Inside Choctaw Books

A House of Books

Fred Smith grew up in a house of books, some of them written by his father, U.S. Congressman Frank E. Smith. His father was a newspaperman by trade who entered politics after service in World War II. Congressman Smith wrote The Yazoo for the Rivers of America Series and Congressman from Mississippi about his experiences as a moderate Democrat representing the conservative Delta district.

“We were sheltered from the really negative things said about Dad over his support of Civil Rights and his friendship with President Kennedy,” Fred Smith remembers. “Everybody was nice to us children. I didn’t realize until years later how hateful people had been to him.”

Congressman Smith served from 1950 to 1962 until his district was gerrymandered to prevent his election. He lost the 1962 race but was appointed by President Kennedy to the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Later, he taught college courses, wrote more books, and served on Governor William Winter’s staff. From 1982 until his death in 1997, he often manned the desk at Choctaw, himself a book of history.

The story of Choctaw is in so many ways the story of a family who loves books and each other. Given life in his aunt’s shop and sustained initially by his father’s efforts as much as his own, over the years Fred Smith has recruited his mother Helen, his sister Kathy Smith Miles, and his daughter Anna Marie to help operate the store. His wife Mary and oldest son Frank have supported the cause too, handling other duties. His eight-year-old son Luke is “the real historian in the family,” Smith confesses, but out of respect for child labor laws he is resisting the itch to put him to work too.

“When I was young, when we traveled around the country or were in England, we stopped in all the bookstores,” says Smith. “I’ve been surrounded by books since I was a boy. And it is the same for my sister Kathy, who is a librarian at Union College. She went to the University of North Carolina her freshman year, but I told her so much about Millsaps that she transferred. So we graduated together in 1975.

“I like to read history and mysteries, and since my mother is descended from William Barrett Travis, I have been interested in the Mexican War and the Alamo. Well, of course, my son Luke has become such a historian on the Alamo that we had to take him to San Antonio to see it.”

Jacket Required

Building a book collection for a client often calls for historical research, and certainly there is a component of gentle warfare about the process (i.e., haggling over the price). But in this case, both sides seek the same outcome. “Helping people build their collections is one of the fun things about this business,” Smith says. “I have worked with people on Welty and Faulkner as well as more affordable writers. It’s wonderful to know what people need and to call them with it.”

“In real estate, they say it’s all about ‘location, location, location.’ With books, it’s about ‘condition, condition, condition,’ and for collectors it starts with the dust jacket,” explains Smith. “For example, a first edition of The Great Gatsby is worth maybe $500 without a jacket, but $47,000 with a good intact one.”

Indeed, when it comes to collecting, one should always judge a book by its cover. While such gaps in price seem ludicrous to the non-collector, for the collector a fine first edition without its jacket is like a new Porsche Boxster with sun-baked paint and key marks across the hood. It is still an exquisite automobile, but there is something lost that a new paint job cannot restore. With books, it is known as the first state. Book collectors are passionate about the first state. They want the closest thing they can find to the author’s actual mind in motion. Thus first editions are better than later ones, which often include corrections and are printed in large runs with inferior paper and binding.

Whether one is a bibliomanic or merely an impassioned collector, there are common rules for collecting, such as jacket required. Of course, if the jacket looks too good to be true, then it probably is. Just as vintage movie posters have become vogue, leading to a flood of reproductions, the century’s best novels have been reproduced often in recent decades. Book of the Month Club reproductions usually state “First Edition” on the copyright page and are wrapped in jackets identical to the originals. These reprints can easily fool a novice.

There are several ways to tell cubic zirconias from real literary diamonds, but you can’t examine them over the internet. Be smart, Smith advises: always buy good books from reputable dealers at reasonable prices.

Internet Phenomena

“The internet is not going to put used bookstores out of business,” Smith states. “There are always going to be folks looking for somewhere to browse and spend an hour or two or three. These people like to see what they are buying and hold it and make sure it’s exactly what they want.”

Bookstores listed with major sites such as www.abebooks.com or www.ebay.com have reliable return policies, but there is still risk inherent in buying blind.

Yet as more customers flock to the internet, walk-in stores are converting into virtual stores. For a few hundred dollars per month, they can list their entire inventory online and realize equal profits with less headaches.

“Business-wise, it’s easy to close your storefront and put your books online. Then you come in each morning, check your emailed orders, and ship them out,” says Smith. “I have only a small number of books listed online, but I sell some every week. We even sell to Barnes & Noble and Amazon.”

But, for Smith, listing select titles online is a means of broadening his market, not the first step toward closing his doors.

“It’s still about people,” Smith says, between phone calls from customers. “People come here to gossip, to escape, to see friends. I have regulars who come just to talk, mostly, like the old men used to on courthouse benches, or like women quilting together. They like the community feeling, and I do too.”

Choctaw Books is a place where you can still find stories, not just on the shelves but among the people. With such places, secret gardens of the mind, you don’t question why they are – you just say “thank you” that they are.

And then you read.

You read.

Collecting Welty by Fred C. Smith Owner, Choctaw Books

The first three Eudora Welty books are expensive, but for a complete collection, you need them. Her first, Curtain of Green, costs about $1,500 for a first edition with dust jacket. It was a wartime book with a print run of less than 3,000, and many copies went to libraries.

A nice copy of The Wide Net is around $750, and The Robber Bridegroom goes for $750-$850. Then they drop down quite a bit. There’s a nice middle section in the $300 range: Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, and The Golden Apples. The Bride of the Innis- fallen is actually less than that. Then you get to the later books. The Optimist’s Daughter, which is becoming harder to find because it won the Pulitzer, costs about $150. You can still pick up Losing Battles, though, for around $75.

You could spend $5,000 on a good Welty collection. If you want signed books, however, you’ll probably have to double that figure. That’s still affordable compared to collecting Faulkner. One book will cost you that. Soldier’s Pay with dust jacket costs $7,500. For a fine autographed copy of Marble Faun with dust jacket, you could easily spend $50,000, because there are less than 100 known copies of it, with most of those in the possession of libraries or private collectors.

Of all the collections I have helped build over the years, I have had the most pleasure in dealing with Miss Welty’s works because she’s so loved around here. We sold 40 signed pieces of hers last November and December. I have not been able to replace the first one! I don’t find them locally. I can’t buy signed Welty books here very often. People hang on to her books – it’s something they treasure.