Vineyard books, Vineyard writers

"When I think of the Vineyard, my ankles feel good -- bare, airy, lean. Full of bones. I go barefoot there in recollection, and the island as remembered becomes a medley of pedal sensations."
-John Updike, "Going Barefoot" essay, 1989


What a fitting quote for me to find in the bookstore yesterday, on a day when I was concerned with the well-being of mine own feets. (Faithful readers, no worries, my weird feet emerged unscathed from a day of no-sock boat shoe battle)

The first day working at Book Den East was marvelous. The owners, Ivo and Piret, are probably the coolest islanders I've met so far -- they're legitimately, as opposed to falsely, down-to-earth, easy to talk to, helpful, and, most importantly, book lovers.

Book Den East is the only actual used book shop on the island; the only competition is thrift shops and yard sales. This didn't stop us from only getting five buying customers and a few pairs of lookie-loos on a dreary, gray day, but a big part of the job is organization and maintenance in the shop, so it was still a solid day's work. I'll save more description of the shop and what it's like to work there for a day when I've taken photos. For now, suffice to say it was humbling and inspiring to be surrounded by books all day, to take hours to soak in exactly how many writers and works have been published.

A writer can't treat work in a bookstore like any old job. It'd be like Picasso punching a timecard mindlessly for a janitorial shift at the Louvre -- if that didn't cross time periods and I couldn't think of a more robust metaphor, which I cannot. The fulfilling nature of working in a used bookstore also includes endless opportunities to meet authors through their words, with no access to my lightning quick Wikipedia instinct. I spent quite a bit of time sifting through Mr. Updike's material and can't wait to pick up a full novel as soon as possible. [For more about reading, I'll post my summer reading list in the comments. Don't want to inundate this post with any more blather than necessary.]

The point of this entry, the interesting factoid you're hunting for, is that I learned about two Vineyard-centric writers yesterday. One is Henry Beetle Hough, a now deceased fella who helped found the Vineyard Gazette newspaper and spent many of his days as editor and author, writing, from what I can gather, a hybrid of journalism, non-fiction essays and maybe some fiction. I thumbed through a copy of his autobiography, "Mostly on Martha's Vineyard: A Personal Record," and am looking forward to spending more time with it on a slow day. A People magazine article I found calls Hough "almost synonymous with the Vineyard." Sounds like required reading to me. Comparing the experiences I have with places and the experiences writers have chronicled between covers is a blast.

The other author I investigated is Philip R. Craig, also deceased, who wrote a string of 20 mystery novels all set on Martha's Vineyard. They've got stupendously cheesy titles like "A Deadly Vineyard Holiday," "Dead in Vineyard Sand," "A Case of Vineyard Poison" and, my favorite, "Murder at a Vineyard Mansion." Leave it to me, a Stephen King fanatic who honed my suspense chops on heaping helpings of R.L. Stine, but I think Craig's bread and butter was cheap thrill novels meant to be read under a beach umbrella. I'll still give him a shot as he was an unarguably prolific Vineyard author. Plus, he wrote a charming little autobiography on his website, and I made fun of his titles posthumously. I owe him a cruise through at least one measley paperback...