By Marnie Craig
In 1994, a team of book lovers with handcarts and strong backs wheeled bookshelves and boxes of books across Hamilton’s Main Street into the corner storefront on Main and Third, where Chapter One Book Store has stood for 26 years. This independent bookstore has survived the rise of Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, the Great Recession and a pandemic.
Some dust has settled on the shelves since Governor Bullock closed all non-essential businesses to slow the spread of COVID-19, so over the weekend, employees and bookstore owners Shawn Wathen and Mara Lyn Luther cleaned the store for reopening on Monday. Signs on the doors say only ten people can be inside at one time.
“We will have tape on the floor to show what six feet looks like and we will have a regular wipe-down schedule,” Luther said. “We will also offer curbside pickup.”
The last day the store was open before the shutdown went into effect was the busiest day of the year. The community poured in to support the bookstore before they closed the doors.
“It was like a wake,” Luther said. “We couldn’t hug each other, and people walked out with tears in their eyes. Life was pretty scary. We didn’t know what temporary meant or what things would look like on the other side. Would we survive?”
“We locked our door for what was supposed to be two weeks, but none of us believed it would just be two weeks,” Wathen said. “When we locked the doors, we were uncertain if they would ever open again.”
Black and white handmade signs in a typewriter font hang from the ceiling to designate book sections that Wathen and Luther have thoughtfully curated over the years. The store is filled with books, but books aren’t the only thing customers find inside. Wathen and Luther encourage conversations by providing what the community wants. “We want our community to know we are their bookstore and we want to be part of their conversation,” Luther said.
She said it is the human-to-human book recommendations and conversations that people come in for. Both owners support conversation as an art form, and they like to talk with people about books. “We could talk about books all day long, that’s why we work here,” Luther said. “We talk about books with the customers and we continue the conversation after they’ve left.”
Wathen said Chapter One has a story, and the people that come in and make a personal connection are part of the story. “We are curating and narrating that story,” he said. “You can’t do that online. It feeds into the whole narrative of how a bookstore is part of the community. Bookstores remind people of the power of language to share ideas and concepts in a way they can have real discussions.”
Wathen started working at Chapter One in 1996 because he was unemployed and hungry. He and his wife Laura had just returned to Montana after living in Paris and Poland. Bookstore owners, Russ Lawrence and Jean Matthews, were concerned that a Ph.D. candidate of East-Central European Intellectual History wouldn’t stick around long at their small-town bookstore, so they asked him to commit to six months. Before long Wathen was hooked — he was vested in the community. Five years later he became a partner and in 2009 he bought the store. “I didn’t think anything in the world would make me want to be a business owner,” he said. “But there’s something a little different about books.”
Wathen’s son Brendan said growing up in the bookstore made books and literature part of his personality. “When I was a kid, I would spend my lunches in the school library,” he said. “I would stay up late reading at night and my parents would often tell me, ‘no books at the dinner table’.”
Brendan wrote a novel in high school. After graduation, he traveled and wrote a novel while living in Morocco. Today he lives in Eugene, Washington, and spends his time writing fiction. He recognized how important the bookstore was to the community when his parents took him to a dinner party. “The bookstore seemed to be the entity linking all these people together — whether they worked at the store, were friends of the owners, or just loved books and frequently stopped in,” he said. “I’ve been to a lot of bookstores and although I admit I am biased, I have yet to find its likeness.”
Luther started working at Chapter One in 2005 because she loved books. In 2010, she bought into a partnership with Wathen. “If I had known I could have gone into the book business I would have done that in school,” she said. “Shawn was a progressive open-minded and charmingly curmudgeonly business partner who made it easy for me.”
Luther’s daughter Mikaela began life in the bookstore as an infant. “She learned which books she could touch and pulled the used books off the shelf and surrounded herself with them,” Luther said. “Today she is six and a half and likes to read graphic novels. She is recognizing words and putting sentences together.”
Becky Boykin is a longtime customer of Chapter One. She attends the once-a-month Saturday morning book club that Luther facilitates where readers spend an hour discussing a book and an hour Skyping with the author. She learned about books in translation and Eastern European literature by attending Wathen’s lecture series at the Bitterroot Public Library. “I learned so much,” she said. “There were books I never would have read had it not been for his lecture series.”
She attended the ‘book club at the bar.’ “It started at the Silver Coin Casino, but because it wasn’t accessible to me, they moved it to Taco Del Sol,” she said. “They brought in lower tables and chairs from the store so I could participate because I am a person who uses a wheelchair.”
The store has had a website for two decades, but most people don’t know it’s there. Book recommendations, conversations, author book signings, release parties and lectures are part of the intangibles you can’t get online. Wathen said this is why the store has thrived.
“It’s one of the things Russ and Jean wanted to do when they brought the store to Main Street,” he said. “They wanted it to be a community space, a fundamental part of the downtown landscape, not just to sell books but to have people feel safe with divergent ideas. As long as the community wants us here and they value what we do, we will be alright.”