*Life without books is death.
I don’t pretend to know the business side of running a bookstore/café like Sarasota News & Books, but I do claim to know the emotional side of being one of its patrons.
When I moved back to Sarasota five years ago after living in Boston for years, Sarasota News & Books saved my sanity. Not being a barfly or club-goer, it was at this bookstore that I became a regular, staving off crazy-lonely feelings in the company of books and book-lovers. It was there that I scribbled out the beginnings of an essay entitled Café Chess – Très Sexy that would later launch my (so-called) career as a writer in Sarasota in a column that celebrated the cerebrally-sexy chess players sitting at the café’s outdoor tables.
But Sarasota News & Books served a far greater role in our community than to simply feed the emotional needs of lonely-heart, would-be writers and lovers of café society and books. It became, almost by default but considerably by design — thanks to the owners and the smart and charming managers and bookselling staff – a whole lot more. It became, quite simply, one of the last bastions for casual, nearly free, public intellectualism in Sarasota.
Sarasota is chock o’ block full of places for the glitterati. You can’t throw a martini shaker in this town without hitting some “arts” event or gala fundraiser where hipster types seem to spend half their nights striking poses for society page photogs.
Sarasota’s literati, however — the people who get their Saturday-night thrills not from seeing and being seen at the hotspot du jour, but from discovering a new book, rustling through the pages of a newspaper, debating healthcare with strangers at the next table, or just relaxing alone, in the company of others – have always had just one place in this town, really, to call their own: Sarasota News & Books.
Since the days of Charlie’s News, the various bookstore, café, and newsstand incarnations at 1341 Main Street have attracted what constitutes Sarasota’s intelligentsia – book-lovers, news-hounds, artists, students, aficionados of salon-esque society, masters of the local zeitgeist, visiting politicos and authors, and of course, local writers.
But more importantly, the newsstand cum café/bookstore consistently provided a place where folks of varied interests, ages, and zip codes could grab coffee, the news of the day, and browse, buy, and read the one item that has the single biggest influence on the individual and collective intellect – a book.
And, especially for a community that likes to applaud itself for its culture, a bookstore of this kind was essential. Because truly, there is no culture, there are no arts, without first cultivating the mind through the regular reading of books.
At Sarasota News & Books, the mind was extraordinarily well-served. More than the books that were sold, however, it was the intangible essence of the environment that stimulated not just the senses, but the sensibilities as well — with roomy tables and banned book displays, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that practically made you swoon, and huge arched windows that encouraged the pleasures of people-watching and absent-minded wool-gathering. It was a much-needed home away from home for locals and visitors alike.
When my book, Sideways in Sarasota, came out in 2008, Andrew Foley, as he had done for many other local writers, graciously hosted a book launch for me. And just about six weeks ago, Foley again opened his café up to me and another local writer, Theresa Rose – this time for a joint talk entitled “Sex, Socrates and the SRQ” that ran the gamut from sexuality, to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to my soapbox yammering about, ironically, the importance of reading books.
The audience came not only to buy a signed copy of a local author’s book, but to hear and discuss ideas and have a smart evening out that didn’t involve donning Jimmy Choos and busting a C-note. More than a few of them commented on what it meant to them to have that kind of intellectual and communal event and environment.
Sarasota News & Books didn’t just feed the intellect as a purveyor of the written word; it became, particularly in recent years under the cultivation of Caren and Dick Lobo and the Foley siblings, a thriving heart of the community and a much-loved mecca for Sarasota’s life of the mind.
It will be missed.
(this piece published in Creative Loafing newspaper September 2009