The Maple Street Book Shop is gone, but treasured memories remain of a Golden Age in my early life
I’ve really been missing New Orleans lately. That old city of my birth, where I lived for the first 21 years of my life, is full of he most fascinating architecture, unique neighborhoods, fine restaurants and endless attractions and historical and other sites to visit and see, whether one is a resident or tourist. It always puts on a magnificent seasonal floral show of azaleas and camellias, just like in Charleston. I remember the huge azalea bushes covered in pink, white and pale purple flowers blooming in my backyard in the suburbs where I lived. I recall fondly all the live oaks along magnificent St. Charles Avenue, and elsewhere in the city, quickly shedding their leaves every March and putting on a new mantle of green, suddenly, almost overnight, it seemed. Soon the whole avenue was a verdant canopy of leaves, beneath which hundred-year-old streetcars lumbered along on their tracks from Uptown to Canal Street downtown.
Whenever I think of New Orleans, poignant memories come to mind about my favorite store, the now closed Maple Street Book Shop that I discovered my senior year of college. I was an English major, full of the heady and intoxicating words of great novelists, poets, short story writers, playwrights and essayists. What better place to wile away precious leisure time than at a fabled bookstore.
Owned at the time by Rhoda Faust, this venerable bookshop presided over a city with a rich literary history. It was Faust who introduced the shop’s popular slogan that was printed on countless brown bumper stickers: “Fight the Stupids.” She was a longtime friend of the late novelist Walker Percy. The shop was everything I always dreamed and imagined a bookstore should be. It was spread out over five or six rooms in a small house on Maple Street, in one of my favorite areas of the city. Each room was so filled with books in every available space where shelves or counters could be placed that it was difficult to walk in there. You were surrounded by literature and non fiction, coffee-table books, psychology, poetry, novels in the first room as you came in from Maple Street, photography books in the second room. Literary criticism, travel books, essays, education, philosophy — each tiny room had a section of its own, or maybe two.
Faust was, to an easily impressed 21-year-old college student, the arbiter of all things bookish and literary. She seemed like some mysterious intellectual guru who spent all her waking hours glued to novels and books, her eyes penetrating, wise, but inscrutable. How I wanted to take my place behind that counter and spend days working part time in such a quaint and literary bookstore, frequented by all kinds of fascinating eccentrics and bookworms. And, it exuded all the potent intellectual vibes I wanted in a bookstore. Loyal customers included erudite and educated clientele from the neighboring Uptown area of the city, and students from nearby Tulane and Loyola universities. Plus, a literary pilgrim such as myself who trekked across the city in his yellow 1970 Volkswagen convertible to mingle with the literati, solemnly peering at one shelf after another, in one small room after another, sometimes having to squint because of the dim light. And naturally, it had that unmistakeable smell of books and old house, slightly musty. Perfect.
From the early fall of 1972, during my last year in college, I visited the store as often as I could. I had my first apartment and was feeling quite liberated from the dorm and independent at last. It was that time of my life, as I’ve written before, where I had my goal in sight. Graduation was just two semesters away. I was accustomed to college life by this time, used to the quantities of reading I had to do for my English literature classes and papers I had to write for all six of my courses each semester that last school year. The Maple Street Book Shop became a refuge, a beacon of civilization and refinement in “The City That Care Forgot.”
How many times did I make the trek from the Gentilly neighborhood where I lived not far from campus to Maple Street, I couldn’t say. But whenever I entered the front door, I knew I was coming into a very rare and special place. There was this indefinable aura. I can’t explain it too well other than to say I felt safe and happy there. I would sometimes spend an hour or more browsing. I could buy perhaps one book at a time, being a typical, poor college student. I did purchase a number of Penguin edition novels by the French masters, Balzac and Zola, about whom I was very interested at the time, especially the Balzac masterpiece, “Cousin Pons,” which I never forgot. I associate that book and the experience of literature outside what was required for my courses, with the Maple Street Book Shop.
Founded in 1964, it closed its doors for the final time in 2017. But what memories I have of that sacred, dusty and dimly-lit old house full of books.
Maple Street Book Shop