More Than ‘Just Books’ — The Spirit of a Community

“It ain’t in books,” Jack Hitt used to say. The longtime owner of Northtown Books considered bookselling a public service, a tradition still in practice the day the store burned down in January.

Jack had once been Arcata’s police dispatcher. During a time on the East Coast, he was an ambulance driver. Upon his return, he started a coffeehouse. In a town with a surplus of churches and bars, it was briefly a community center. So was the bookstore.

It was the late ’60s. The student strike center had become a draft counseling office, then started selling books and moved into a former Northtown bakery. An old economy was dying, another being born. Other vacant Arcata storefronts became a record store, a shop that sold and repaired fiddles and banjos, a place to buy organic food, a church that was now a free school.

People couldn’t afford much — paperbacks that cost a dollar or two. A few hardbacks — “The Ashley Book of Knots,” “The I Ching,” “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens” — were browsed till dog-eared. A public service.

I was the first of Jack’s employees who wasn’t a poet, though I was pre-qualified — over-educated and under-employed. He came into the kitchen one evening, claimed he needed someone to pay bills.

I couldn’t pay my own bills. Didn’t even have a checking account. Jack had to show me how to match statements and invoices. When I’d finished my first afternoon of work, I was proud of the little pile of stamped envelopes. “Shall I mail them?” I asked.

“Oh god, don’t mail them,” he said. That’s when I understood the bookstore wasn’t altogether a business. The Hitt family was among the most wealthy and respectable in Arcata, but what Jack was most proud of was their history of invention and risk-taking.

Books were already being swallowed up by a new corporate empire of acquisition and merger. Amazon was on the horizon: the book as a soulless commodity. Small stores, even small chains like Borders, died off like dinosaurs. Humboldt County — even cute little Arcata — has not been exempt from this sanctification of growth. A new Amazon fulfillment center is coming to McKinleyville.

The burning of all those books in January’s fire was a terrible thing. We were fortunate no lives were lost. But the spirit it revived in our community was a blessing. With all that water poured onto that half-block of Arcata, from the ashes of all those books, something was reborn.

Pray we keep it alive.

Jerry Martien is a poet living in Elk River. (For more on the fire and Northtown Books, see “Dante Undaunted,” March Senior News, page 4.)