<< Back 8/21/02 Keeping it local — book company returns to Main Street home By Jeff Minick After seventy years the Waynesville Book Company has returned to Main Street. The original Waynesville Book Co. was a Main Street fixture from 1870 until about 1930. It began as a stationary and newspaper store, then expanded around 1900 into a shop that also carried magazines, cameras, postcards, and books. Like many other businesses of its time, the Waynesville Book Co. fell victim to the Depression and closed its doors for the last time in the early 1930s. Now the store is back. Kent Stewart moved his store, Sloan’s Book Shop, from Depot Street up onto Main Street in the spring and renamed the store the Waynesville Book Co. A number of coincidences accompanied this move. First, the Waynesville Book Co. has returned to the building in which it was housed 80 years ago. Second, the shop is next to the building where Charlie and Edie Sloan first opened their store back in the 1970s before moving off Main Street. Finally, although Kent Stewart does not sell cameras and film as did H.C. Lindsley in 1900, he nonetheless has a lively interest in photography. “I got my degree in photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology,” Stewart says, adding that Rochester is the home of Kodak. “And I teach photography at Haywood Community College. So this store also has that connection to the old Waynesville Book Company.” The Main Street of the old Waynesville Book Co. was quite different from the Main Street of today. Several large hotels lined Main Street. The street at different times boasted movie theaters, a bowling alley, soda fountains, and a skating rink. In the 1880s, Waynesville had become a tourist attraction with the arrival of the railways, and in 1900 H.C. Lindsley and his family moved to Waynesville for Lindsley’s health. He bought the bookstore from H. Taylor Reece, expanded the inventory, and remained in business for more than thirty years. Before her death at age 99, Sue Willard Lindsley remembered working in her father’s store. “I was supposed to help him,” she said, “but often as not he’d let me go down to the dances at the Gordon Hotel. In the summers there were morning dances with a victrola, afternoon dances with a four-piece band, and evening dances with a full orchestra. I liked dancing better than I liked bookselling.” Lindsley sold books to local schools, carried the best sellers of his day, and even developed film for camera buffs. For many years the store prospered. “Papa worked hard in the store,” Sue Willard Lindsley said. “He’d come home for supper in the summer and then go back and work evenings. I’m not sure opening in the evenings was worth it because he didn’t do much business then.” Today his namesake shop would undoubtedly please Lindsley. The new Waynesville Book Co., located at 184 North Main, is a bright, spacious place with a plentitude of books, comfortable chairs, a large wooden desk, an attractive children’s corner, and overhead fans that lend an old-fashioned touch. Kent Stewart, who comes from a family of booklovers, worked a variety of jobs before purchasing this store from the Sloans in 1997. “I worked for 3M — the company makes scotch tape, among other things — for several years in their research and development division. Later I worked for Alderman Studios in High Point and managed their processing facility.” Although he enjoyed both positions, Stewart had always wanted to own a bookstore. “When my corporate job went away due to downsizing, I decided that this is what I wanted to do.” After working briefly for a large bookstore to gain experience, Stewart bought Sloan’s Book Shop and moved to Waynesville. Today he stands comfortably behind the cashier’s desk in the middle of the store, answering a customer’s questions about a diet book and adding up charge receipts from a book fair that he had recently attended. “Big box bookstores and on-line shopping are tough competition,” he says. “I understand the attraction to both, but I’ve made a commitment to Waynesville to be here and I look for a commitment from the people who live here.” One major point of pride in the Waynesville Book Co. is the regional books section. Accompanying these works about Appalachia are a large selection of topographic and relief maps. “Recently I read Far Appalachia by Noah Adams of NPR,” Stewart says. “That was a wonderful book. But my favorite regional book is still Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders. Customers who aren’t from here are sometimes surprised when I recommend that book, mostly because of its age, but I tell them that nearly everything in that book is still true in a general way for this area.” Besides selling books, the Waynesville Book Co. is also a sponsor for Mountain Writers, a regional writers group, and is a supplier of books to several local book clubs. When asked why he continues to operate a store in such a difficult business as bookselling, Stewart answers that he wants to make sure that the town has a bookstore. “It’s not just about making money,” he says. “Waynesville deserves to have a good book store.” (Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)