Mauney Cove's Bargain Book Shop is For Hardcore Book Lovers
Published by the Biltmore Beacon
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If you drive about a mile past the dump on Mauney Cove Road (near Maggie Valley), then take a plunge of a right into a very steep drive that might scrape the undercarriage of your car, you will be confronted by a low slung cinderblock building, painted baby blue and without windows. This is the Bargain Book Shop.
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It’s likely that the store’s owner, Ms. Mary Messer, will be in her house upon your arrival, which happens to be directly adjacent to the store. Her dog will alert her (and her neighbors) to your arrival, at which point she’ll emerge from her residence and slip quietly into the store behind you as you gape at the end result of a good 50 years spent acquiring books.
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If you’re like me, and coming from a world of cavernous Barnes and Nobles, you’ve probably never seen a terminally full bookstore before. It’s remarkable, in both sight and smell. Ms. Messer estimates that she has 200,000 books currently in stock — and the building is not large. You walk in passageways no wider than a doorway, flanked by stacks of books that extend formidably to the ceiling. Your limbs will suddenly feel clunky and wayward; your body will have to be contorted in profound ways to be able to get anywhere beyond the very front of the store. This is no place for claustrophobics or giants.
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Shopping here involves much calculation in terms of risk-reward — it might not even be, strictly speaking, safe. Say you spot a pristine book from an admired author, but it’s toward the bottom of one of the many seemingly load-bearing walls of books that reach the ceiling: do you attempt to dislodge it, and thereby risk triggering an avalanche of hardcovers?
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During my first visit to the store, I made such a choice by trying to liberate what looked like a first-edition copy of The Godfather from one such tower of books. Calling to mind the immortal “tablecloth trick,” I figured if I yanked it out with sufficient speed and panache, the books above it would remain more or less undisturbed. I was wrong. Almost knee-deep in books, I issued a loud apology that I hoped would reach the front of the store, where Ms. Messer sits in a sort of cubicle that appears to be made out of books. There was no reply — I imagine that, for her, the sound of large quantities of books falling is too familiar to notice.
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While slithering through the store, you’ll also notice many signs, written in permanent marker and tacked to the walls. Many of them are benign, e.g., requests to please try to maintain the rough organizational scheme of the place, notifications for discounts, etc. But then there are the signs concerning shoplifting. Chilling in their conviction, they state in jagged and very forbidding letters that shoplifters will: a) be caught on camera, b) be made to pay huge and seemingly arbitrary fines, c) ultimately wind up in a certain four-letter locale mentioned at great length in the Bible. One can only speculate as to the truth of these ominous messages, but compulsive shoplifters should nevertheless stay far, far away.
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When I asked if she took credit or debit cards, she said yes, but that in order to run a card she must exit the store and walk up to her house. I couldn’t imagine making her do that, so I paid for my two books with cash; you probably should too. I handed her a $50, and she went about making change, a lengthy process which involved moving several stacks of books to access an assortment of bills underneath (which I assume she’d stored there to flatten out), and hunting and pecking from a plastic container full of coins.
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It should be mentioned that Ms. Messer is herself the author of a book, Moonshiner’s Daughter, which is available for purchase both in the store and on Amazon. What’s especially notable about her story is that her father, seeking help for his liquor making, recruited the man who would become one of Appalachia’s most (in)famous figures: Popcorn Sutton, a moonshiner and bootlegger, who killed himself — carbon monoxide poisoning — March 16, 2009, “apparently” to avoid a federal prison term for making moonshine. He was 62.
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Of Popcorn, Ms. Messer remembers a rough-mannered, disagreeable man — “he used the f word every time he opened his mouth” — who married five times and whose own children were kept far away from him for fear he might influence them in unlovely ways. She told me that there are plans to make her book into a movie, but that the project has hit a rather serious snag because the director — an unnamed man from California — recently lost his toe in an accident.
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Bookstores like this are becoming increasingly scarce. To me, bookstores like this are a welcome departure from those corporate “Bookstores” (the very word increasingly seems like some sort of euphemism) that, in the age of illiteracy and the e-book, cravenly resort to selling gummy worms and useless bric-a-brac. Unlike these places, the Bargain Book Shop is unapologetic, uncompromising. It is, admittedly, also a mess — but if you’re at all fond of books, it’s a beautiful, beautiful mess.
