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Harry Potter book release party 2003- kids, cats, books- one juvenile wizard gave me an extra wand
which is still in the chandelier
Tempest Book Shop
5031 Main Street
Waitsfield,
VT 05673
since 1977
Books, Music, Cards, Maps, Posters, Watch Batteries
Daily 10-6
Sunday 12-5 802-496-2022
General books, with strong sections in fiction, Vermont, children, cooking, home
building/improvement, nature, religion, and psychology.
Special orders of books and music welcomed by an
expert staff.
See our Lionel trains run on over 200 feet of standard O track.
FAMILY BOOK
SHOP My family has owned and operated the Tempest Book Shop since 1977. I resigned tenured teaching and
research at Roosevelt University in 1986. I wanted my one year old daughter Rikki to be raised near both sets of grandparents,
in a small-town setting, I wanted my wife to feel comfortable in a rural environment and with a steady job, I wanted
to live in the mountains. I bought the Tempest from my mother and step-father and they helped me until they left
for fuller retirement in 1994. My sister Jorie worked with me at the Tempest from about 1989 to 1991.
Rikki graduated in 2007 from Wellesley College in art history and she is living and working in Boston.
My daughter Murilla spent her first year of life living at the Tempest the three or four days a week I cared for
her while her mother Dena was taking classes.
Holliday and I were married in 1995. Sophie was born
that year and has spent much of her life in the loft at the Tempest. Miranda (Prospero's daughter in Shakespeare's Tempest) was
born in 2004 and spends about three days a week making the book shop her playground. Holliday graduated from UVM
med school and did her psychiatry residency at Dartmouth. Holliday reads, rows, runs, and relates well with others.
It is good to have her in the Tempest when she can. The Lionel trains started as a train set for Sophie, who played
with them as transportation for Barbie and Ken. Our two shop dogs, Nick and Jingle, passed away in 2005 after
twelve years of greeting customers. Dog heaven must have book shops. Tanya/Grace and Oliver spend summers near Chicago
and many grandchildren, and winters in Green Valley Arizona where they are active in political protests and xericulture.
LOCAL AUTHORS: The Tempest has hosted only a few book signings, due to limited space, and a very active
community. We have had the local kids autograph the book they co-authored with a Russian school. Howard Frank
Mosher autographed his books one afternoon before the premiere of a movie based on his book. Bob Buck, famed aviator
and author, autographed his books almost every other day, and finally set up shop one Saturday to do it officially for those
too shy to knock on his door or bump into him at the Warren airport. The most famous book siging was a clothing-optional
talk and booksigning with Jim Cunningham, author of Nudity and Christianity in 2007. It was a warm evening, and we
made newspapers and radio stations as far west as California. Jim, who is blind, even took off his prosthetic leg.
A number of successful writers live in he Mad River Valley, and the Valley has some other writing connections.
Ralph Ellison began The Invisible Man living across the road from Harwood Union, and John Updike had a summer home
here. Ward Just, formerly of Warren, is cranking out solid politcal thrillers. We lost Doug Terman (First
Strike, et al.) who threatened to bump Tom Clancy off the top of the mountain of spy thriller writers.
Ray Montgomery (and his host of ghost writers we suspect) and his wife Shannon, and now his son Anson, have published
over one hundred Choose Your Own Adventure books of world renown. James Tabor wrote the highly regarded best
selling Forever on the Mountain. Bob Buck who died in 2007, wrote a half dozen of the best flying book
ever, including the unequalled Weather Flying, and his brilliant autobiography North Star Over My Shoulder.
The latter was briefly #4 on the Amazon best-seller list. Earlene Marsh wrote Hairry Gogoinky about the
elves that plague Mad River Glen skiers. We still do not know how Berkeley Breathed set his book Flawed Dogs
at the site of the former Humane Society shelter in Waitsfield, which he renamed Piddleton. His main character is a
dead ringer for former NYC model Dorothy Parmacina who came to town with the jet set, cared for decades of strays, and must
now be favorite angel in dog heaven. Linda Faillace has recounted their sheep farm's run-in with the feds, mass hysteria,
and stupid fear in Mad Sheep. Mary Kerr wrote and assembled the magnificent Mountain Love Affair: Mad
River Glen, published by Mad River Glen. Quite a few Valley people have appeared in Peter Miller's Vermont
People and Vermont Farm Women. Kevin Eurich wrote Waterbury My Life-Long Love Affair. Local poets
publish singly and together. Ann Day's nature columns appear weekly in the Valley Reporter, and
Ann publishes a poetry/photography calendar usually every year, and has a colection of her nature articles published.
Richard Bisbee has written a massive and informative History of Waitsfield, a great improvement and update
over the old Jone History of Waitsfield. Janet Hubbard writes mostly nonfiction books for the children's
library market. Though he lives over the hill in Lincoln, Chris Bohjalian turns out best selling novels- Midwives
was an Oprah book; I teach from Trans Sister Radio. State Senator and history teacher Bill Doyle keeps updating
his Vermont: A Political Tradition. We hate to leave anyone off this list- it is meant only to give a flavor
of the variety of local writers whose books we enjoy sharing. STILL HERE
Several years running the
Tempest Book Shop has been more profitable than the whole Barnes and Noble chain. And year after year, we make more
money on bookselling than Amazon. Of course, that's because those giants are discounting books below their actual cost
of selling them. They lose money, while we stay carefully in the black. One reason is the half our of readers
who live in town, and the another is that half of our business is visitors- skiers, hikers, bikers, golfers, singers-
to the Mad River Valley.
The term "jet set" was invented in 1963 by Oleg Cassini to describe
his cultured New York friends who would take scheduled jet service from LaGuardia to Montpelier VT in order to ski a few hours
or days at Sugarbush or Glen Ellen or Mad River Glen (our three ski areas). It took three days to get to Europe to ski;
Vermont was little Austria (ask Maria VonTrapp, or her many kids who chose to live in our discreet and rural Mad River
Valley instead of the goldfish bowl of Stowe). Leonard Bernstein is remembered as skiing more like Chopin than Beethoven.
Author Erica Jung stopped by one evening to find out how badly her latest book was selling, and we gave her her first print-out
of which of her books were in print. Famed columnist and Nixon hater/hatee Tom Wicker retired nearby, and cleaned various
sections of our classic fiction books over the years. We have movie directors, inventors, soap opera stars, and famed restauranteurs
in our little town. Thank the Lord the town is full of good readers, or we would have joined the 3/4 of independent
booksellers who went out of business in the last twenty years. OUR BOOKS
We have about 8,000 active titles
on the shelves, most of them selected by us as top notch books. We get most special orders the next day or two- we have
worked hard to streamline delivery. Our books are selected by me, but with tremendous input from my staff, our customers,
and trusted sources like NPR, the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Scientific American, and Ranger Rick's Nature News.
Would you pick a restaurant because it had the largest menu? Or the best food? We try to have the best food for
your soul on our shelves. Amazone loses gobs of money putting millions of titles on their wonderful web site- we use
it every day. We do not have time to keep a web site up-to-date with current inventory,k and we are plenty bnusy with
our walk-in customers. If you cannot come in, we will be pleased to help you by phone or email. OR WHAT?
In an early scene in the movie Arthur, someone asks Arthur (Dudley Moore) what it's like to be rich. His slurred response
is simply, "Great!!" So what's it like to run a book shop for so long in a small town, you may ask. I will
slur if you want, but it is great. It has been a great way be to be around books all day, to have my kids around
books and great people- that's who comes into a book shop, and to be part of the community- selling books for
book clubs, and schools, and tickets for concerts and fund-raisers, and knowing that I am a useful part in the progress of
humanity. In case I forget to tell you, thank-you. It has been great. PART-TIME and PART-TIMERS
I went back to teaching part-time in 1990. First at Norwich University, I was hired to save the psychology majors who were
largely not graduating because they had not completed the research paper requirement for seniors. In true military fashion,
I was let go once I was successful in getting 90% graduated on time. I am much happier at St Joseph College, a catholic
women's college in West Hartford, CT, teaching psychology and liberal studies. I come in part from a catholic education
tradition. I have four daughters, so I am a believer in education for women. St Joseph was founded and continues to
have a kind of make-it-happen attitude which I appreciate as a Protestant. It is a good match, even if it takes me out
of the Tempest Book Shop every Wednesday. Everyone needs a day off. Since 1994, we have had the pleasure
of a number of part-time and summer employees: Peggyann Noel, Jim Dodds, James O'Neill, Ayla Walker, Tim Cook, Kate Smyth,
Mark, Kaylie Roy, April and Katrina Backus, Alexander Court, Julie Jay, and someone I probably forgot just now. CENTERED
SKIER ET AL
Denise McCluggage wrote Centered Skier in the Mad River Valley, and
published it through a local publisher in 1997. Bantam picked it up and it went big time. When the Inner-this and that
market shrank, people still expected the Tempest to have copies, as the local book shop. Denise let us reprint the book.,
first in a sweet deal where Sugarbush bought half the copies. Then we reprinted a lovely edition that reproduced the
color and feel or the first edition. It is still available.
We helped the local church publish a cookbook,
and Holliday and I published a scrapbook of wedding ceremonies. I have helped the B F Skinner Foundation publish an audio
book, Walden Two. It has been fun and educational to be involved in aspects of books other than retailing and
reading. FREE FREE FREE AWE AND COMFORT
We have lots of free advice on books, and
anything else in town if you are the half of our business that is visiting. We have a free toilet, and free bookmarks.
We have free wi-fi. We have free shipping for books over $15.00 anywhere in the USA. We have some free maps of
the area, free Valley Guides. We have a free oxygen bar right out front (also called a park bench). We are free
thinking in our selection of books- and anything we do not have, we will get for you.
Books are each a magical
distillation of someone else's life experience. Some are more than a single life, some are a deep rich narrow slice.
You may have fewer lives than a cat's nine, but you can sample the beauty, elegance, horror, passion, cruelty, joy and wonderment
of many human experiences right in our pages. The Tempest Book Shop has better shock and awe than the US military,
and more comfort and warmth than a cat in your lap. Come get a book or two here. Or tell us what we should be
sharing with others.
Rick Rayfield
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