Janice Joplain performed for hundreds of thousands of people. She filled stadiums. She was one of the loudest voices of her generation. Every Friday afternoon for 2 years, she sat in a small bookstore in San Francisco and didn’t say a word. The man who owned it didn’t recognize her.
that she made clear was exactly what she wanted. His name was Daniel. He had run the store on Hate Street since 1965. He knew his customers the way a book seller knows them, by what they reached for, by how long they stood in front of a shelf, by whether they brought the book to the counter already decided or paused and second-guessed themselves at the last moment.
She never second-guessed herself. That was the first thing he noticed about her. San Francisco, 1968. The hate ashbury is at its peak. And beginning in the way all peaks do, to quietly decline. A bookstore on Hate Street. A book seller who asks nothing of his customers except that they treat the books with care.
and a woman who comes in every Friday and sits in the chair by the window and reads. This is the story of what he saw and what he missed. Daniel had opened the store in 1965, 2 years before the summer of love changed the neighborhood around it. He had come from Portland with a literature degree he wasn’t sure what to do with and a conviction vague but stubborn that what he wanted was to be around books for the rest of his life and that the selling of them was at least adjacent to the reading of them. The store was small. Two main rooms connected by a narrow doorway, shelves floor to ceiling, a system of organization that made sense to Daniel, and to the regulars who had learned its logic, and to almost no one else. There was a desk at the front where he sat
when there was nothing else to do. There was a chair by the window in the back room, where customers sometimes sat without asking, and which he had never minded. By 1968, the neighborhood had changed significantly around him. The hate ashberry had become briefly and loudly the center of something, and had then begun the quieter, slower process of becoming something else.
The store had weathered this the way small bookstores weather almost everything by being slightly outside the moment, slightly apart from whatever was happening loudly on the street, a place where the currency was patience and attention. Daniel had learned over 3 years to read his customers quickly, what they were looking for, whether they knew it or not, whether they wanted to be helped or to be left alone.
She wanted to be left alone. He understood that the first time she came in. Hate Street in 1968 was not what it had been in 1966 or 1967. The peak of the counterculture had passed quickly, the way peaks do, compressed into a single summer of love that the newspapers had documented in detail, and that the neighborhood was still, in some ways, trying to recover from.
The music was still there, the record stores, the rehearsal spaces in the upper floors above the shops, the sound that came through open windows on warm evenings. the musicians who lived in the Victorians on the side streets who rehearsed in garages and performed at the Fillmore West. Daniel was not particularly part of that world.
He knew the records the way anyone who lived in San Francisco in 1968 knew them. They were in the air. They came through the radio. They were the soundtrack to whatever was happening on the street. But he was a book seller, not a music industry person. He didn’t go to the parties. He didn’t know the managers or the promoters or the journalists.
He knew the books and he knew the people who wanted them. The two worlds, music and literature, over overlapped in his store in the quiet way that things overlap when nobody is paying attention to the overlap itself. She came in for the first time on a Friday in the fall of 1968. He didn’t recognize her.
He had no particular reason to. She came in without announcement, the bell above the door, footsteps on the wood floor, and then silence. Not the browsing silence of someone uncertain moving from shelf to shelf with the diffuse attention of a person killing time. a directed silence. She knew what kind of thing she was looking for, and she moved through the store with the purposefulness of someone who has learned that the best way to find what you need in a bookstore is to stop and let the shelves speak.
Daniel looked up from his desk. He saw a woman in a loose blouse and jeans, her hair large and wild, some jewelry at her wrists, moving through the fiction section with her head tilted slightly to read the spines. He did not offer to help. He had learned that the customers who moved like that did not want help.
They wanted to be left to it. She stood in front of the fiction shelves for several minutes. She pulled one book, read the back, put it back, pulled another, considered it longer, brought it to the counter. He told her the price, she paid in cash. He wrapped it in brown paper without being asked.
She seemed like the kind of person who would want the paper, and he was right. She took the book to the chair by the window. She sat down. She read. She stayed for nearly an hour. When she left, she said, “Thank you.” She was back the following Friday. By the third Friday, Daniel understood this was going to be a regular thing.
By the sixth, he had simply incorporated her into the rhythm of his Fridays. The woman who came in the early afternoon, found something in fiction or occasionally poetry, paid in cash, sat in the chair by the window, read for between 30 minutes and an hour and a half, and left. He learned her tastes by accumulation.
She read fiction predominantly, American mostly, some European. She gravitated toward books about people who were trying to understand where they were, novels about the interior life rather than the external event. She did not read self-help. She did not read music books or celebrity biographies or anything that touched the world she inhabited professionally, though Daniel didn’t know that yet.
She occasionally spoke to him for a moment at the counter about the book she was returning to, or the one she’d just finished. Brief exchanges, not unfriendly, but bounded. She was not a person who came to the bookstore to have conversations. What he noticed over months and then years was that she was different in his store than anyone who came in from the street usually was.
There was a quality in the way she sat in that chair, a quality of having put something down, as if the chair by the window was a place where she was permitted to be a certain kind of quiet that she wasn’t permitted to be elsewhere. He didn’t think about it in those terms at the time.
He noticed it without naming it. Over two years she bought 43 books from Daniel’s store. He knows this because he kept the receipts, not deliberately, not as a document of anything. They went into the cash drawer with all the others and stayed there. And when he eventually counted them, there were 43. The list, if you read it, tells you something.
Carson McCullers, Flannry O’ Connor, Odora Welty, southern writers mostly, the ones who understood that the interior of a person is not a simple geography, that the place you come from leaves a mark that the place you go to does not remove. Some Steinbeck, some Faulner, a few volumes of poetry, Sylvia Pla once, and Ston twice.
She never talked about what she was reading in any depth. Occasionally at the counter she would say something brief. This one took a while to get into or this one I finished in a day. And Daniel would respond and that was the extent of it. What the books told him in retrospect was that she was a person who read to understand something about the experience of being who she was, where she came from, how it marked you, what you did with the mark.
The southern writers, especially people from places that shaped them in ways they couldn’t entirely leave behind, no matter how far they traveled. He didn’t know she was from Port Arthur, Texas. He didn’t know anything about where she was from. He just sold her the books and watched her read them in the chair by the window.
The last time she came in was a Friday in late September 1970. Daniel remembers it as unremarkable at first. She came in at the usual time, moved through the shelves with the usual purposefulness, brought a book to the counter. He thinks it was Flannry O’ Connor. He’s not certain. What he remembers is that she sat in the chair by the window for a long time, longer than usual, an hour and a half at least. He had customers come and go.
She stayed. At some point in the late afternoon, the light through the window changed and she looked up at it and he caught her face in that light from his desk and she looked he has said this and then corrected himself and said it again. She looked like someone who was deciding something, not unhappy, not distressed, something more deliberate than that.
When she finally stood and brought the book to leave on the returns shelf, she had started leaving the finished ones for him to resell a few months earlier without comment. She stopped at the counter. She said something she had never said before in 2 years of Fridays. It was not dramatic. It was brief.
It was the kind of thing that if you heard it on any other afternoon from any other customer, you would have nodded and forgotten it before the door closed. He didn’t forget it. He wrote it down that evening the way he sometimes wrote down things that seemed worth keeping. The following Monday was October 5th, 1970.
Daniel opened the store at 10:00. He made coffee. He read the San Francisco Chronicle the way he read it most mornings, quickly from the front, moving through the sections with the half attention of someone going through a familiar routine. He was on the third page when he stopped. The photograph was small, a press photograph taken at a concert, the full amplified version of herself, microphone in hand. the performance face on.
He recognized her immediately. He sat with the newspaper for a long time, long enough that his coffee went cold. He thought about the chair by the window, about 43 Fridays, about the books she had chosen, and the ones she had left on the return shelf, and the ones she had taken away with her, about the way she had looked in the late afternoon light the previous Friday.
the look of someone deciding something and about what she had said at the counter before she left. He has never repeated what she said. He has been asked and he has declined. He says it was private. He says it was said to him in his store as a private thing and that it belongs in that category. He says it was not sad.
He says that is the part he most wants people to understand. Daniel sold the bookstore in 1981. He moved to Marin County. He taught high school English for 20 years and retired in 2004. He is in his mid 80s now and lives as he has for decades with a great deal of books. He kept the receipts, all 43 of them, in a small envelope that is moved with him from the Hate Street store to three subsequent addresses.
He has not shown them publicly. He has been approached by journalists and declined. He was approached once by a biographer and declined. He has a clear position. What happened in that store on those Friday afternoons was a private thing conducted by someone who went there specifically because it was private and the fact that she is gone does not transfer ownership of it to anyone else.
what he has said to the people he has told. She was a reader, a serious reader, the kind who brought the same quality of attention to a book that he imagined she brought to everything that mattered to her. and she was quiet in his store in a way that suggested the quiet was not her natural state.
That it was something she had found there, a specific frequency of silence that the shelves and the chair by the window and the particular non-attention of a good book seller made possible. He thought she deserved that. He still thinks she deserved that. Subscribe to Echoes of Greatness for new stories every week.
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