The Pioneer Press offers a tribute to Brian Baxter, who is retiring at the end of the month after 30 years as a bookseller. He has owned Baxter's Books, been a book buyer for the B. Dalton Bookseller chain and most recently worked at Birchbark Books in South Minneapolis, Minn.
Birchbark, which is owned by author Louise Erdrich, is hosting a Brian Baxter Day tomorrow. Erdrich told the Press: "Brian is treasured. He rescued my store when it looked like we were going down the tubes." He will continue to consult for the store, as needed.
Baxter said he plans to train for an Ironman bicycle endurance race in April, write "what he thinks might be a memoir" and continue gourmet cooking.
The paper wrote: "Baxter inherited his love of reading from his mother, the late actress Whitney Blake, who encouraged him to read books such as Lysistrata because she thought he was spending too much time with comics. (His sister is actress Meredith Baxter.)
"He was a lonely, dyslexic teenager living in California's Hollywood Hills when he found his way to books and selling.
"'At the bottom of our hill was a Pickwick Book Shop,' he recalled. 'Sitting in the middle of this store at a desk was a guy who everybody asked questions of, and he had all the answers. I wanted that job, and I wanted that desk. At the age of 22, I had them. I was a reorder buyer for Pickwick, which was then a small chain.'"
After Dalton bought Pickwick, he moved to its headquarters in Minneapolis and worked for many years for the legendary Kay Sexton. When Barnes & Noble bought Dalton and moved it to New York, he set up his own store.
His advice about bookselling: "I would tell someone who wants to open a bookstore that they are not going to make money," he told the paper. "But you will feel so fulfilled when a customer comes back and says, 'That was just the right book,' or a kid asks for 'more books like that.' You have an effect on the world when you give someone a book that makes them better, makes them know something more. That's what all human beings want."