This is the inaugural installment of Inside Indie Bookstores, a new series of interviews with the entrepreneurs who represent the last link in the chain that connects writers with their intended audience. Once the authors, agents, editors, publishers, and salespeople have finished their jobs, it's up to these stalwarts to get books where they belong: into the hands of readers. News of another landmark bookstore closing its doors has become all too common, so now is the perfect time to shine a brighter light on the institutions that mean so much to the literary community. Post a comment below to share your thoughts about a favorite indie bookstore.

The first thing customers notice when they enter Square Books—apart from the customary shelves and tables overflowing with hardcovers and paperbacks—is the signed author photographs. There are hundreds of them, occupying nearly every vertical surface not already taken up by bookcases. They cover the walls and trail up the narrow staircase to the second floor, framing windows and reaching all the way to the fourteen-foot-high tongue-and-groove ceiling. Most of the photos are black-and-white publicity shots, the kind publishers send with press kits, but there are also large-format, professional ones—of Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Richard Ford, and others. Many have that spare yet beautiful quality of something Eudora Welty might have taken. Collectively, they comprise an archeological record of this place's luminous history—all the authors have passed through these doors—as well as a document of the important role that this particular institution has had in promoting writers and writing.

Richard Howorth, the store's owner, would modestly deny having had a hand in any of the number of literary careers that have sprung from the fertile soil in this part of the country, but the honest truth is that Square Books has served as a nurturing place for writers—as a "sanctuary," to borrow a word from William Faulkner, another Oxford 
native—for more than thirty years now. He and his wife, Lisa, opened the first store in 1979. Seven years later they moved into their current location, formerly the Blaylock Drug Store, after buying the building. Since then, they've opened two other shops: in 1993, Off Square Books, which specializes in used books, remainders, and rare books and serves as the venue for store events and the Thacker Mountain Radio program; and, in 2003, Square Books, Jr., a children's bookstore. Howorth also helped establish the Oxford Conference for the Book, which brings together writers, editors, and other representatives from the publishing world each spring for public readings, roundtables, and panel discussions on writing and literacy. This year, as part of the seventeenth annual event, the conference will celebrate the legacy of Barry Hannah.

I made my first literary pilgrimage to Oxford nearly a decade ago. At the time, I was running Canterbury Booksellers, a small independent bookshop in Madison, Wisconsin. Invariably, whenever authors visited our store, one of the topics we'd end up discussing was where they were headed next or where they'd just been. Square Books was always mentioned as a place they one day hoped to go, were looking forward to going, or couldn't wait to get back to. Partly this has to do with its lineage, for few places can claim to have hosted readings for such varied and important authors as Etheridge Knight, Toni Morrison, Allen Ginsberg, Alice Walker, Alex Haley, George Plimpton, William Styron, Peter Matthiessen, and others. And partly it has to do with the Howorths themselves, who, despite the cliché about Southern hospitality, make all authors feel as if they were the first to visit the store.

This was certainly the case for me. Even though I wasn't reading, and even though I hadn't been back to town in almost ten years, I was welcomed with enormous generosity when I arrived. For two days I was given the grand tour, including a dinner with local writers at the Howorths' house, a walk through Faulkner's home, a trip to the Ole Miss campus to see the bronze statue of James Meredith under a marble archway in which the word courage is carved into the stone, as well as an oral history of what took place in Oxford during the Civil War as we drove through the shady neighborhoods of town.

No person could have been a better guide to the literary and historical roots of Oxford. Howorth grew up across the street from Faulkner's home (in the house where the bookseller's father, a retired doctor, still lives). Faulkner's sister-in-law used to chase Richard and his brothers off the property for pestering her cow and causing mischief. All the Howorth brothers still reside in town—one a judge, one a retired lawyer, one an architect, and one a retired admissions director at the University of Mississippi. In addition to his thirty years as a local bookseller, Richard, the middle brother, also just finished his second term as mayor of Oxford.

It was with this same generosity of spirit that Howorth agreed to talk with me at Square Books one afternoon. We sat upstairs, at a small table in an out-of-the-way corner. I chose the spot because it seemed secluded—though, coincidentally, we were between the Faulkner and Southern Literature sections. Howorth commandeered the espresso machine and made us cappuccinos before we settled in to chat, fixing us our drinks himself. He is a man quick to laugh, and despite having spent the past three decades as a bookseller and the last eight years in public office, seems largely optimistic about the world. Or, rather, has learned to appreciate life's quirks, mysteries, and small pleasures.

How did you come to bookselling?
Deliberately. I wanted to open a bookstore in my hometown, so I sought work in a bookstore in order to learn the business and see whether it was something that I would enjoy doing, and would be capable of doing.

The apprentice model.
Yes. Lisa and I both worked in the Savile Bookshop, in Georgetown, for two years. In the fifties and sixties it was a Washington institution. It was a great old store. The founder died about ten years before we arrived. It had been through a series of owners and managers, and by the time we were working there it was on its last leg. It was also at the time that Crown Books was first opening in the Washington suburbs—it was the first sort of chain deep-discounter. The Savile had this reputation as a great store, but it was obviously slipping. We were on credit hold all over the place. So it ended up being a great learning experience.

Then you came back here with the intention of opening Square Books?
Sure. We opened the first store in the upstairs, over what was, I think, the shoe department of Neilson's Department Store. Back then the town square was so much different from what it is today, and commerce was not so terribly vital. It was certainly viable, but the businesses didn't turn over very much because the families that owned the businesses usually owned the buildings. Old Mr. Denton at his furniture store didn't care if he sold a stick of furniture all day; it was just what he did, run his store. So when I came home I knew I wanted to be on the square, and I just couldn't find a place. My aunt owned the building where Neilson's had a long-term lease on the ground floor, but there were three offices upstairs—rented to an insurance agent, a lawyer, and a real estate agent who were paying forty dollars, thirty dollars, and thirty dollars a month, respectively, for a total of a hundred dollars. So my initial rent was a hundred dollars a month.

Did you have a particular vision for this store from the beginning, or did it change over time?
The initial vision is still very much what the store is today. I wanted it to serve the community. Because of Mississippi's distinct history and character, as well as social disruptions, the state—and Oxford, in particular, due to the desegregation of the university in 1962, when there was a riot and two people were killed—was regarded as a place of hatred and bigotry. And I knew that this community was not that. I knew that there were a lot of other people here who viewed the world the same way my family did, and my instinct was that people would support the store not just because they wanted to buy books or wanted a bookstore here, but because they knew—not to overstate it—that a bookstore would send a message. That we're not all illiterate, we're not all...it said something about both the economic and cultural health of the community.

Has that happened?
The university, for instance, has made a lot of progress—there's now a statue of James Meredith; there's now an institute for racial reconciliation at the university. And most young people today know what the civil rights movement was, but they don't know the specific events and how tense and dramatic and difficult all of that was at that time.

You grew up in the midst of that.
Correct. I was thirteen when Goodman and Chaney and Schwerner were murdered [in 1964] and buried in Neshoba County, Mississippi, and I was eleven when the riots at Ole Miss occurred. I remember my mother crying when that happened. Her father taught English at the university for years, and she knew that it was a tragic event.

As someone who's spent most of his life in this town, how did you see the place after having been the mayor?
My view of the community is essentially no different from what it was before I was mayor. Except, I would say, I really appreciate all the people who work for the city. A lot of good public servants.

When you talk with writers about places they hope to visit someday, they always name Oxford. Partly that's because this is Faulkner country—his house is here, and his grave is here, and so on—but how did this place become such a literary destination in the last several decades?
You know, it's a lot of things. Beginning with Faulkner. But there were people preceding Faulkner connected to the university, mostly. Stark Young was a novelist and a New York Times drama critic and an editor at the New Republic who helped Faulkner a little bit. Phil Stone was a lawyer here, educated at Yale, who introduced Faulkner to Swinburne and Joyce and a lot of the reading that was so influential to him when he was very young. And primarily because of the presence of the university, there's always been something of a literary environment. But I think because Faulkner's major work dealt with this specific geography and culture so intimately, and because of the mythology he created, that makes for a very particular kind of literary tourism. Hemingway didn't quite do that with Oak Park. It wasn't a little native postage stamp of soil. And in Mississippi in general there were also Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty—these great writers of the twentieth century.

More recently, Willie Morris moved to Oxford in 1980, within a year after we opened the store. He was from Yazoo City, Mississippi. He was the editor of the [University of] Texas student newspaper, and from there got a job with the Texas Observer, where he became editor at a very young age. He was hired by Harper's Magazine to be an editor, and a few years later, in 1967, became its youngest editor in chief. And while at Harper's, he really changed the magazine and was on the ground floor of New Journalism. He published David Halberstam and Larry L. King; he published Norman Mailer's "Armies of the Night" [originally titled "Steps of the Pentagon"], the longest magazine piece ever to have been published; and he published Walker Percy.

He also wrote a book called North Toward Home, which was his autobiography, published in 1967, that kind of dealt with this whole ambivalence of the South and being from here and loving so much about it—stuff about growing up in Yazoo City, and his friends, and his baseball team, and his dog, and his aunt Minnie who lived next door—but also the racism. The murders and the civil rights movement. And he had to get out of the South 'cause he loved it too much and hated so much of everything that was going on.

That sense of conflictedness.
Right, right. The book expressed all that and was a touchstone for a lot of people my age. Then he got fired from or quit Harper's, depending on the story. He got in a fight with the publisher and submitted his resignation, believing that he wouldn't accept it. But he did. [Laughter.] So he continued to write, but none of his subsequent books were quite as big as North Toward Home. And Willie was a big drinker and he had kind of run out of gas in the black hole, which is what he called Manhattan. But Dean Faulkner Wells, William Faulkner's niece, and her husband, Larry, raised money to give Willie a visiting spot here at the university. So he came here that spring as a writer-in-residence. And he immediately befriended us and the bookstore. He said, "Richard, I'm going to bring all these writers, all my friends. I'm going to bring them down here and they're going to do book signings at your store and we're going to have a great time."

The summer I came back to open the store was also about the same time that Bill Ferris, who was the first full-time director at the newly established Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the university, came here. Bill was originally from Vicksburg; he'd been to Davidson [College in North Carolina] and got a PhD in folklore under Henry Glassy at Penn, taught at Yale. Bill was a tremendous guy and very charismatic and bright and enthusiastic and full of ideas. Bill had a tremendous influence on the university and the community and our store. On the South as a whole. What he did was, despite this whole business of the South's being known for racism and bigotry and poverty and illiteracy and teen pregnancy and all the things we're still sort of known for [laughter], he took Creole cooking and quilt making and basketry and storytelling and literature and the blues—all these aspects of Southern culture—and made it fascinating to the public. So Bill had a tremendous influence on the community and the bookstore. He also knew a lot of writers. The first book signing we did was with Ellen Douglas, the second month we were open, October 1979. She had a new novel coming out called The Rock Cried Out. The second person to do a book signing at the store was a black poet who was originally from Corinth, who had taught himself to write while doing time at the Indiana State Prison: Etheridge Knight. [Laughter.] Bill knew Etheridge and he got Etheridge to come here. Bill also knew Alice Walker, got her to come here. Knew Alex Haley, got him to come here. And Willie got George Plimpton and William Styron and Peter Matthiessen. All these people were coming and doing events in the bookstore. So, really, from the time that we opened, we had this incredible series of events. Then the store kind of became known. And in those days the whole author tour business was nothing like what it soon thereafter became. In the seventies and early eighties, publishers would send an author to San Francisco and Denver and Washington and Atlanta. Maybe. But primarily they were there to do interviews with the press and go on radio and television. Publicity tours, not a book-signing tour. They didn't go to bookstores. We weren't by any means the first store to do this, but there weren't many who were doing this at the same time as we were. The Tattered Cover [Denver] and Elliott Bay [Seattle] and the Hungry Mind [Saint Paul]. I think that's kind of how the circuit business got started.

Then Barry Hannah moved here in 1983 to teach creative writing. And his personality and writing style particularly contrasted with Willie's. Because Willie, he was kind of a journalist. And even though he could be critical of the south, part of his method in being critical was to get to a point where he could also be a cheerleader for the south. And Barry I think kind of looked down his nose at that sort of writing. You know, Barry was the Miles Davis of modern American letters at that point. There would've been kind of a rivalry with any writer, any other writer in town, I suppose. Plus, both of them had to struggle with Faulkner's ghost—there was that whole thing. But it was an immensely fertile period in the community's literary history.

So that convergence of events helped create the foundation you would build the store upon.
Right, right. And then, you know, Larry Brown emerged from the soil. His first book came out in 1988. John Grisham: His first book was published in 1989.

Had John been living here the whole time too?
No, he'd been living in north Mississippi, by South Haven. He was in the state legislature. But when he was in law school at Ole Miss, he heard William Styron speak. Willie had invited Styron down for the first time, and that was when he got the bug. That's when John said, "Wow, I'm gonna do something with this."

And now he endows a great fellowship for emerging southern writers here at Ole Miss.
Correct. And he did that because he wanted to try to build on what Willie did with all the people he brought in.

Speaking of nurturing young writers, I once heard that when Larry Brown was working as a firefighter he came into the store and asked you whom he should read.
Nah.

Is that not correct?
No. [Laughter.]

Was he already writing on his own?
Firemen work twenty-four hours and then they're off for forty-eight hours. And then they're back on for twenty-four and they're off for forty-eight. So all firemen have other jobs. They're usually painters or carpenters or builders or something. Larry worked at a grocery store. He was also a plasterer; he was a Sheetrock guy; he was a painter; he was a carpenter. He did all of this stuff. And he'd always been a pretty big reader. Larry's mother, especially, was a really big reader of romance novels. So Larry had this idea that he could supplement his income by writing a book that would make money. And he would go to the Lafayette County Public Library and check out books on how to be a writer, how to get your book published. He went through all of those. And I think he read that you start by getting published in magazines, so then he began to read magazines—fiction especially. He would read Harper's and Esquire. Larry was a complete omnivore of music and film and literature.

He took it all in.
Took it all in and he had an incredible memory. You would talk about a movie; he knew the producer, the director, the actor, the actresses, the location; music, the song, the group, who was on bass, the drums. On and on and on. And at some point, yes, early on, he came into the store. When I first opened the store, I was the only person who worked there. So I was talking to everyone who came in. And we started talking and, you know, I didn't give him a reading list and say, "Read these ten books and that'll make you a writer." Larry was already reading Raymond Carver and Harry Crews. Cormac McCarthy very early, long before Cormac broke out. Flannery O'Connor. So we talked about those authors, but Larry completely found his own way. He was completely self-taught. And I did later on help him in a specific way when he was kind of stuck. But he would've gotten out of the jam that he thought he was in at the time.

What was that?
Well, he had had one or two stories published and then he kind of couldn't get anything else published. He kept sending off these short stories and they kept coming back. Then he called me one day—and, you know, I hadn't read anything he'd written, hadn't asked to; I don't go there with writers unless they ask me. It was a Sunday. He said, "I don't know what else to do. I'm sorry I'm calling you, I don't mean to bother you, but I think I must be doing something wrong. Everything's coming back." I said, "Larry, I'd be happy to read them. Bring me a few of your stories. I'm no editor or agent or anything, but I'd be willing to read them."

So he came over with a manila folder. It was raining outside. We sat down at the dining room table and I opened this folder. He was sitting right across from me, and I just started reading. The first story was "Facing the Music." You know, I read maybe four pages and I said, "Larry, this is an incredible story. You're not doing anything wrong." And then I finished reading it and chills went down my spine. Because I knew that it was a great story. It still is a great story. And I told him, "This is going to be published. I don't know when, I don't know where, just don't despair." Actually I was looking the other day at a note he'd sent me. He thanked me for helping to make it better, that specific story. But I don't remember what that was. I may have said, "You might move this sentence from here to here," or something like that.

But mostly you were telling him to keep the faith.
Exactly. Also, I suggested he contact Frederick Barthelme and Rie Fortenberry at the Mississippi Review, who'd published his first serious publication, a story called "The Rich." I said, "What about this story? Where have you sent it? Have you sent it to the Mississippi Review?" And he said, "No, ‘cause they've already published me."

That's a good thing! [Laughter.]
So he sent it to them and they published it and he dedicated that story to me. And then later on I helped him meet Shannon Ravenel, who published his first book.

It seems like so many of the greatest writers of American letters have come out of the south: Tennessee Williams, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor. And, more recently, Tom Franklin, Larry Brown, Barry Hannah. All these people whose work I deeply admire. They share something...an intimacy with place perhaps?
It often gets explained in phrases like that, but I think that for the moderns...well, Faulkner was a genius. But I think he also realized early on what he could do and in contrast to the many things that he could not do.

What do you mean by that?
Well, he was a failure as a student. But I think with someone like Eudora Welty, who was an intelligent and independent woman of that time, there were limited opportunities for things that she could do. But writing, writing was one of them. And photography was one. So I think it's tied to economics in some way, but I also think that all of the rich and conflicted history of the South has a lot to do with it, all the various tensions. Because literature is built on conflict. There's also the whole war thing, the Civil War. Being the loser in that war makes us akin to other literature-producing places—Ireland, Russia.

Do you see any collective project happening as a trend in writing right now, in the same way that, say, the modernists were trying to make sense of a new world?
No, but I think there are always different schools in the same way that Updike focused on the suburban married life, and I think other writers operate in certain other niches.

How about southern writers specifically? How are they trying to make sense of what the south looks like right now?
I think Southerners are mostly concerned with just telling a good story.

The tale?
Yeah.

Since we're talking about contemporary southern writers, let's discuss the Conference of the Book. How did that start?
The Faulkner conference is held every summer. I think it started in 1974. It's always drawn a crowd—people come from California, Japan, Canada, wherever. And over the years, people would come in the store and say, "I heard about that Faulkner conference and I'd love to come back here and go to that, but I don't think I want to do Faulkner for a whole week." These are people who aren't necessarily Faulkner fans or scholars, but who want to come for the experience.

A literary pilgrimage.
Right. And at the same time, I was going to conferences like ABA [American Booksellers Association] and BEA [BookExpo America] and SIBA [Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance], where you would hear not just writers but also publishers and agents and editors talking about the process of publishing a book—all these great stories which typically were not available to the public. And I thought, "What if we had a conference in Oxford where people could get the local experience, but also a more general thing about books?"

So I talked to Ann Abadie, who was a founding director of the Faulkner conference. I told Ann, who's been a good friend for a long time, "I've got this idea. Instead of just having the Faulkner conference, why don't we do another kind of literary conference? We can just talk about books and what's going on with The Book and how it's doing today. We'll invite editors and agents and people who have these conversations, but make it for the public." And Ann said, "Yeah, maybe soon." Then, after about three or four years, she said, "Let's do this book conference thing." And so we did.

Is it focused specifically on Southern writers?
No. I was trying for it not to be just a Southern thing.

That would be too insular?
Yeah, and frankly I get tired of all this stuff about the South all the time. And I thought that the university and the community had the opportunity to create a one of a kind conference.

Where would you like to see this conference five years from now? Ten years from now?
In an ideal world it would have a larger budget to bring people in. For instance, Nicholson Baker wrote that article in the New Yorker about the Kindle. You know, that's a timely thing. He could come and do a lecture, perhaps even be on a panel with other people from the industry, people like [Amazon founder] Jeff Bezos.

So you want it to explore all the different intersections, not just publishing.
Right. Everything that's going on that affects books. We want to put this thing called The Book on the operating table and cut into it and see what's going on.

With developments like the Kindle and Japanese cell-phone novels and Twitter stories, how does a bookstore stay relevant in the twenty-first century?
I think there are a couple of things. There are the technological developments, which are interesting and positive in that they offer opportunities for reading and the dissemination of literature and ideas in a way that might be greater than the way we've historically done before. As Nicholson Baker pointed out in that New Yorker article, digital transference of text is much cheaper than disseminating literature through books. So you have that, which in many ways, properly conceived, is a positive development.

But the question we need to ask is, How does the technology threaten this thing that we love so much, and has been so critical to the development of civilization for so long? And how do we, in terms of that threat, deal with and understand it? There's also the cultural threat of younger people who are growing up not reading books. The way I see it, though, I think that digital technology will go on, on its own path, no matter what. But in terms of books, I maintain that a book is like a sailboat or a bicycle, in that it's a perfect invention. I don't care what series number of Kindle you're on, it is never going to be better than this. [Holds up a book.] I don't see how it could be. I could be wrong. Who knows? But this thing is pretty wonderful—and irreplaceable.

I think they can coexist is what I'm saying. And by the same token, I think bookstores offer an experience to book consumers that is unique. To be able to go into a place physically, to experience a sensation that is the precise opposite of all that is digital, and to talk to people about books in a business that has as one of its objectives a curatorial function and the presentation of literature as another—that is, I believe, irreplaceable. Of course, the question we all recognize is how the development of technology, in reducing the industry that creates the physical book, will change bookselling. Because there won't be as many of these [books], and therefore the cost will go up.