Shift Notes: Upstairs Books Edition
T-Minus two-ish weeks until we open a bookstore, apparently
Upstairs Books is our soon-to-be-opened used bookstore above St. George Pizza in Warren, Maine. Shift Notes is my series of shorter stories about whatever's been happening at the restaurant lately. This week, Shift Notes is about the bookstore. Not sure all that needed explanation, but here we find ourselves.
I.
“we’re such dumb bitches…” my sister muttered.
I sighed, turning away, “I know.”
A mere three hours prior, my younger sibling, Julie, and I had perceived ourselves to be smart or at least enterprising bitches. The two of us had weaseled our way into a 36-hour residency at our parents’ Cape Cod vacation. Justifications of family bonding were used to mask freeloading beach access. Like the unconditionally loving, nice people our parents are — they bought it. And that’s on them!
But karma immediately caught up to us in the Storrow Drive tunnel. The lighthearted tone of “road tripppppppp!” had quickly darkened upon finding ourselves in dead stop traffic midway through the subterranean purgatory ironically classified as an “expressway.” We’d managed to perfectly time our drive to hit Friday rush hour in Boston. And that’s on us!
Julie white-knuckled the steering wheel, keeping sluggish pace behind an nondescript white SUV with the curiosity-piquing license plate, “Timzgirl”. I assisted by performatively zooming in and out of Google maps, tracing where the red line of traffic doom turns to a less catastrophic orange. All the while this blood-pressure-spiking song from my sister’s mystifying playlist blared through her speakers and mingled with the honks of fellow car cave prisoners.
When we emerged hours/8 or so minutes later, we shifted into 5th gear or whatever and left Timzgirl (progressively driven by a middle-aged man) in the dust. We soared over the Sagamore Bridge and the thatched roofs of the once iconic Christmas Tree Shops — may it rest — came into view. We’d made it to Cape Cod.
After an uneventful conclusion to our once-harrowing journey, we’d arrived at our parents’ compact Airbnb. I took one step in the door and promptly got the wind knocked out of me by their dog Luna. This overzealous greeting ("she loves you! give her a pet!") resulted in me dropping my bags, which was ultimately convenient as I was apparently already standing in my bedroom — the mudroom. I looked at my cot, nodded at the rack of coats and pile of boots, and uttered two words: drinks. now.
The following morning, after tossing back some Advil to account for both my sleeping accommodations and wine consumption from the night prior, I joined my family on a classic Cape mission. Not a meal of fried clams or a swim at the National Seashore, but rather, a perusal of the shelves at Parnassus Book Service.
I’d grown up spending a week each July at our Aunt Kathy and Uncle Tony’s small summer getaway in the town of Harwich Port. Core childhood memories include a pound of wet sand falling out of my swimsuit at every post-beach-bathtime, humid nights willing the oscillating fan to make its rotation from my sister's side of the bedroom to mine, and our initial, urgent bookstore run for vacation reads.
While there is no shortage of outstanding independent booksellers on the Cape, none has stuck with me like Parnassus — a former general store so packed with books that they spill out onto racks along the side of the building, in the shade of a forsythia bush.
This return trip felt especially significant — the first time I’d been back since deciding to open Upstairs Books. It had been years, and yet there it was, unchanged. The fact that it still exists at all felt like a small miracle.
Upon entering the 19th century building, my family dispersed. On my way to the fine arts section, I passed the furniture shelves where my father and the proprietor were deep in competitive hip surgery discourse. Him: one. Her: two, with an upcoming back surgery to really clinch the title.
I spent the better part of an hour culling my haul and couldn't help but notice the shop was empty the entire time. I tried not to think too hard about what that meant for the septuagenarian owner — or for me, a soon-to-be-bookseller. If she felt any anxiety, it didn’t show as she cheerfully bagged my finds to the sounds of a staticky classical station on her transistor radio.
After each of us purchased our selected texts, my family stood at our car debating (arguing) over who would drive to the oyster bar for lunch. At that moment, a taxi-yellow Ford F-150 ripped into the bookstore's dirt parking area, nearly manslaughtering me in an effort to secure the closest spot in an otherwise empty lot. The squabble stopped as we silently watched five men in their early 20s emerge clown car style from the big truck's tiny seats. Wearing what can only be described as athleisure-pajamas, they stretched, passed around a vape, and...walked into Parnassus.
And there I stood, a dumb bitch yet again — embarrassed at my surprise that these fine young gentlemen could contain such multitudes. Turns out MMA fans and David McCullough readers aren't mutually exclusive. I left my favorite used bookstore that day reassured not only by its longevity, but by the unexpected range of people it seems to find. Two things I hope to cultivate at Upstairs Books.
II.
Lowball ‘em. It’s the first rule of the cutthroat world known as Facebook Marketplace. And it’s a tactic that has served me well in the acquisition of varied items such as a kiln, a to-scale skeeball game and a 1980s Pepsi vending machine (don’t ask…about any of these).
So, it seemed only natural that my Messenger negotiation style would work on Joanna, the local-ish seller of a vintage cookbook collection. But I should have known I wasn’t dealing with a Marketplace novice when I saw the price: the portentous “$1234.”
Ignoring that warning sign, I read through the rest of the listing, which claimed there were over 4,000 tomes. I couldn’t believe my luck — as someone opening a used mostly-cookbook store this would take care of procurement in one fell swoop.
I cracked my knuckles, clicked “message seller” and typed in my opening offer: a cool $1K. Now we waited...but not for long. Two minutes later, my phone pinged. The immediacy of her response seemed to bode well.
A flat out rejection? This lady was playing hardball. I swallowed my pride and drafted a response:
Ok, wow. So, we’re doing this. I fired back:
The polite yet passive-aggressive trap had been laid. If she was asking that much for precariously piled cookbooks of unverifiable worth, she was either going to have to hold out for the perfect (insane) buyer or eventually come down on the price. And I would be lurking in the social media shadows for the latter.
A new Messenger notification popped up almost immediately. My master haggling tactics confirmed! I smugly opened the app, chuckling to myself: “well, well, well Joanna, we meet again.” The smirk faded as I read her reply:
I’m sorry, did she just call me POOR? After taking a beat to calmly collect myself (read: hysterically ranting to my husband, George), I closed the conversation the only way I knew how:
Just like that, my sourcing dreams were dashed. Discouraged by the book bargaining debacle, I focused on other aspects of store prep. It was during a floor-patching session that I took a break to check my phone and saw a Substack message from a reader:
Cue the stock track of an heavenly choir, because my girl Cathy was an angel. She was headed up to Maine from her home in Rhode Island to visit family the following week and kindly offered to meet me with her boxes of books.
And after Cathy, Amie McGraham reached out, then Henry, and soon a growing pile of donations was filling a corner of the WIP bookstore. Turns out books inspire generosity in *some* people (coughJOANNAcough). Emboldened, I took it to Instagram:
And the local community didn't disappoint either. This past weekend we exchanged complimentary cones of vanilla-pistachio twist soft serve for armfuls of books — the perfect negotiation if you ask me.
III.
I have to be real with you. This concluding essay was going to be an emotionally resonant ending to a trilogy of otherwise silly stories. The theme (as bolded and italicized in my working draft): the impulse to build something for others even if it’s tearing you apart. Yeah, you think it’s all fun and games and Hallmark-movie-adjacent shit around here? Wrong!
I try to use this platform to lovingly and humorously detail the running of two small businesses in our tiny Maine town because the majority of the time it is full of love and humor. But with the ramp up to the bookstore, things have been a bit less so.
The fact of the matter is that despite my Substack-based sugarcoating, there is a lot of stress that comes from owning a restaurant. And I am the first person to ever say that!! Not to be extra-obvious but the majority of it stems from finances. Long story short, and you, even as a non-pizzeria-owner know this — everything is expensive. Longer story shorter, this means that George and I still have full-time jobs to help supplement SGP’s costs.
I liken it to the monthly investment that comes from an equally foolish hobby, like…golf. Except that instead of puttering around a green on Sunday mornings, we are shuffling pies in and out of a sweltering oven on weekend nights. AND WE LOVE IT. But we just get tired, ya know? All this to say, we were at a real breaking point when it started to get warm enough this spring to begin work on the (uninsulated) bookstore space.
Ever since I wrote about the little bookstore I’m opening in the previously undiscovered room above the pizza parlor I run in a 200-year-old building in a small Maine town, there has been an onslaught of questions. For the past few months, I’ve fielded inquiries from people as close as our neighbors in the building and as far as Amsterdam (begroeting!). It’s been thrilling to witness the collective excitement about a 150-square-foot used bookshop. But it’s also been nerve-wracking. With every eager “what’s going on with Upstairs Books?”, I can only respond with an acid-reflux-twinged mumble that we’re working on it.
But we really hadn’t been. Between a never-ending, largely ignored request to our landlord to fix a hole in the roof and, again, our day jobs, it’d been hard to find the will to climb the near-90° stairs to do moderate to major renovation (replacing the death-trap steps being one of them). For my husband George, this wasn’t a biggie — he doesn’t work the front counter, answer Instagram DMs, or read Substack comments. Aka he wasn’t receiving these ravenous requests and didn’t feel the same urgency I did to get started.
While I’d been trying to convince him that this groundswell could translate to more customers, which could mean more money, which could mean less stress, sometimes you just need to witness it for yourself. And that’s exactly what happened one morning over his plate of fried eggs at a local cafe. We’d been sitting there sharing a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice when I noticed we were being watched from across the room by (albeit a cool-looking) woman. I nervously gulped down some pulp as she approached our table — we’re at breakfast goddamnit, far too early for human interaction.
She politely greeted us and apologized for staring, explaining that she was trying to place why she recognized me. To my delight, it was from this here Substack! She went on to tell us that she was particularly interested in local food-adjacent writers because she develops recipes and writes cookbooks for King Arthur Flour. It was at this moment that George slowly put down his fork and turned his full attention to this stranger. King Arthur Flour, THEE flour we use in our pizza dough?? A celebrity was in his midst. He remained silently stunned as she asked about the bookstore and then casually suggested a potential King Arthur collaboration with both Upstairs Books and St. George Pizza. It wasn’t until after we’d exchanged numbers and she’d walked away that George regained the ability to speak. “Oh wow. Ok.”
Did we chug the remainder of our lattes, rush to the car to peel out of the parking lot and back to the bookstore demo site to immediately begin work now that George had seen the light? Well, no — but the seeds were planted. The following day, George put on his best pair of shitty jeans and began the process of installing an exterior door to Upstairs Books.
In the weeks since, we’ve tried to seize the opportunity without seizing up and dying of a heart attack. We’ve found a good balance: George reassures me that interest in the store won’t waver if we open on July 6th instead of the 1st, and I maintain a meticulously detailed list of to-dos in a shared Note. There's still stress and there always will be, but we're taking care of it and one another.
Ok, so I have to be real with you. The revised version of this concluding essay was going to be a quick fake-out — a brief nod to this tumultuous period before pivoting to the aforementioned list of shop tasks I actually needed to be doing instead of writing this. The updated notes in my working draft: Summarize stress re: George and bookstore → pivot to “have no time for this (but my therapist will)” → bulleted list of everything still left to do before we open. But hmmm, it looks like I did just write that essay. Guess someone needed to get that out of her system…
And now I really gotta go do all that shit (spoiler: paint floor, install shelves, decide if we have enough of a selection to warrant a “travel” section) if we’re gonna open this puppy soon!
Girl, King Arthur Flour?! Cannot wait to hear all about this next week.
You're making me wish I was living in Maine instead of Arizona.