Bud's Books

Bud Kalette owned one of the oldest book stores in Carson City, Nevada.  Books & Antiques was housed in the bottom floor of an old Victorian on Curry Street, which rumor had as a former brothel.  For many years, he was also my sister Elenie’s landlord for her vintage clothing shop, Revelations, which was located several blocks away in the same old neighborhood, dotted with Arts & Crafts bungalows and stately Victorian homes.  Bud’s store straddled the abrupt dividing line between the Sierra Nevada range just a few blocks away, and the Great Basin desert splaying out into an infinite eastern horizon. 

 Carson City had been the center of activity during the days of the Comstock Lode.  Mark Twain had lived and written here for a while.  The moneyed upper class, the successful miners and merchants built their fabulous homes as close to the mountains as they could.  And when the state of Nevada was established, Carson City became its capital.

 Drive a few blocks east from the vintage neighborhoods and the capitol building, and today’s Carson is an abysmal conglomeration of car dealerships, casinos, and strip malls lined along US Highway 395.  Several miles to the north is Reno, still trying to convince itself that it is the “biggest little city in the world”.

To the south, past Minden and Gardnerville, the road comes alive through places like Bridgeport where Robert Mitchum  starred in the noir classic Out of the Past, and Lee Vining, the gateway to Yosemite.  And just beyond that the tufa-studded shoreline of Mono Lake.

 In any case, my sister eventually abandoned the store idea, and a few years later old Bud passed away.  But Elenie knew Bud’s sister, who was liquidating the inventory, and who graciously allowed the two of us to have free reign in the store before all the books were sold off.  So one late summer afternoon, not long after the store had closed its doors forever to the public, the two of us were granted access to its dark and dusty shelves.  With only Bud’s sister hanging out at the counter, the two of us had as much time as we wanted to pick through boxes, open drawers, poke around the shelves, and just sit on the floor leafing through pages of history.

 

Bud had a fantastic collection of Western Americana, everything from books about Death Valley to the history of San Mateo County, California and the development of cable cars in the west.  He also had drawer upon drawer of antique postcards, the old hand tinted variety, carefully cataloged and arranged.

I ended up with a huge stack of hard-to-find titles, mostly regional tomes like a history of Inyo County and Memories of the Mendocino Coast.  I really could have looked for much longer but I wasn’t sure I could afford to do it.  As it turned out, when I went to cash out, Bud’s sister charged us a pittance to carry it all off.  

 

But the most priceless part of the experience was having the silence, the solitude and the time to just look to our hearts’ content, to graze through the piles of paper.  In the dim lower floor of an historic home. With no pressure to buy.  No crowded aisles.  But surrounded by the most wonderful array of written material one could imagine.  If I could have, I would have spent the night gladly on that hard wooden floor with all those books as my companions.  But eventually, like waking up from a blissful dream, we had to emerge into the harsh desert light and the white heat of reality.