When I Was a Girl I Wrapped Books

November 30, 2017 5:33 PM

Erin O. White: The gift wrappers at the Chinook were North End girls, the North End being the old downtown section of a newly sprawling western city, a downtown of treed boulevards and clapboard houses so separate from the city swelling around it that only in college did I learn that the rest of the country saw Colorado Springs as something of a joke: militarized, fundamentalist, ignorant. What I saw instead was Pikes Peak from every street corner, towering and maternal and vigilant. I saw the loud and gentle Vietnam vets who lived in the Albany Apartments and panhandled out front on Tejon Street, the stucco churches with their statues of a brown Jesus, the shallow creek near the highway where in spring we waded in water the color of rust. I saw the Chinook.
posted by mandolin conspiracy (11 comments total)

Thank you for the evening curled up reading!
Good stuff to get me started.
posted by Lizard at 6:36 PM on November 30, 2017

When I was a bookseller (she's right: never a sales clerk), we wrapped our own books. I am terrible at wrapping any gift that isn't book shaped, but I can wrap a book perfectly in about thirty seconds flat.

Working retail on Christmas Eve is a special brand of hell, but it's also kind of fun. I don't miss it, but I kind of miss it.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:39 PM on November 30, 2017 [6 favorites]

The Chinook is closed?!! I have too many books from there. It was a proper bookstore, neither a big box nor a specialty indie. The Springs had a liberal, creative, witchy, intellectual secret heart, but nobody would believe that now.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 7:36 PM on November 30, 2017 [3 favorites]

Wow, this brought back vivid memories of the Chinook. I loved that place - it was a lifeline to teenage me. It was such a joy and relief to go there and just...be surrounded by good books.

The promise of spring.
posted by medusa at 7:55 PM on November 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

The Springs had a liberal, creative, witchy, intellectual secret heart, but nobody would believe that now.

The Springs did have a feisty little counterculture, much of it centered in that little downtown area that had the Chinook, the comics shop (was it a Mile High Comics?) and Independent Records. And I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show something like 50 times at one of the local multiplexes. And made some pleasantly freaky friends. I just took a Google Street View tour of the area and it looks like Independent Records, at least, is still there. BUY SELL TRADE!

I put in my years at the Boulder Bookstore a couple hours north. I worked special events with Douglas Adams, Ken Kesey, Barbara Kingsolver and Frank McCourt and sold books to Allen Ginsberg and Marianne Faithfull. My wife got to meet Jonny Greenfield back when Radiohead was looking like a one-hit wonder, and Peter Garrett from Midnight Oil came in to browse the ecology section and ended up offering to put everyone on the staff on his personal guest list for the show on campus later that night.

Working in a bookstore, even a great one, has never paid well, but it's still a hell of a thing to do if you can afford to.
posted by Mothlight at 9:30 PM on November 30, 2017 [7 favorites]

In the mid 70s someone at UCLA interviewed my grandfather and other former LA bookstore owners for his master's thesis. Grampa described how Marlene Dietrich came in one day during the Xmas rush, saw that they were swamped and pitched in to help wrap.
posted by brujita at 9:50 PM on November 30, 2017 [5 favorites]

My favorite job ever was working at Waldenbooks. And I loved it best during the holidays. Some customers were cranky and rushed but most people were in a good mood. I loved suggesting books to give as gifts. I could ask all kinds of questions about the gift recipient and the customer would answer everything. It was a fun psychological experiment to see how nosy I could be in pursuit of the perfect book for a gift.

I also like wrapping the books. We had to go in the store room to gift wrap so it was a nice little break from the holiday craziness. Our manager always had great candy for us at the wrap stand.
posted by narancia at 6:53 AM on December 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

> Working in a bookstore, even a great one, has never paid well, but it's still a hell of a thing to do if you can afford to.

Yup. It was my first real job, and it paid my (minimal) rent and kept me in pizza and beer, and I got to meet a few famous authors and a lot of wildly interesting people and I got a discount and I learned a hell of a lot and (as ArbitraryAndCapricious put it so well) I don't miss it, but I kind of miss it.
posted by languagehat at 7:34 AM on December 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is wonderful. The Chinook was one of my favourite places and as others have noted was part of the boho heart of the Springs. I knew it had closed, but I don't think I've missed as much as I do after reading that. When I was young and hanging out there, I thought places like that - and that particular place - would always exist, and I'd always have the time to just hang out there, and Poor Johns and the rest.
posted by YoungStencil at 8:51 AM on December 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

It's an uncanny feeling reading about my little corner of the world just as I remember it. I'd cross Acacia Park after school to look at the new books at Chinook, and if I had any money for a new hardcover, I'd ask them to wrap it, even though it was just for me. Just because it felt like a gift.

The cheese shop she mentioned has been closed for 20 years, but I still remember the scent of it, sweetly sour milk and freon from the ancient humming refrigerated coolers. The floor tilted a little.

Chinook was definitely the coveted job downtown. Also the candy counter at Michelle's. But the Chinook
girls always had a kind of aura.
posted by mochapickle at 3:21 PM on December 1, 2017 [4 favorites]

I also wrapped books in a bookstore (the U Bookstore in Seattle, still open) as a young woman, but during the summer. It's one of the best jobs I've had. During slow times (and they were all slow) I giftwrapped Frangos, which were then sold only at Fredrick & Nelson and at the U Bookstore, using cuts of paper we kept for that task and only that task. At the bottom of the box were papers from the 1970s, so I would dig for those. Nobody complained, not even the people who then had to make the floor displays using them.
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:08 PM on December 1, 2017 [2 favorites]