Nettell was the one who convinced Torrey to republish it. This year, Torrey House Press is reissuing “Stone Desert” in an updated format that includes Childs’ sketches and portions of that initial journal. Buying something from that place and taking it out into the world - it meant something different coming from there.” “If I hadn’t bought that journal for that winter in Canyonlands, I might not have written that first book, and then I may not have written a second book. “I realize that’s where book writing started for me,” he says. That journal, a leather-bound Oberon, became the bones of his first book, “Stone Desert,” which kicked off three decades of writing about the natural world. That dedication and desire to go beyond the norm of bookselling seeps out beyond the writing community to the readers in town and folks who are passing through. “The shop is right in the middle of my home landscape and that’s where I first held that journal in my hands,” he says. In 1993, writer Craig Childs was on his way into Canyonlands for a season when he stopped into Back of Beyond looking for a notebook to take with him. This change in ownership raises some big questions about the future: Can a bookstore devoted to writing about the West hold on in a changing West? And can the magic of a local bookshop sustain itself when so much of what we read and write and buy and think about today happens online?īookstores work in funny, nonlinear ways. Writers like Williams credit Back of Beyond’s owner, Andy Nettell (who has owned the shop since 2004) and his employees with holding on to the community fixture - and with holding the line on the creep of Amazon by fervently supporting local readers and writers.īut change could be coming. They do a remarkable job of dancing down the line.” “Both the myth of the West and the reality of the West. “It’s like a time capsule of the West,” Irvine says. By February ’90, a measured nine months later (which was no coincidence, I’m sure), bookseller Jose Knighton, who had been selling books in Salt Lake City, had wrangled funders and opened the doors on Back of Beyond Books, a dusty desert bookshop dedicated to writing about the West. They decided they needed to start that, because, as Abbey once wrote, “Freedom begins between the ears.”
A place dedicated to the rangy deserts of the Colorado Plateau, the rowdy writing about environmental issues and the way the West is changing. Moab, Utah, needed a bookstore - a reliable place to buy books in the desert, as well as a memorial to Abbey’s legacy and the canon that he’d created. The details of what went down that night have been clouded, but after the dust cleared from the celebration, the rebellious literati of the American West had come up with a plan for the best way to solidify Abbey’s memory.
The service started with readings and got rowdier from there. Author and veteran Doug Peacock showed up late, sneaking in quietly because he was on the lam, running from the FBI. Montana-based writer Rick Bass had hitchhiked after his rental car ran out of gas. But for many of the 500 people in attendance, it didn’t matter what it took to get there - the spirit of Abbey, the acclaimed (and controversial) author, demanded their presence. It was at least a mile down a dirt road at the far side of Arches National Park to the site of Edward Abbey’s memorial service on May 20, 1989.
0 kommentar(er)
