Alabama Booksellers Share a Lifetime Edifying and Entertaining

According to the calculations of Cheryl and Thomas Upchurch, a life of bookselling has aged them ... about five years more than their contemporaries. Putting in yeoman's hours at their Montgomery, Alabama, bookstore, Capitol Book & News Company, has meant that "for the past 25 years we've both worked a six day week (and actually, for the first couple of years we owned the store, a seven day week!). That means 52 Saturdays a year, and after 25 years that comes to 1,300 days we worked that most folks did not. There are 260 five-day work weeks in those 1,300 days, and 260 weeks comes to five years more of work than we realized we'd done!" the couple wrote in a recent column in their local newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser.

Capitol Book & News Company owners Thomas and Cheryl Upchurch.

Not that they're complaining. After all, they added, "when you work in a bookstore not every day is really work." They concede that "perhaps we should subtract the two or three days right in the middle of the week that Thomas spent recently trying to discover what has happened to all the goldfinches this year." The column, typical of their comic style of mixing edification and entertainment (somehow they even make birdseed funny), describes their successful quest to find out what happened to the goldfinches and, naturally, ties the subject to books, mentioning The Sibley Guide to Birds, (David Sibley, National Audubon Society).

The Upchurches, who recently celebrated their 30th anniversary, met at Vanderbilt University. Even back then, Cheryl was also working as a bookseller. They married, graduated, Cheryl worked a yearlong stint at Ingram, they moved back to Thomas' hometown of Montgomery, and Cheryl got a job at Capitol Book & News and worked with owner/founder Victor Levine. Three years later, in 1978, Levine sold them the bookstore and thus began the Upchurches self-described life of ceaseless toil.

Of course, things change over a half-century and Cheryl listed just a few of those changes. "When we started out, we had to call the publishers long distance to order titles," she said. "And they'd take a month to get here. Now people want their books in two to three days and most times you can get it.

"And now books have a shorter shelf life, and it seems that customers want more help from us to recommend what's good, so they know what to spend their money on. Personal recommendations are best, but we also use the Book Sense lists and the New York Times bestseller lists along with a lot of other [sources]."

Capitol Book & News Company in Montgomery, Alabama

The bookstore has moved, expanded to two stores, contracted back to one, and finally settled into a "big, old house," as Thomas described it. The big, old house is an incredibly charming, 3,000-foot, nearly century-old wood house. Sections of the bookstores are separated into the different rooms. "The old dining room is nonfiction, travel, and biographies," said Thomas. "The front bedroom is fiction. The living room is where the sales desk is. There's a nice front porch where we have our sale books." Thomas said the Book Sense section was near the sales desk where he said that he "makes all [the customers] take the Book Sense fliers." The bookstore's specialty is Southern history and fiction.

One of the fairly recent developments was the addition of the e-mailed Capitol Book Newsletter. The newsletter is full of recommendations and showcases the Upchurches funny and erudite musings. In fact, the duo's writing is so dynamic, it caught the attention of the features editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, who invited them to contribute their column, which appears in the newspaper on every other Sunday. Thomas said that he and Cheryl typically "write columns about the Patriot Act, how [they] met at school, stacks of books, anything that's interesting to write about."

He also said that the column has been fun and "really good for business. Many times when we're out for dinner, people tell us they've read our column."

About whether Capitol Book & News Company would continue for another half-century Cheryl said, "We plunged into this very quickly and we seldom make long range plans, but that's worked for us so far. We're doing well. As long as things continue to go well, we sell plenty of books, and our bills are paid at the end of the year, I think we'll do this a lot longer."

To read a selection of Montgomery Advertiser columns written by Thomas and Cheryl Upchurch, visit the store's Web site, www.capitolbook.com. --Karen Schechner