Eric Wilska said something in passing that I thought profound as he showed me around Shaker Mill Books. “Nobody can throw a book away,” he told me. Eric should know. He’s the recipient of thousands of books — many donated, some purchased — that line the shelves and much else at Shaker Mill, a new and used book store in West Stockbridge, MA. “It’s the glory days right now,” he added. “Baby Boomers are aging out and giving us books.”
I first met Eric while he was boiling maple sap at his sugar house in Old Chatham, NY. I was frankly less interested in the chemistry, or is it alchemy, behind turning sap into maple syrup than I was in his day job. Eric has been in the book business since 1974 when he left his supermarket job trimming lettuce, and with a $4,500 loan opened the Bookloft in Great Barrington.
He ran it for forty-two years, putting four kids through college, before selling it in 2016. Shaker Mill might be considered a retirement project, though my impression from watching Eric making maple syrup or wandering around Shaker Mill — its converted historic grist mill is as much a book-themed art installation as a store — is that one would have to redefine retirement as something entirely kinetic. If not quite poetry, one might describe Eric’s way of being as quality prose in motion.
I’ll get to the store and it’s delights in a moment. But first about those Baby Boomers, a demographic of which I count myself a member, and shedding their books. I don’t possess as many volumes as Eric — while Shaker Mill has 35,000 titles there are 200,000 more at a nearby warehouse — but I own thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of books thanks to my father. He had an author interview show on the radio in New York City doing the 1970’s and 1980’s and was deluged with books from publishers. And once his show ended he continued to solicit more books.
While visiting his sugar shack I tried to interest Eric in acquiring the murder mystery section of our basement. After my father died in 2005, many of the volumes still in boxes, I shelved them by category. I generally don’t read murder mysteries. I read so slowly that I don’t read much of anything, even though I’m always reading. But pretty much every book in the basement is by definition a first edition, most of them with the “pub slips” — information about the book’s publication date and price — still inserted.
But Eric didn’t exhibit particular enthusiasm about taking them off my hands. Maybe his mind was on making maple syrup. But, as he mentioned, folks are contacting him every day to release them from the bondage of their old books. And as he noted, nobody can throw a book away. Why is that? Perhaps because books are so human an object, an extension of the dreams and personality of the author whose sweat and tears produced them. They’re about as animated as an inanimate object can be.
That may also be why independent bookstores continue to survive in the face of megalodon online booksellers like Amazon. There’s a thrill peculiar to walking into a bookshop. Whether new or used. They’re filled with the promise of discovery and acquisition. They trigger something atavistic in the recesses of the brain.
And then there’s Shaker Mill Books, with the scenic Williams River running through the backyard. The operation is divided into two parts. There’s a reasonably conventional bookstore and then next door the grist mill that Eric has converted into an easy-going shrine to literature. The front counter is composed of stacked books. There’s a “Read Dress” on display designed by Lenox artist Deb Carter and fashioned from 850 pages of Webster’s New World Dictionary. A dog house made from books and book covers provides a home to a stuffed Black Lab puppy. Why? This is one of those charmed places where the more appropriate question is probably, why not?
For all his experience Eric’s understanding of the book business isn’t infallible. Exhibit A: the five hundred copies he purchased of a hardcover classic edition of Edith Wharton’s Custom of the Country. I assume at a bargain price. Having recently read the book myself, slowly, I can attest that the story of a small town ingénue who rises to the heights of Manhattan and Parisian society is a page turner, as insightful today as it was when it was written in 1913. I heard that director Sofia Coppola was working on a series adaption until Apple + pulled the plug because they found the protagonist, Undine Spragg, “unlikeable.”
Perhaps that tells you everything you need to know about our current age. People are afraid of their own shadows. Undine’s craven unlikeablity is what made her such a great character. “I sold two copies in two years,” Eric confessed. So what did he do with the rest of them? “I made a brick wall out of it,” he said. And he did. The edifice, several feet high, rises in a corner on the second floor.
Shaker Mill has spectacular over-sized books as well as sections devoted to local celebrity authors such as Simon Winchester, who was due to visit that afternoon. A specimen case acquired from the Albany Museum of Natural History currently houses not dinosaur bones but autographed first editions. One of them caught my eye — a copy of Jerzy Kosinski’s Blind Date inscribed with a self-caricature to the “Sheeds”. That’s a reference to the Wilfred Sheeds, the late novelist and essayist, who lived in Great Barrington at the end of his life. I also own a Kosinski novel with a caricature inscribed to my father. Eric’s had a price tag of $75, suggesting that the sentimental value of mine exceeds the market value.
As I was leaving a fellow approximately my age drove up in an SUV filled with boxes of books. Eric stoically helped lug them into the store. Perhaps one should think of what he’s doing, as well as selling books, is performing a public service. He’s unburdening book lovers of one of the more painful decisions they’ll have make and helping answer one of their hardest questions: what’s to become of my books when I’m gone?
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
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