You may have seen some of the photos of Barry Moser’s artwork on Facebook and on our blog. On Saturday, December 10 at 11:00 we will be having a signing for Barry Moser on the occasion of his two new books The Cheshire Cheese Cat: A Dickens of a Tale and Franklin and Winston: A Christmas that Changed the World.
What you may not know is that Barry Moser has a long history at Lemuria. John Evans will tell his story soon, but first we need to hear it from former Lemuria bookseller Emily Crowe.
I also used this as an opportunity to embellish Emily’s post with the beautiful art work of Barry Moser. -Lisa
Here’s her story:
I had been working at Lemuria about two and a half years when I met Barry Moser on December 7, 1999, a date which will live in infamy. John and Barry had been friends for years and John had been preparing the staff with lots of great anecdotes before Barry’s arrival.
I had somehow lucked into the position of writing up most of the author interviews for the store newsletter, so John arranged for Barry and me to spend a little extra time together to facilitate the interview.
We mostly chatted while Barry signed stock for the store, particularly the copies of The Holy Bible, that month’s first editions club selection. The staff had already flapped the books to the title page, but Barry told us that for the bible, he only signs in pencil and only on the last page of acknowledgments. After reflapping all of the books, we settled in for some serious conversation, and flirtation, too, if truth be told. Barry said at one point that he was impressed that I could keep up with passing books to him to sign, since he is such a fast signer. I remember that I told him that yes, he was fast, but that he was no John Grisham, and that seemed to take the wind out of sails a little.
That night John hosted a publication party for Barry at his home, with both of the deluxe limited editions of The Pennyroyal-Caxton Holy Bible on display. All of us staff members in attendance took turns monitoring these books, standing guard with an array of white gloves so that guests could thumb through the heavy pages and guess at the famous people who might have modeled for Job, Mary, Noah, or John the Baptist, or try to find Barry’s own self-portrait that he sneaks into every book he illustrates. Between the bourbon on the one hand and the wee small hours when the last guests left on the other hand, you might say that both merriment and more flirtation ensued.
As it turned out, the store was so busy during Barry’s visit that I didn’t have time to write up the interview before he had to travel to the next stop on his tour. When he suggested that I might email him my interview for him to fact-check before we published it, I readily agreed. Little did we suspect that our first email exchange would lead to hundreds more, accumulating more than 2,000 pages of electronic correspondence between us before the spring was out.
Circumstances brought us together again four months after our first meeting, but by that time we had fallen in love in this very new, old-fashioned way: it had been a purely epistolary romance, albeit an electronic one. I left Lemuria in January of 2001 to move north (to the kingdom of the yankee) to be with Barry, and two years after that we married. It pleases us both more than we can say that we will be back in Jackson, and more particularly back at Lemuria, twelve years to the date after we first met there. It’s improbable that a curmudgeonly old fart like him and an insufferable know-it-all like me could find lasting happiness together, but I blame the books: the ones I made a living by selling at Lemuria, the ones he illustrated that brought him into John’s life and thus mine, the ones we discussed passionately early on in our relationship, and the ones we hope to do together one day.
Emily Crowe was a sweet, innocent, young bookseller at Lemuria for several years before she ran off with a dirty old man twice her age. When she’s not traveling the Caribbean in search of the perfect rum punch, she continues to be a bookseller at the independently-owned Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, MA, where she is also the assistant manager, a buyer, and a blogger.
Read her blog here.
