CHESTERTOWN, Md. -- There’s hope that the era of American idiocy will end soon, and while a lot of that rides on the outcome of the presidential election, you can feel some real optimism from this trend: Bookstores have been making a comeback.

Amazon put a bunch of them out of business, of course, but while e-commerce exploded, new stores opened, survived and even grew. In Baltimore, the Ivy Bookshop and Greedy Reads are among independent stores that continue to buck the online trend and serve readers. Membership in the American Booksellers Association has just about doubled (to more than 2,400) since 2016, and the association says nearly 200 stores are opening over the next two years. A booksellers group in Colorado reports that, since 2020, at least 100 new stores have opened in 14 Western states, many of them in small towns.

Bookstores and libraries are different — one sells what the other lends — but they both serve small towns as community centers. There’s something profoundly alluring, reassuring and comforting about books; we like to gather and linger in rooms lined with them and feel the warm brilliance they emit. The faith that American idiocy will not prevail emanates from the mountains of new and old books around us, the vigorous defense of libraries against narrow-minded banners and the growth of independent bookstores.

I visited The Bookplate in downtown Chestertown, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, on Sept. 11 — by coincidence, 20 years from the day Tom Martin opened it. Martin says the store is “pretty much a destination bookstore” by now, with customers arriving from all over to shop among the store’s 50,000 titles.

The Bookplate is a maze of books, new and used, organized in hundreds of categories designated by white placards that stick out of the shelves like bookmarks.

Martin’s employees have arranged the inventory by genres within genres (young adult romance, dark romance), by authors, by geography (a whole section on Maryland, organized by counties), by sport, by hobby. The cookbooks are separated by ethnicity, type of food (pork, seafood, pastry) and method (grilling, slow cooking).

“‘The Joy of Cooking’ still sells,” says Martin, leading me through what seems like a tunnel of titles in two adjoining rooms. No space seems to have been wasted, yet you never feel claustrophobic. Overwhelmed, yes, but not confined.

As Martin tells it, he became attached to books as a kid some 60 years ago in Michigan

“Doubleday used to run their own bookstores and there was one in a Detroit suburb near me,” he says. “There was a bookseller there named Bill Harris. He was the brother of the actress Julie Harris. He recommended two books to me that changed my young life. One was ‘The Years with Ross’ by James Thurber. The second was ‘The Annotated Sherlock Holmes.’ The first opened up a whole world to me — that creativity could be fun and entertaining, that writers could be interesting and fascinating people.”

Martin says he became an insatiable reader, even during some of the busiest years of his life as a congressional aide on Capitol Hill and, later, as a policy expert on Central America and the Middle East. He did a lot of traveling. He did a lot of drinking. He burned out.

At midlife, Martin was floundering, not sure what to do next. He took a job in Washington with a bookselling chain and learned aspects of the trade from the inside. During a trip to Chestertown, the idea of opening his own store started buzzing among Martin, his wife Lizzie O’Donoghue and some friends. By March 2004, Martin had a lease on a storefront on South Cross Street. He also had a job on a Chesapeake crab boat.

“I worked on the crab boat during the day and worked on putting the store together in the afternoon,” he says. “I never worked so hard, physically, but it was worth every second. … Once the fishing season ended, my wife said, ‘Are you going to open the store or not?’”

That’s when the “Now Open” sign went on the door of The Bookplate. Martin started with 1,000 used books, and the business grew steadily. The inventory was replenished with trips to auctions and thrift stores. He’s got a full store now and a warehouse to support it — thousands of books, but almost no time to read any of them. “The worst thing I ever did for my reading was getting into the book business,” he says.

One of the joys of Martin’s enterprise is seeing young people reading and talking about books in his store. Books for young adults are huge, he says, turning to the section of The Bookplate set aside for them.

Some of my questions had Martin reflecting on his own youth, when Bill Harris, that bookseller in Michigan, got him into Thurber and Conan Doyle.

“I sometimes wonder what impact I may have had on some kid coming in for a book,” Martin says. “I’m not a hard-selling person. I just want people to come and enjoy and maybe buy something. We are there to help but not overwhelm. But I do emphasize to younger kids what a great move it was to buy a book, that reading a book is something you’ll never regret. Maybe some kids will remember me 50 years from now — that old dude at the bookstore.”

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