Say Farewell to an Old Friend

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Elliott Bay Book Company moves on to Capitol Hill. Will we?

Photography by Andrew Waits

When literary types heard that Elliott Bay Book Company might close forever after thirty-six years in its landmark 1890 Pioneer Square home, wailing e-mails flooded City Arts. “I just screamed, ‘No!’” wrote Lorian Hemingway, a Seattle author (and Ernest’s granddaughter). “Punch to the gut,” lamented LA Times rock critic and ex-Experience Music Project curator Ann Powers. “Oh no!” wrote Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief). “It’s always been one of the crown jewels on a book tour, along with Powell’s [in Portland] and, oh, one of those Minneapolis stores and [Denver’s] Tattered Cover. Wow, how depressing.” “Sorry to see Elliott Bay – and so many independent bookstores – go,” wrote spy novelist and former Seattle Weekly columnist Alan Furst.

Those reactions proved to be somewhat premature, as owner Peter Aaron announced last month that the historic book store would live on in a former Ford truck repair shop on Capitol Hill. The bookstore will move into the space on 10th Avenue, between Pike and Pine, sometime this spring, likely in March, though Aaron says the date is not set yet. The 1930s Ford Building at 1521 10th Avenue is not quite as picturesque as the 1890 Globe Building the beloved bookstore currently occupies, but Elliott Bay may improve in some ways. “It’s got its own parking underneath,” says Aaron.

Will the reading room in the new Elliott Bay be as big as the beloved Pioneer Square basement where almost ten thousand authors have read? “I’m hoping it’s gonna actually be a little bit bigger.” He has similar hopes for the space devoted to books.

“Elliott Bay is beyond a mere bookstore,” wrote poet Tree Swenson. “It’s an enchanted place that has transported tens of thousands of people out of their boring, quotidian, plodding days into wider, deeper, more expansive and more intense lives. The loss of this historic space is sad beyond measure, but the place will live on.”

Let’s hope so. Much is at stake with the move of Seattle’s literary institution. EBBC events coordinator Rick Simonson didn’t just bring Al Gore, Kurt Vonnegut, Umberto Eco, Joan Didion and then-underground Salman Rushdie to Seattle; he advised publishing giants like Sonny Mehta, helped propel rising stars like David Guterson, Amy Tan and Terry Tempest Williams, and penned an influential column in the industry bible Publishers Weekly. Can this literary landmark survive a transplant to Capitol Hill?

“I think moving to Capitol Hill is brilliant,” says novelist Ryan Boudinot, who wrote some of the fiction that made his name at Elliott Bay Café, next to the reading room. “Elliott Bay would be closer to its natural clientele up on the hill. I always wondered just how many drunken sports fans and bachelorette partiers the store managed to siphon out of Pioneer Square. Whatever happens to the viaduct is going to disrupt everything down there, and if EB moves to Cap Hill they’ll be close to the new light rail station. Plus, better restaurants, cafés, and the excellent little Pilot Books, too. I think a move to Capitol Hill is a win-win-win for the store, its patrons and the neighborhood.”

The key, experts say, will be to retain the place’s identity as the center of literary culture. “When I think of Elliott Bay, I think of readings,” says novelist Mark Lindquist. “Richard Ford, Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, Martin Amis. Sometimes I went to see authors I didn’t even particularly like just because the reading was at Elliott Bay – the patina rubbed off on all of us who read there.”

Elliott Bay was where so much literary drama happened. You’d think Gwen Knight and Jacob Lawrence would have met Toni Morrison in New York, since they’re all from there. “Nope, they met right there in Elliott Bay’s book-lined reading room, in the sanctuary of Seattle book lovers,” says painter Barbara Earl Thomas, who introduced them. “It was sweet.”

“I met my ex-husband [Jonathan Raban] at Elliott Bay,” says novelist and critic Jean Lenihan. “He was reading from Hunting Mr. Heartbreak, and I introduced myself while he was signing. I’m sure those damn brick hollows also contributed to my rash romantic hopefulness.” Even though the marriage eventually ended, Raban says he’ll probably remain a Seattleite until his daughter is off to college (and he goes off to London or New York).

Once they’ve stepped inside the Pioneer Square building, nobody leaves the enchanted circle that is Elliott Bay. “Elliott Bay was family,” says Hemingway. “Even if you’d been gone for five years or seven or ten, it was still family when you came back.”

No doubt Aaron will strive to keep that family feeling alive in the new place. But we have a New Year’s resolution to propose: Seattle’s entire literary flock should vow to gather at the original Elliott Bay Book Company at least one last time before the epochal move.

Think of it as a poignant flash from the past – and, as Thomas puts it, “prelude to the next chapter, non?”

More Elliott Bay Memories:

Lorian Hemingway
Author, Walk on Water; founder, Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition
I remember a reading with Tess Gallagher. It was from a fishing book in which she and I had stories. Tess wore a fishing hat with lures dangling down in front of her eyes as she read. I was charmed enough to forget my own ever-present stage fright and laugh. So many good times. The warm feeling of the room downstairs where the readings took place, the old pull-chain toilets in the restroom, the feel of history. One last memory: Tess and Raymond Carver reading together. He read poetry. She read fiction. They teased one another. They looked into each other’s eyes once in awhile as if there was no one else in the room, and those who were there bore witness to “what we talk about when we talk about love,” oh yes indeed.

Dan Ireland
SIFF cofounder, Hollywood director
While I lived in Seattle, Elliott Bay was the most respected and cherished place to buy books. My dear friend Lucy Pond, astrologer extraordinaire, used to give readings there every Wednesday. I’m so happy you’re doing a tribute to them, they’re on my “one of the reasons to move back to Seattle” list.

Mikal Gilmore
Author, Shot in the Heart
A singular and valuable place.

Ann Powers
LA Times rock critic
When I was in high school I was a major nerd, desperately aspiring to be a bohemian. My school, Blanchet, offered chorus and the spring musical, but nothing remotely hip in terms of a hangout. At least twice a week my friend Nora, who went to Holy Names, and I would meet in the Elliott Bay Café and eat chocolate mousse and look at the dusty volumes lining the walls, and make eyes at the would-be poets and other literary types sipping soup and hanging out. It was my first taste of what a winemaker might call the “terroir” of bohemia. Yes, we bought books occasionally, but the main thing was just being around them, and, even more so, being among other readers, people who cared about culture and thinking and being smart. Years later, when my first book, Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America, came out, I fulfilled a lifelong dream by giving a reading at Elliott Bay. My parents came. I think it was the only literary event my Boeing accountant dad ever went to in his life. I was so honored and delighted that it could happen in this place that meant so much to me. I hope the bookstore lives on for the next generation of kids who need to find others who dream the same dream, in the flesh.

Matthew Zapruder
Wave Books editor
Its marvelous naturalistic, even slightly Ewok-y wooden halls are not only great to be in but also somehow emblematic of the spirit of Seattle. So yes, it’s a shame they are moving, but I’m sure wherever they land, they will continue their great programming and collection.

Ellen Heltzel
Coauthor, Between the Covers: The Book Babes’ Guide to a Woman’s Reading Pleasures
My most significant memory of being in Elliott Bay: the mentally challenged person who attended our reading last fall.

Mark Rahner
Seattle Times critic, coauthor of Rotten
I stepped inside Elliott Bay for the first time when I was a young nerd visiting Seattle. It was like discovering the Alexandria Library in Nerd Shangri-La, and I wanted to live there. I felt like Burgess Meredith in that Twilight Zone episode, but without the broken glasses. It was like visiting Scarecrow Video years later and finding that not only did they know who Lucio Fulci was, but they had a whole shelf devoted to him. I’m pretty sure my mom had to drag me out by the hair.

Bob R. Longino
Former Seattle Times and Atlanta Journal-Constitution culture editor
It was the first great bookstore (outside of New York City) I entered. What I loved was the wood and the layers (the nooks and hideaway places in which rested glorious volume after glorious volume). I loved the respectful silence that permeated the store. It was a monument to literary nirvana.