeded down the second and third rows, testing laps one by one. She tested every lap in the audience, and not a single one of them met her requirements, so she jumped down and went downstairs. Everybody was laughing so hard, the poor author had to stop.”
Spike “was named totally for himself,” Leibman says. Sarah Holt, children’s and teens’ specialist, remembers one particularly tense, wearisome Inventory Day. While the preoccupied humans counted and cross-checked every book, Spike sat down on a keyboard and accepted Windows 10.
Which was incompatible with the store’s inventory system.
Spike survived the aftermath, but he was eventually found to have an advanced and untreatable cancer. He died on December 21, the third-busiest day of the year.
“Everybody was crying all day but waiting on customers,” Kleindienst says, “and I was really worried about the parents who used to bring their kids in, saying, ‘We’re going to see the cat! You get to see the cat!’ No, you get to explain death to your child.” She brings up her fist, à la Shirley Temple: “You’re welcome!”
The next day, they were “fielding a lot of sympathy and offers of kittens,” says Holt, “and a woman came in with this tiny kitten, and I thought, Oh, no. She’s going to try to get us to adopt it. She said, ‘This is Turkey’—she’d found him on Thanksgiving—‘and we need to pay our respects.’ She’d rescued him as an orphan, so she’d been bringing him to the store to interact with Spike.
“It’s only tangentially related to books,” Holt adds, “but it means the store was a safe place. It provided a sense of community. Even for a kitten.”
I always say what’s in my head. –Eloise
The chore of closing time was prying rapt customers away from the used books in the basement and shooing them out the door. One night, Janie Ibur told a new colleague, “There’s a guy downstairs still. Don’t worry, I’ll get rid of him.” A minute later, Ibur was screaming at the top of her lungs, “Don’t you know we have lives, too?” The customer yelled right back, and they both stomped upstairs.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Ibur said to her aghast co-worker. “Have I not introduced you to my brother Jim?”
Now St. Louis’ poet laureate, Ibur overcame her shyness at Left Bank and became its comedic genius. If somebody came in asking for Kleindienst, Ibur would say gravely, “She’s having her medication adjusted” or “We’ve put her on administrative leave.” Later, Kleindienst would find people asking her the strangest questions, then realize: Janie.
Ibur loved the store’s guarantee that “if you’re an outsider, you don’t have to be one here.” Nobody who worked at Left Bank made much money, but whenever cash flowed, the owners shared it. Kirsten Jacobsen remembers a long, festive late-’80s holiday meal at Balaban’s with a bonus envelope at every place. She sailed out the door without her envelope, and when she got home, she called Kleindienst in a panic: “Tell me that was a check.”
Nope. $300 in cash. All gone. But because Jacobsen was about to leave for Guatemala, Kleindienst organized a quick collection and bought her a pair of sturdy hiking boots.
The booksellers at Left Bank were a quirky mix, as smart and curious as Eloise. A birthday was celebrated the way a big, fond, boisterous family would celebrate it—not always on time but lavishly, with exquisite French pastry or deliberately bad poetry or very good poetry by Phil Barron, one of those luminous souls who died too young and can’t be forgotten.
In his obit, Barron was identified as “writer, bodhisattva, champion of the vulnerable.” Another close friend and co-worker, Holly Silva, remembers how “people would walk in and say, ‘There’s this book with a purple cover,’ and before they’d even finish the sentence, he’d be stepping down off that little platform 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 overexcited 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 clipboard at the front counter so it could be reordered. “There was a series of board books about a little dog, so we’d add fantasy 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 continues, “and there were a lot of strong personalities 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 wondering 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 person who would 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 independent 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 mental 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 realize 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 clothing 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 hardcover book we sell, we probably see a dollar,” 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 experiments—a café next door; a downtown location that opened right when the 2008 recession hit and closed six years later. But Kleindienst and Steele redirected 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 bookstore 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 different 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 usually 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 generation of folks who are taking over or starting 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 country. Why’s the concept catching fire now?
“I think people want authenticity,” she says. “The age of computer screens is morally and spiritually bankrupting, and people 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.”
