Hooray for a Neighborhood Book Seller

by Laura Arnow

Last fall I was at a yard sale on El Camile when I spotted a 1970s vintage Unabridged Websters Dictionary, perfect for my third-grade classroom, and I told the gentleman so when I asked the price.

"For you, it's free," he said, but insisted on inscribing it first. But instead of signing his own name, he wrote, "From Nikki Silva."

"Hey," I said, "I recognize that name. Isn't she on NPR?"

He confirmed that Nikki is one of the Kitchen Sisters, occasional contributors to public radio, and that she is his daughter. She grew up in that house in Maxwell Park. I was tickled, and so were my kids, who love that dictionary even though they can barely lift it.

It took a whole year to track down Nikki's e-mail address. I couldn't locate her until her current series, "Hidden Kitchens," began to air in October. Right away I e-mailed her to thank her for that dictionary. She and her dad were so touched to hear about its fate that they sent me a check for $100 to buy books for my classroom.

Oh, I could have ordered books from Scholastic or gone online to Amazon, but instead, I called Luan Stauss at the Laurel Book Store.

Then I put my whole class on an AC Transit bus, and we rode over to High Street and then up from East 14th to MacArthur, and we paid a visit to the Laurel Book Store. Luan and Shilo were excellent hostesses to a rambunctious group of kids, but the kids were largely respectful and did a nice job of spending more or less exactly $100 on a range of material from Hamtaro to Judy Moody. They were delighted to make the acquaintance of a bookstore owner and to ask her questions about how she got all those books on the shelves and how many books are in there anyway.

Hooray for our neighborhood independent bookseller! And for NPR, too!