University Book Store's '110/110' celebrates 11 decades in the book biz

Lit life |

In my other life, I am a member of Band Parent clan. I have followed my kids to university-based music festivals all over the West. I have learned this: When there are hours to kill, your feet ache and the little prodigies you are charged with chaperoning have glared you into submission, you retreat to the university bookstore. From Reno to Moscow (Idaho), I have haunted the aisles of these joints, coveting the pricey pens, scratching my head at the mascots (the Vandals??), rifling through sad piles of weighty, authoritative books on sale for $2.

So I can say with conviction that Seattle's University Book Store is the sine qua non of university bookstores. Multiple author readings. A well-read staff. A wonderful children's department. Free parking with purchase, and some of the most interesting sale tables on the planet.

The grand old UBS celebrated its 110th anniversary yesterday. To celebrate, the store issued a book. "110/110" collects the works of 110 local authors (110 words or less), writing about lambent memories, dashed dreams and the thrill and heartbreak of loving books. This keepsake collection is free at the store when you buy one of the contributing authors' books. Here's a sampling from those who have treasured the store as students, as faculty and as writers:

Ivan Doig: Back in the '60s, Seattle novelist Doig was a UW graduate student. At the store, he wrote, "I loaded up, according to my handwritten list, all the way from Tacitus' Annals to Murray Morgan's saga of Grand Coulee, the Dam. A dozen years later, a book with my name and the title This House of Sky was magically on those same shelves ... I'm still a bit awed to be in the blessed company the UBS has put me in: Doctorow, Doerr, Doig, Dostoevsky ... "

Shawn Wong: The UW English professor wrote that "I once found two books of mine — two different anthologies I had edited — on the bargain discount table for $1.98 each, so I bought all nine copies. The cashier looked at the name on my Bookstore credit card, then the name on the book and said, 'Does it make you mad to find your book on the sale table?' "

UW Astronomer Donald Brownlee: "My favorite experience — (former Washington governor) Dixy Lee Ray coming into the UBS men's store, looking at a polo shirt and telling the sales person that she really liked it and would take 12 — in assorted colors."

And children's author Deb Caletti on the lives that converge on the Ave:

"You see him over your back fence with his guitar, singing his heart out. A kid, swooped hair, Coronas around from the last party ...

"You can read his mind. Kurt Cobain. Nirvana. You saw him posting flyers in the U District — Guitar Player wanted. Can't suck. — He doesn't mean you, though you once had real gigs before the mortgage, the wife. Even she doesn't know how you felt when your music and the crowd were a single heartbeat.

"But he does. He knows. And over that fence it happens. Your dreams rise, collide. Together, they make their own immortal song."

UBS is located at 4326 University Way N.E., Seattle (206-634-3400 or www.bookstore.washington.edu).

Mary Ann Gwinn:

206-464-2357 or mgwinn@

seattletimes.com. Mary Ann Gwinn appears on Classical KING-FM's Arts Channel at www.king.org/

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