The Beautiful and Bizarre Moments of Seattle’s Independent Bookstores

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From The Stranger:

Independent bookstores are the best. You never know when you’re going to have a profound experience browsing the shelves, an encounter with a famous writer, or an unexpected flirtation with someone who has the same taste in books as you do.

On April 29, nineteen Seattle-area bookstores are participating in Independent Bookstore Day. If you visit all of them and get your Indie Bookstore Challenge passport stamped at each, you get 25 percent off at all those stores for a year.

Two years ago, 42 people completed the challenge; last year, 120 people did; this year, maybe you?

In anticipation of Independent Bookstore Day, I visited a few of the participating bookstores and put their staff members on the spot: What’s the craziest thing that’s happened in their store?

. . . .

Third Place Books

17171 Bothell Way NE, Lake Forest Park, 206-366-3333

Events manager Wendy Ceballos recalls booking John Irving and Hulk Hogan on the same night. The Lake Forest Park location is big enough to do multiple events at once, so they do it sometimes, but this was a particularly interesting pairing. “John Irving was onstage and had like 200 people, and Hulk Hogan had a signing line only. The audiences couldn’t be more different from each other, and they were sort of bumping into each other. And I got them in the back room, and of course John Irving knew who Hulk Hogan was, and Hulk Hogan had no idea who John Irving was,” Ceballos said.

Seattle Mystery Bookstore

117 Cherry St, 206-587-5737

“We do have a ghost,” one employee said when I asked if there was anything mysterious about the store. “About 15 years ago, one of the staff came out from the back hallway and asked her colleague if the man back there had been helped. Her colleague told her there was nobody back there. When they looked, there was indeed nobody back there. The woman who saw the man described him as a dark figure wearing a long overcoat and a funny round hat. And a few months later, a guy came in who said that his great-grandfather had had a barbershop in our space back in the time of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in 1909, and the next time he was in he’d bring us pictures. The next time he came in, weeks later, he brought a picture of this space when it was a barbershop and a picture of his great grandfather, who was wearing a long dark overcoat and a bowler hat. The woman who had been working and had seen the dark figure didn’t know the term for a bowler hat.” He paused to let that sink in. “And occasionally books fly off shelves. We usually say, ‘Hello, ghost.’ And two women who work here with me now occasionally feel someone futzing with the hair on the back of their head. That’s when they know it’s time for a haircut.”

Link to the rest at The Stranger and thanks to M. for the tip.