At first I couldn't find it. I strolled down the recently renovated N. Market Street to inquire in one of the many antiques stores; the clerk, who said she only worked Sundays, had never even heard of it and advised me to try my luck at Aunt Bea's across the road. On the way back I realized my mistake: the sign that hangs over the bright yellow façade declares the building to be a laundry. But there, barely visible in the transom window, is a stained glass sign that says, "Books."
No one was manning the front of the store. I browsed the aisles for a while and looked for something to pique my interest. A few biographies looked tempting. I seriously mulled over Neal Gabler's An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood for a couple of minutes (Life: The Movie by the same author is excellent, by the way), but I couldn't remember if I'd already bought it for future reading, or if I'd only made a mental note to buy it for future reading. (There are still boxes of books yet to be unpacked, but my suspicion is that it's the only the "mental note.")
The shelves are arranged according to a system that is the proprietor's own. It isn't as indecipherable as other bookstores I've been to, but it does take a bit of time to figure the system out. The broad categories — history, fiction, travel — are there — well, in the front room, at least; entropy tends to take over the further back one moves (the "Pilot Picks" bookshelf in the very back room, for example, has become a catch-all "potpourri"and books there no longer come backed with any particular recommendation) — and that certainly makes both aimless browsing and single-minded missions possible.
Eventually I was spotted and the owner, who was munching unshelled peanuts and sporting a pair of tie-dyed plastic spectacles, along with his apparent partner in crime, came out of hiding to help me find whatever it was I was looking for. By then I'd made up my mind that I wanted something to do with early Spokane history. As he tore into a handful of peanuts, Tom, as he'd later introduce himself, asked me to narrow down the meaning of "early history." Native American history, early settlers, books along those lines, I said, and he began thumbing through the spines on the history shelf with a sense of urgency and purpose. He turned up an 1858 speech given by Isaac Ingalls Stevens ("our illustrious first governor") and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
I was in luck, Tom said, because he'd had a recent delivery of Native American-themed books, one of which was a biography of Sitting Bull that I didn't have the cash on hand to pay for. I'd hoped this admission would get me some kind of sad sap discount, but my loss was his gain. He said he'd been looking forward to reading the books himself.
At the book-strewn counter we got to talking, as often happens, and then we got to talking in German, because, as it turns out, Tom studied the language to advanced degree level and then later taught it. He lived in Germany for a time as a Gastarbeiter, too; his stints in the country were more sporadic than mine but over a longer timespan. First in '68, if I remember correctly, again in '72, and then a few more times after that. Any bookstore owner who reads Kafka in the original language deserves some literary street cred, no?
More of Tom's bio came out over about two hours of idle chatter and what I'll call erratic asides, the pertinence of which wasn't always apparent at the time but does make some sort of loose sense in hindsight. He and Terry, his good-natured sidekick, make for a Heckle and Jeckle kind of duo, albeit as antagonistic toward each other as the cartoon characters were toward adversaries, and the course of conversation never did run smooth, particularly when both of them were struck with a burning question at the same time. The topics hopped from massacres in US military history to Orwell, to the debatable impotence of German police, to the seasonability of Spokane's local economy, to the history of the building (a Japanese wood-fired-cum-coal-fired laundry, apparently, up until 1949) and the wondrous smells and creatures that inhabit its basement, on to the history of Pilot (a fixture of Moses Lake for eight years before it was transplanted to Spokane), and on further still to the viability of eBooks, until finally resting on the best way to extract a Hunter S. Thompson DVD from its case.
If, to borrow and twist a quote from Voltaire, a place like Pilot Books didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent it. A visit is highly recommended. Go when you've got an hour or two to spare, though do keep in mind that customers, particularly those who interrupt valuable reading time, are seen as a necessary evil.
Pilot Book Store. 3108 East Olympic Avenue, Spokane, WA 99217-6046. Tel: (509) 487-1548. Both Tom and Terry are proudly self-avowed Luddites, so don't expect the store to have a blog or website anytime soon. Cash or local check only.
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