CALLIE
MOUNT VERNON, OHIO
PRESENT DAY
People tuck the strangest things into the pages of their books. Dried flowers. Birth certificates. Twenty-dollar bills. One time I found a baby’s tooth crammed down the spine of Ginger Pye. I’m not entirely certain what type of person stores a tooth in a children’s book—perhaps a boy or girl saving it for the tooth fairy.
The owner of a book, I’ve discovered, can be as intriguing as the author. And owners often lose more than someone else’s story when they give away their books. Sometimes they give away a part of their story as well.
My story is the same as any other in that no one owns it except me. And it’s filled with threads of achievements and regrets, seemingly random bits of plot that meander across the pages of my everyday even as I sell other people’s stories, the sort neatly sandwiched between two covers with a spine that’s either stiff or slightly worn, smelling of musty leather and ancient ink.
Below my bedroom—a bedroom where, at this very moment, I’m supposed to be asleep—is the bookstore owned by my sister and me. Some nights, like this one, sleep is fleeting as my mind tumbles the unpolished pieces of my story over and over, trying to smooth out the edges.
When I realize there’ll be no respite from the tumbling, I decide to seek the company of friends and their secrets. A mug of chamomile tea in hand, I slip down the back steps of my loft apartment.
More than fifty years ago, Charlotte Trent opened Magic Balloon Bookshop on the ground floor of this colonial brick building, next to her husband’s ice cream and soda shop so kids could enjoy a treat along with a new or used book. The Trents were never able to birth children, so they welcomed an entire village into this store as their own, including my sister and me.
When I was younger, I’d spend hours here after school, reading books that took me to the faraway places I longed to see. Now, as a bona fide adult, I can go down and read whenever I like, including these late-night hours while everyone else in our small town is asleep.
While some might proclaim the death of the print book, every day dozens of kids still tuck themselves away with a book on beanbags or in the hidden spaces of the two-story castle that my sister’s carpenter husband, Ethan, built for us. The kids of Mount Vernon and the surrounding county now know me as Story Girl, a role I’ve embraced since my fifteenth birthday, when Charlotte gave me a pair of red-striped socks and a copy of L. M. Montgomery’s novel about a girl who entertains a group of children with the most fascinating tales, some true, some not.
Charlotte’s gift changed my life in more ways than one. In The Story Girl, the children find a picture of God portrayed as a fierce, cruel man and take this picture to a minister, crying as they ask if that is what God truly looks like—a face of hatred instead of love.
The minister’s reply is simple, but his words affected me in a profound way.
“God is infinitely more beautiful and loving and tender and kind than anything we can imagine of Him.”
In my own tears, a new picture of God began to form, a smile on His face instead of an angry scowl. Montgomery’s words, the truth ingrained in them, stitched themselves into my teenage mind. God wasn’t cruel like my own father had been. He loved me, Calisandra Anne Randall, a girl who craved beauty and kindness and, more than anything, a family who cared about me.
After reading The Story Girl, I realized that I wanted to spend the rest of my life working with books, helping change and expand the perspective of others through the power of a great story.
A few years later, Charlotte gave my sister, Brianna, and me another present. After she retired, Charlotte gifted us with the keys to her bookstore and then she moved out of the apartment over the shop, into a condo east of town. I still have my striped socks. And a decade after Charlotte handed over the keys, Brie and I still own this shop.
A cramped office in the back of the store hosts Charlotte’s antique desk—a giant walnut piece with carved braiding around the edges, fancy Queen Anne legs, and iron pulls on the eight drawers. The desktop is covered with papers, a computer cord, and paper clips, along with two pictures of my sister with Ethan and their four-year-old twins, Owen and Oscar. Two boys who I’m pretty sure worked together to hang the moon with their dad’s hammer and nails.
Books line shelves above the desk and spill over the edges of cardboard boxes on the carpeted floor, filling in all the spaces of this room. The bottom desk drawer holds the thick album that Brie and I have been compiling since we took over the store, the forgotten items left in the stacks of used books sold here.
With one swoop, I push aside the clutter on the desktop and open the album to see if Brie has added anything new to our collection. Stored inside the fifty or so vinyl sleeves are letters, theater tickets, and all sorts of pictures—formal ones dating back a hundred years alongside Polaroid prints and more contemporary pictures of birthday parties, beach trips, and one of a family visiting a medieval church somewhere in Europe. But there’s nothing new inside.
Brie is two years younger than me, and she’s the chief book collector and manager of our little shop. I’m part-time sales clerk, website manager, blogger, and Story Girl, though my name should probably be Story Lady since I’m fast approaching my thirtieth birthday. The income for all the above is miserly, but my apartment comes with the job, and I have a bicycle and two good legs to pedal wherever I need to go in this town. And if I want anything else—I lower the voice of my mind as if I might offend these walls—I can buy it online.
I’m the curious one of the Randall girls—Curious Callie is what Brie used to call me after our favorite little monkey, though my curiosity is fueled by purpose these days. I research and post articles about children’s authors and then spend my free time updating the expansive Lost & Found section on our Magic Balloon Bookshop website.
When Brie and I first took over the bookshop, I tried to find the previous owners of the bits and pieces we discovered in our collection of used books by contacting whoever sold us the book. Now when we find something, I post the item online instead.
The postings generate a lot of traffic from other curiosity seekers like me, but in the past eight years, no one has ever emailed or called to collect a letter or photograph or that tooth I found in Ginger Pye. Still I post, driven by the hope that one day I might actually reunite someone with a significant item they’ve misplaced. Restore what was lost to its original owner.
At least once a month Brie and I also find money hidden in the pages of a book, but we keep mum on the cash lest we have a host of people calling to claim it. While kids and adults alike often view their books as safety-deposit boxes, my sister and I have started a real savings account with this extra money in a bank down the street. It’s our own secret stash, more than two thousand dollars now accumulating interest.
I jump at the sound of rustling behind me. Inkspot, our resident cat, hops onto the desk and knocks his tail into my tea, the drops splattering across the vinyl pages of the album. A swift whisk of my sleeve wipes up the liquid, and then I pet his white fur and the perfectly formed black splotch between his ears.
Sometimes I wonder if he’s down here at night with his super vision, reading about poor Tom Kitten or perhaps the Cat in the Hat. Like me, he’s found refuge inside these walls.
Some books, I think, can be like cats. No matter where they’re sent, they have this uncanny ability to find their way back home.
Turning, I lean over and lift a hardcover book from a recently delivered box. It’s a newly printed edition of Djibi, the tragic story of a cat who liked adventures.
I ordered four books to read as I research for my next monthly post about a children’s author, this one an Austrian man named Felix Salten who wrote in the 1920s and ’30s. Salten wrote stories about a variety of animals, some of the creatures pursued by hunters. Sadly, as a Jewish man, he became the hunted one when the Nazis took over Austria.
“You can read this one later.” I nudge Djibi toward Inkspot, tapping the cover illustration of a gray cat. “Assuming you know how to read.”
He doesn’t mew in response, but he eyes the cover.
Under Djibi are three other recent editions of Salten’s books, all of them translated into English. The Hound of Florence. Fifteen Rabbits. Florian: The Emperor’s Stallion. After I publish my blog on Salten, I’ll put all these books on our shelves to sell.
A much smaller box sits beside the one with the Salten stories. The tape is dangling off the edge, and I peel it back to remove another of his stories. Instead of a new copy, this worn, early version has the ruby-red sketch of a deer embossed on its cloth cover, the deer’s eyes seeming to search for a friend.
Bambi: A Life in the Woods.
A 1931 edition, according to Roman numerals on the copyright page, printed in Vienna. It’s a classic I’ve read before in English, a story that bears little resemblance to Disney’s version. I didn’t order this book, but Brie knows about my featured post for July. Perhaps she’s planning to surprise me with an early edition for my birthday.
Nothing sparks my imagination more than the discovery of an old book in any language. Like an abandoned house, I wonder at the many stories it could tell of its journey, beginning with its birth in an Austrian printing shop almost ninety years ago.
The clock on my phone reads a quarter past two, but I’m still wide awake so I wander out into the bookstore, the old Bambi edition under my arm, and settle into a blue twill beanbag sized for an adult.
Light from the streetlamps filters past the display of books in the front windows, streaming between the shelves in this room. I flip on the bronze sconce high above the castle gate and glance across the shop. Colorful Japanese lights bubble above the front window, and curved bookshelves ripple like sea waves across the carpeted floor, around the dozen or so beanbags that stand like stones in the tide. A hot-air balloon, pieced together from papier-mâché, dangles above the castle, beside the loft. To my left is the front counter with its antique cash register alongside a modern iPad and white Square.
When Charlotte first opened this store to supply readers with French, German, and English resources, she thought it vastly important that children read books that would grow and expand their minds, stories they could cling to as friends when others weren’t friendly. Brie and I followed suit when we took ownership, only buying books for the store that we’d let our own children read. Or read eventually. I don’t have any kids yet, and Brie’s twins prefer picture books over ones with actual words.
In the back corner of the shop is a platform with a puppet theater. I’m no good at puppets, but I sit on that platform every Saturday for my weekly appearance as Story Girl to read the brilliant words of authors such as Dr. Seuss, Robert Munsch, and Doreen Cronin. Lately I’ve taken to wearing a cherry-red cape to match Charlotte’s striped socks since my younger audience members are convinced I’m somehow related to WordGirl from PBS. The youngest kids also think I can fly.
I’ve never bothered to explain that the only time I’ve ever flown is in my dreams, on the nights I’m able to sleep.
Inkspot settles in beside my beanbag on a pink square of rug, and I open the cover of Bambi. Inside is an inscription, written in beautiful script. Thanks to Charlotte, I can read some German.
Annika Knopf
Schloss Schwansee, 1932
I push down one of the corners, bent from wear, as my brain tumbles the words into translation. The Castle of Swan Lake.
Underneath the name of the castle and date is another inscription, simple and yet deeply profound.
Mit all meine Liebe, Mama.
My fingers against the page, I can almost feel the lingering heat from this mother’s love, and my thoughts travel back to the woman who birthed me and then thought it witty to name me Calisandra, after herself and the abbreviation of her favorite state—a woman who moved to Santa Monica when I was two and left me behind with the man who never got around to proposing marriage. A man who died fourteen years later. Sandra Dermott friended me on Facebook while I was in college. She has a family in California now, four children whom she clearly adores.
What happened to the girl who once owned this book in my hands? Did she treasure her mother’s gift for the rest of her life, or give it away?
The pages are smudged, worn. In the first section are illustrations of Bambi and Faline, and then pictures of the stag and Man.
The book was written a decade before Hitler came to power, but Hitler, I’d read in my research, amplified the anti-Semitism already rampant in Europe. Perhaps Salten saw the scribblings of persecution long before they coated the walls.
Turning the pages, I begin to notice something different about this version of Bambi. In black ink, under the original German print, are extra lines on every other page as if someone decided to add to the story. I recognize many of the German words in the story, but none in the handwritten lines.
My eyes finally heavy, I close the book and lower it to the carpet.
Brie and I have found plenty of books marked up in the past, but I’ve never seen handwriting like this at the bottom of the pages, as if the words were part of the original story.
Who marked up this valuable edition, almost a hundred years old? An aspiring author, perhaps? Or had someone tried to leave a message hidden in the pages?
My skin tingles at the thought.
Charlotte’s ability to read German has faded in her twilight years, but it’s not gone. Tomorrow, after my appearance as Story Girl, I’ll ask her to help me translate these lines. Perhaps there’s a simple explanation for the additions.
My hand slips down to find Inkspot’s fur, but it lands on the Bambi book instead. And I fall asleep right there, dreaming of old books and balloons and cats who like to fly.