Maple Street Memories, loving tributes to the book shop by Consuelo Abaunza Faust, Â daughter of co-founder Mary Kellogg, and Chris Wiltz, dear friend and supporter of Maple Street.
Memories of My Bookshop by Consuelo Abaunza Faust
My mother Mary Kellogg Faust (now Mary Kellogg) and her sister Rhoda Kellogg Norman started Maple Street Bookshop in 1964. Iâm pretty sure it was an act of spontaneity for them, at least it was a huge surprise to me when Mama came home one evening and told me she had bought a bookshop. (Actually they had leased the building at that point â with bookshop intentions.) I was 11 at the time and I remember jumping around the house and running everywhere telling everyone in the neighborhood. I couldnât contain my excitement at the idea of having a real store! And I did always see it as my store. Over the next few years my mother would sometimes let me sit behind the desk and take the money, figure out the change and write down the name of the book and author in a notebook that was kept on the desk. Those were pre-cash-register days at the Bookshop.
I really felt like royalty. I would bring all of my friends to the Bookshop after school â from Allen School and then from McMain Jr. High. Mama would hand us money to go get hamburgers and snowballs at Miss Amyâs down the street â to get rid of us no doubt, but we would happily stuff ourselves and come back to the Bookshop for more entertainment. I remember having no patience at all for customers. The idea that I couldnât say something to my mother exactly when I wanted to was frustrating â so basically I interrupted those exchanges sheâd be having every chance I got. Iâm not sure I ever really got over the habit of thinking that the customers were less important than me communicating with my mother.
I had always been a reader. My mother read to me all the time until I started reading my own books. Later she coined the word âbibliotherapyâ â at least I think it was she who invented the word⊠at any rate thatâs what it always was for me, a need to read, along with a desire â but more of an emotional need.
One of my early memories is of lying on the couch at our home on Joseph St. as my mother read Charlotteâs Web to me one hot afternoon. Iâm not sure where my sister and brothers were but it seemed that we were in the house alone. As we came to the end when Charlotte dies, I was sobbing and making involuntary choking noises. As I looked over at my mother she lay there with tears streaming down her face. She kind of smiled at me. I had never seen her cry before. And her smile and maybe her tears made me laugh. Then she laughed. Then we cried harder than ever and again we laughed at ourselves.
One of the great privileges of owning a bookshop as I did, was being able to take whatever books I wanted home with me and there was always a huge stack at the end of the day as my mother and I packed up to go home. Many of the books I chose at age 12 or 13 were books I heard my mother and her friends from the Tulane English Department discussing. I remember Carl Jungâs Man and His Symbols was one. Also John Lennonâs A Spaniard in the Works, as well as The Annotated Alice and something by Freud. Also periodicals: Ramparts and The Evergreen Review. I would read little things from these books and magazines and sometimes even begin a book and make myself read more than a few pages. But mainly they looked good on my bookshelf.
I knew that after a few days or a week my mom would gather them up and bring them back to the shop â but it didnât matter because I could always bring home more.
MEMORIES, DREAMS, AND NIGHTMARES. It Was Thirty Years Ago . . . by Chris Wiltz (on the occasion of Maple Street Book Shopâs thirtieth anniversary)
ALSO READ:
Bright Lights On Maple Street (November 24, 1992)
In 1965 I bought my first book from Maple Street Book Shop. It was 50 Poems by e.e. cummings and I still have it. Mary Kellogg and her sister Rhoda Norman opened the store earlier in the year, and the bookmarks boasted âFive Rooms of Paperbacks,â something the city of New Orleans never had before, a shop dedicated to stocking the greatest and latest in paperback books. Before the year was out, the book shop was well known for something other than its growing stock and willingness to special order books.
Because Mary and Rhoda Norman felt like fish out of water in mostly conservative New Orleans, the bookstore became a place the left wing and avant garde could depend on as a source for their books and as a meeting place. They would hang out on the screened side porchâwhere the travel section is todayâschmoozing until after dark, sometimes well after closing hours if anyone had enough pocket change to run down to Brunoâs and buy a few beers to fuel the conversation.
In my memory it was all glamorous, everyone wearing dark glasses, black turtlenecks, and long hair (my memory may not be so reliable on some of these finer details) except for Mary who always seemed to have on a crisp white cotton blouse, wore her hair short and frosted, and had sunglasses with cool-green lenses.
Part of the glamour too, Iâm sure, had to do with my being younger than those I perceived as the hip intelligentsia, the college professors and students who dressed in black and talked about Neitzche. I was only a high school senior, beneath the notice of that group, and not only that, Rhoda and I were usually tearing in after school, out to do some âblazingâ as we called it (which usually meant checking out some boyâs house or whereabouts) and looking for some extra funds. Mary would ask Rhoda what we were up to, get absolutely no satisfaction that I can recall, and only in self defense finally open the cash drawer and hand over a few bucks.
Hard to believe, but it was thirty years ago that Rhoda and I met at Fortier High School. One of the teachers there, Charles Macmurdo, put us together as editor and managing editor of the school newspaper. I remember his telling me before he introduced me to Rhoda that I would like her very much and that we would be friends for a long time. Prophetic, indeed, because thirty years later we are still the very best and closest of friends.
As it turned out, Mr. Macmurdo and Mary Kellogg were two of the most influential adults in my life, Mr. Macmurdo for introducing me to Rhoda and allowing us to be rather creative, shall I say, with the school newspaper. Students used to congregate in the halls on the day the paper came out to see what Rhodaâs survey was that month (she covered topics such as âWhat historical figure would you like to be and why?â Morgus was a popular response) and to find out what I was taking to task on the editorial page, none of which I remember now. It was also due to Mr. Macmurdo and his consuming love of literature that I became a novelist.
But it was Mary Kellogg who ended up having the most prolonged influence. Iâd never known women like Mary or Rhoda Norman before. They were both glamorous and smart; they owned a book shop. And they were mothers. I didnât see Rhoda Norman as often as I did Mary, and anyway, Mary was the mother of my best friend. I spent a lot of time at their house.
I watched Mary handle Rhoda and her sister and two brothers (a major handful, believe me!) without ever raising her voice, though I did see her go up to her bedroom and lock them out a few times. But Mary and Rhoda Norman let us smoke cigarettes in front of them (on one special occasion) and talked about men in front of us. I was enthralled.
The summer after high school Rhoda and I spent three months blazing, playing chess, and getting into Maryâs hair. There was a very brief part of that summer that we made some sort of pretense of working at the book shop, but I think it wasnât long. I donât think Mary could stand it. She probably paid us to stay away.
Then Rhoda and I both went off to college. We wrote letters every now and again and kept up with each other during summers. The summer after our freshman year we came home to discover that Mary had hired Marigny Dupuy to work in the shop. Rhoda had already met Marigny and hated her on sight, mostly because Mary spoke so well of her and clearly liked her a lot. Also, Marigny was on territory Rhoda perceived as hers.
So one day while we were out on a blaze, Rhoda suggested we go over to the book shop and give Marigny the business. We arrived at the shop with our toughest attitude only to discover that the object of our attitude was intelligent and funny, and though we didnât want to admit it right away, we liked her. All that was left was to shed the tough weâd put on as gracefully as possible.
Marigny, because she is a nice person, made it easy, and Rhoda and I formed another lasting friendship. Some years later Rhoda asked Marigny to manage the Maple Street Childrenâs Book Shop, and I named my daughter after her.
Before that happened, though, the three of us worked in the book shop together, separately, and on and off, and there were some pretty wild times. It often seemed, in fact, that the shop wouldnât survive us. During one period, our days began with the landlord, Mr. Applewhite, bringing us Tom Collins drinks from Brunoâs, and the crowd that congregated on the side porch started scaring off customers. But Mary, who was off being a political activist, came back and saved the store.
Then Marigny, Rhoda, and I went our separate ways for a few years, Marigny to the Northeast, while I went to California and Rhoda stayed in New Orleans, though eventually she spent part of a year in Okinawa.
I was in San Francisco for my last year of college when my mother wrote and enclosed a Times- Picayune article about a Mardi Gras ball, and there was a picture of Rhoda as one of the maids of Momus! Rhoda, you have to understand, personified âhipâ to me in those days. She was a rebel, a female James Deanâand now a Momus maid? I couldnât believe it and immediately sent off an expressive letter of my disbelief. Â Â Â
Later I found out that Rhoda had failed to attend the Queenâs Supperâan egregious insult to Mardi Gras royalty. Now that sounded like the Rhoda I knew, the Rhoda who eventually made sandals and peace signs at the first Love Shop in the French Quarter, and became a successful hippie entrepreneur, a total contradiction in terms, but Rhoda is very much like the city where she grew up, full of contradictions.
After college I lived in Los Angeles for about a year, but my roots called me home, and I packed up my VW bug and trekked across the Texas desert one more time. I got a job at Tulane Medical School and waited for Rhoda to return from Okinawa.
Once again, the book shop became a focal point of my life. Soon, though, Mary and her daughter Consuelo and Rhoda Norman decided to do some traveling.They hit the road, driving first to Florida, up the East Coast, across the country, eventually to arrive where Iâd just returned from, California. While they were gone, they left the management of the shop to a young man named Ricky Coxe, who I could tell was in love with Mary.
We didnât know at the time that Mary, Rhoda Norman and Consuelo would never return. Shortly after Rhoda Faust got back from Okinawa, she got a call from Mary asking her if she wanted the book shop, and telling her that if she didnât, then she was going to sell it. It didnât take Rhoda long to decide; she told Mary yes and called me to see if I would quit my job at the medical school and come help her. I gave notice that day.
We could see that Ricky Coxe was hard hit by all this news, first that Mary wasnât coming back, and second that Rhoda was going to take over the shop. He gave us a half-hearted tour of the stock and the paperwork, but I had trouble staying tuned in because Rhoda had told me that Ricky had a bubble of air trapped in his brain from a deep sea diving accident and he could die at any moment.
Ricky stayed in New Orleans for a while but ended up in New York. It wasnât long before we heard he died there, sad and terrible news. I never forgot Ricky, though, and 18 years later when I wrote The Emerald Lizard, I gave a character Rickyâs ailment.
Our 30th Anniversay Party
Iâm not sure that either Rhoda or I listened very closely to Ricky, and Iâm not sure that even if we had it would have saved us from all the mistakes we made running Maple Street Book Shop over the next couple of years. Customers were interested in new books, so we stocked more hardbacks than the store had normally carried, but we didnât know anything about returns. The first Christmas we didnât order nearly enough and with no time left to supplement what we had, we ran out of Christmas stock. The next Christmas we over-ordered fiercely and lost money when we didnât return books in a timely manner. Not only that, we had no idea that the book business entailed the amount of paper work it did. Systems had to be developed to keep up with it all, systems which over the years Rhoda has perfected. But we muddled along as best we could, miraculously didnât go under, and things began to look up by the third year. Rhoda had found her niche in life and once things were running smoothly at least, I went off to try my hand at writing novels and found mine.
Many of the most pivotal events in my life happened at the Maple Street Book Shop: I met my first love; I learned of the suicide of a good friend; I made the two most enduring friendships of my life; I learned about books and the world of publishing. And I know that my story is only one of many that center around this atmospheric hub of bonhomie for book lovers of all persuasions; I am one of many thirty-year frequenters of the shop.
When Mary Kellogg and Rhoda Norman opened Maple Street Book Shop thirty years ago, they were celebrating their independence as women and free thinkers. When Rhoda continued the tradition they began, she tempered it and balanced it and turned it into a thriving store that has been written about many times as one of the best independent book stores in the country. May the tradition continue.
