Signing Books In the South

By Wayne Greenhaw

Throughout the southeastern U.S. there is a liberal sprinkling of independent book stores. They are run by friendly open-armed sellers who not only welcome customers but embrace writers with a genuinely warm hospitality. They are well-read up-to-date providers of information on today’s and yesterday’s books.

My first booksigning took place in November of 1968 at Capitol Book & News, a small indie in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, where proprietor Victor Levine was an amiable gentleman who not only hosted the party with his wife Jean but became my life-long friend. After selling more than a hundred copies of The Golfer, my first novel, Vic and Jean took me across the street to the historic Whitley Hotel, where we had more than one celebratory glass of wine and a platter of appetizers.

Little more than a year later, Vic called the newspaper where I worked as a reporter and invited me for coffee “with a friend who wants to meet you.” I went, met Nelle Harper Lee, and we talked and talked over coffee. After that meeting, every time Nelle came down from her home in New York to visit family in Monroeville, she called and we met Vic and enjoyed each other’s company. We shared not only an editor, Tay Hohoff, at J.B. Lippincott, but Victor Levine’s friendship.

Some years later, after Vic sold his store to his clerk, Cheryl Upchurch, and her husband Thomas, we continued a warm friendship. When Nelle Lee visited to buy Christmas presents at this small book shop, we got together, shared coffee and conversation, and talked with Cheryl and Thomas, who also visited the author of To Kill A Mockingbird from time to time in Manhattan.

From my first booksigning I learned that writers are valued by the people who make their living selling our books. Through the years I have met many. In the early days of Southern Independent Booksellers Association (SIBA), we met in a hotel in Nashville and read from and talked about our books. In that informal atmosphere, Ferrol Sams and I talked at length about our families. Roy Blount Jr. and I talked over drinks. All of it was a delightful learning experience for this boy who was raised mostly in rural Alabama. From the legendary Mary Gay Shipley, whose That Store in Blytheville, Arkansas, is a gem to Jake Reiss’s off-the-beaten-path Alabama Booksmith in Birmingham, the sellers are friendly and open-hearted. It’s always more like a welcoming into a cozy living room than a store’s open house.

After my twenty-second book is published in January, Fighting the Devil in Dixie: How Civil Rights Activists Took on the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama, I plan to travel the South doing readings and signings. I look forward to working with the friends I’ve known for years, like Mississippians Richard Howorth at Square Books in Oxford and John Hughes at Lemuria in Jackson, or Floridians like Linda and Bob White at Sundog Books at Seaside, and new people in stores across the countryside.

Signing once in Burke’s Books on South Cooper Street in Memphis, I wandered amidst the first editions and found From Here to Eternity, my first favorite contemporary novel. I picked it up, felt its strong weight in my palm, and I had to have it. After all, that is part of the process of browsing, to feel and open and peruse the printed words, and experience the wanting.

Signing at the Page & Palette in Fairhope, Alabama, is always a delicious time for me. Not only are Karin Wilson and her booksellers friendly, they welcome my friends and fellow writers, like Sonny Brewer, who founded Southern Writers Reading and edited Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe, and Winston Groom, the author of Forest Gump who lives in nearby Point Clear. And occasionally songster-novelist Jimmy Buffett wanders through the crowded stacks.

In the South, where Wanda Jewell is the guru of SIBA, we writers and booksellers hold hands as we sing her praises. It is all truly a family affair.