I’d hoped I’d read the headline wrong: “Red Brick Books—Springfield’s Last Bookstore—hangs in there.”
But in truth, I already knew it was true: I’d seen Johnson’s Bookstore, on Main Street, close up shop not longer after I came to the city, then, more recently, watched Edwards Books, in Tower Square, fold. And I recalled reading, some months ago, that even the Waldenbooks in the Eastfield Mall had thrown in the towel.
Still, I suppose I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that a city of 150,000 people, home to several colleges, the southern post of the so-called “knowledge corridor,” was down to just one damn bookstore.
Earlier this week, Springfield Republican columnist Tommy Shea offered a sweet peek into that sole survivor: Red Brick Books, a used bookshop on Page Boulevard in East Springfield—the kind of place where true readers like Shea will be rewarded for their diligent perusal of the stacks (among his finds the day he visited: a Pete Hamill novel for a buck twenty-five).
Marcia Fuller, Red Brick’s owner, told Shea that when she heard that hers was the last remaining bookstore in the city, “It was a little hard to believe and very sad to hear.”
Amen. True, Springfield does have a fine public library system, with multiple neighborhood branches. And fans of best-sellers can always find them at supermarkets and discount department stores, not far from the toilet paper and bananas. But for a city like Springfield to only have one bookstore is, indeed, very hard to believe, and very sad.
(A side note to fans of the late Edwards Books, and all fans of good books: the downtown landmark lives on in the pages of “Shelf Life: Romance, Mystery, Drama, and Other Page-turning Adventures from a Year in a Bookstore,” by one of its former employees, author Suzanne Strempek Shea—who also happens to be married to Tom Shea.)
