Staff Favorites/Ex-Employees

Ex–Employees Unbound: Tales From the Other Side of the Counter
Patty Friedmann wrote this article for our Wag 7 newsletter.

by Patty Friedmann

Riddle: What does the associate dean of the Columbia University Business School have in common with the creator of Mary Reilly? Or with the founder of WWOZ-Radio? With a first vice-president of Merrill Lynch? You might think you know the answer, but you’d be wrong.

They all worked at Maple Street Book Shop. And if patrons of the shop have memories of its 30-year history, then it follows that staffers are even more filled-to-the-brim with anecdotes and emotions. Some ex-employees were contacted to give their best recollections.

This writer, too, worked in the shop. For three weeks, re-alphabetizing the paperbacks on the wall in the front room. It was a short stint, with wages taken out in books (retail value, of course), and I remind myself of the people who spend a semester at a fancy college and then claim lifelong membership in the alumni association. But I got enough of an insider’s view to satisfy my curiosity–and I came away with an anecdote of my own. It has something to do with Rhoda running around the shop waving the business end of a broom, winning my eternal admiration. And because she has that admiration, I’ll add nothing more to the story.

JACE SCHINDERMAN, New York, Associate Dean for Special Projects, Columbia Business School

I was 25 in 1976, when I moved to New Orleans from New York. It was a city I knew well from my undergraduate days at Tulane. When I left in 1973, I had no idea that I would return. But return I did, excited about my prospects of being back but terrified at starting a new life and finding a job.

Britton introduced me to Rhoda when I came for an interview at the Book Shop, legendary to me from my school days. I remember Marigny telling me that everyone gave me odds of lasting from two weeks to four weeks. With two strong personalities, everyone was sure that Rhoda and I would never get along.

In fact, Marigny was right about the strong personalities. What couldn’t have been predicted though, was that Rhoda and my book shop friends–Marigny, Cutting, Mark, Wendy, Betty, M.A., Fej, and others–would become my new family in my new home.

Marigny Dupuy, Mark Zumpe, Wendy Weil,
Jace Shinderman, Kate Montgomery (seated)

The quirky atmosphere suited me to a tee. I loved playing inventory games and trying to remember to enter the TOTAL asterisk at the top of the adding machine tape (it sounds like fun now, but after calling off 100 titles without an asterisk at the top and having to do it all over, it wasn’t).

I learned from Rhoda about drinking gallons of bouillon at lunchtime to stave off hunger. I never quite got the hang of it; I just chugged down the bouillon and then ate my nutritious salad with about a pint of blue cheese on top. I felt that I was the living end when Walker Percy told me what a great Bloody Mary I made, especially when I found out that the sentiment was preserved for eternity in his inscription to me inside my copy of Love in the Ruins.

Mostly at the shop, we all just treasured books together. For me, it was the photography and movie books in particular. I loved to sneak a long look at the special order books that we kept over the window and in the bathroom, handing them over to the customers without cracking the binding when Rhoda was around, and lingering over them in the bathroom when she wasn’t.

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