Color Me Bookish: Seven Portland Authors On Powell’s Color-Coded Delights

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Sunday, September 07, 2014

Deborah Reeves, GoLocalPDX Contributor

Powell’s unveiled big changes to its iconic Burnside bookstore this month. The Green and Blue Rooms were remodeled with a new roof, energy-efficient windows, and an updated floor plan.

Purists were relieved that the "Powell's Books" marquee was left intact and, though the Purple Room’s inventory has been reorganized and re-edited, it is still the Purple Room.

Color-coded rooms are more than an organizational strategy for the behemoth that is Powell’s (each room—Green, Blue, Gold, Orange, Red, Pearl, Rose, and Purple—is larger than an average bookstore). For those of us with a favorite room, its color is a shorthand way of saying: “This is who I am” or “This is who I hope to be.” 

We asked five Portland writers the all-important Powell’s question: What’s your favorite color?

Authors pick their favorite colors

“That’s easy,” says David Shafer—whose debut novel, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, has a tense pursuit through the Red Room—“It’s the Green Room. Powell's is a fortress, as it should be. But the Green Room is the sally port, the room that lets the city in. Burnside, Portland's carotid, courses by outside. In the autumn, the evening sun just hosannahs through those windows. New Arrivals and Debut Fiction face out, all proud, saying, 'pick me, pick me!'

And the magazines! Cat Fancy. Model Railroad Enthusiast. 3 lb. 11x17s devoted to Italian sofas.

What a world!” 

 

“I have fallen in love with every color room at Powell’s at one time or another,” says Chelsea Cain, whose most recent novel, One Kick, was published this month. Cain claims to have read whole books on the floor of the store, and still loves the smell of Powell’s more than any other smell.

“I draw a lungful of air when I walk in and it gets me every time. It’s the smell of old books, of paper and mildew and ink, of softened paperbacks and dusty hardcovers. It’s better than bacon. The blue room smells Powells-iest. Maybe it’s all the poetry, or because that room doesn’t get a lot of circulation.  I only wish Powell’s could bottle the smell and sell a scented bubblebath.”

“I grew up going to Powell's so I've seen it through a couple of remodels,” says Glaciers author Alexis Smith. “I worked in the Rose Room for most of my eight years so a piece of my heart will always be there (probably lurking in the fairy tales). In my day, the science and leisure books were on the other side of the room, too, so you might get questions about ethnobotany or Nancy Drew or nautical lore or pregnancy in any given hour at the info desk.

It was always an adventure.”

Literary miner

For close to a year, Evan P. Schneider spent a few minutes each week combing the very last aisle of the Blue Room. “At the time I was working at Literary Arts only a few blocks away,” says the author of A Simple Machine and Like the Lever, “and during lunch I would run over and resume my ongoing hunt for first edition hard cover versions of all four titles in John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy.

I had never read any of those books, but I loved their classic Knopf rainbow covers and wanted all four to sit on my shelf side-by-side. Rabbit Redux and Rabbit at Rest were easy to come by, and I could have simply ordered Rabbit, Run and Rabbit is Rich online somewhere to complete my collection. But what I wanted perhaps more than the full set was the experience of exploring that Blue Room like some sort of literary miner who descended into the depths repeatedly and patiently and finally came out with fat gleaming gems that I still treasure.”

Joanna Rose, author of the novel Little Miss Strange, also gives the Blue Room a nod. "I have to say that I loved best the Blue Room, and particularly its dark corners," she says. "Small Press used to be tucked away in the northeast corner, and Reference! The Reference aisle, in the opposite corner, was crazy esoteric!"

Happy place

“The Orange Room is my happy place,” says craft-beer writer Lucy Burningham, “specifically the Eating and Drinking sections. Okay, Eating and Drinking might not be the actual subsections, but all I know is that I can turn from books about my favorite beverage—beer—to food memoirs that chronicle adventures with rare cheeses or years spent shucking oysters.

I’m hungry. I turn.

I’m thirsty. I turn.

By the time I pry myself away from the stacks, I’m desperate for sustenance, and a pint of ale brewed down the street most surely counts.”

 

Monica Drake, whose latest work, The Stud Book, was published last year, has fond memories of the Coffee Room.

"Before I really started writing, I’d swing by on my bike in the evenings and see authors read in the Coffee Room," she says. "I was young and didn’t have the cash to buy anything but read entire books there. The scent of coffee and shortbread, good books, live authors! Amazing.

"One night I saw Joy Williams read in the corner where the large glass windows come together. She was deeply suntanned, in layers of all-white clothing, with a silver necklace that hit her bony clavicle. Her lip cracked and started bleeding in a subtle way that held a quiet drama. Her story was hypnotic. I decided to go to graduate school in Creative Writing. I went on to study with Joy Williams. That reading changed my life.

Powell’s has moved the reading space now, but when I step in the Coffee Room I feel ghost traces of good times and big dreams in that place where a broke kid with a bike could meet the kinds of authors who built a world and dared readers to step in."

Deborah Reeves is an Irish writer, happy to call Portland home after many years of traveling. An avid reader, she blogs about books and writing at deborahrosereeves.com.  You can reach her @debrosereeves on the Twitter.  

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