This is just a wretched, excessive place.
————-——Eighth Day Books customer
I HAVE always loved to read. I have always loved the sense of entering a completely new world, yet finding points of contact with my own. I have always felt the relentless pull of whatever might be on the next page of a book. I have often lived through my imagination. And I have always been somewhat shy and introverted, so reading has offered a safe haven where in solitary times I could find an endlessly varied occupation. I “read” even before I could really read, narrating the illustrations that accompanied the as-yet indecipherable text. Academics, not sports, were my strong suit all through school.
In the early seventies, when I was in my teens, the so-called Jesus Movement was sweeping the country, and through its influence here in Wichita I became part of a large group of young people who made open commitments to Christ in a sort of evangelical context. My sub-group was, of course, the readers; but now I was one of the Jesus-freak readers. We didn’t stop with the Bible. We read books about the Bible; we read apologetics; we read books on theology and church history and spirituality. Books were the common coin of our particular sub-group. When I entered college, I chose religion as my major because no profession held any attraction for me compared with the issues my friends and I had been probing for the last several years.
My college years were decisive for me. My Jesus-freak faith matured, joining itself to the Orthodox faith into which I had been born and baptized and intermittently nurtured, and which I had never really left, even in my most enthusiastic evangelical days. The process had begun before college, when I began reading the works of C.S. Lewis at sixteen or seventeen. His extraordinary writing—its beauty, clarity, and penetrating descriptive accuracy, especially regarding emotion and the spiritual life—not only confirmed the fundamental truths taught by the church (which is why I originally sought him), but connected these truths to a much wider spectrum of experience: mythology, philosophy, literature, even cultural criticism. Rigorously honest, self-effacing, and unpretentious, his portrait of the experience of joy—“the inconsolable longing”—permanently and globally shaped my perceptions and priorities. Reading Lewis was the perfect protoevangelion for encountering the history of the church and the world and writings of the church fathers. (I have always felt that Lewis shared the profundity and sensibility of the fathers; I have never been able to bear the dismissive description of Lewis as a “popularizer.”) Shortly after encountering Lewis, I read The Holy Fire by Robert Payne (another so-called popularizer), a book filled with vibrant sketches of John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, John of Damascus, and others—a roll-call of saints whose work and words molded Christendom.
As years went by, and further reading sparked by Payne’s book led to deeper investigation, I discovered that the church I had always belonged to but never fully appreciated was the same church the fathers knew and spoke of and lived in. Even though my experience within evangelical Christianity was overwhelmingly positive and valuable, and even threw light on neglected aspects of Orthodoxy, I felt as if I had come home. I also encountered what to me were the incredibly winsome works of such contemporary Orthodox theologians as Alexander Schmemann, John Meyendorff, Lev Gillet, Thomas Hopko, and Kallistos Ware. The immensely powerful literary (yet in a sense catechetical) works of Dostoyevsky followed not long after. The deathbed discourse of Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov breathed, in passages of heartrending poignancy, the inner spirit of Orthodoxy. I began to hear the words of our services with new ears, to see the deep wisdom of the church in its structure and habits with new eyes. I so desired the riches of Orthodox tradition to be broken open, that the “house” of my friendships might be filled with its fragrance.
It was an awesome and pivotal time, a time of intellectual ferment and exchange. One friend, a doctoral student in literature at Columbia, introduced us to the Victorians and Romantics. Another, pursuing New Testament studies at Duke, maintained a keen interest in paranormal phenomena and incarnated the conviction—later so important to me—that academic studies need to mirror reality by being interdisciplinary. As for me, the unfolding riches of Orthodox liturgical life compelled me to share texts like this with my friends:
In that we have beheld the Resurrection of Christ, let us bow down before the holy Lord Jesus, the only sinless One. Thy Cross do we adore, O Christ, and thy holy Resurrection we praise and glorify; for thou art our God, and we know none other beside thee…. O come all ye faithful, let us adore Christ’s holy Resurrection. For through the Cross is joy come into all the world. Ever blessing the Lord, let us sing his Resurrection; for in that he endured the Cross, he has destroyed death by death.
I loved the almost ecstatic repetitiveness of texts like this—and my friends were patient with my tireless repetitiveness in sharing them.
My friendships—mostly friendships with non-Orthodox Christians—continued to revolve around books. Books formed the center of our common life. We read books together; we discussed ideas; we joked about and argued and pondered things we read. Sometimes, just for fun, we would muse over what the perfect bookstore would have on its shelves.
Meanwhile, the other half of my life was family and work. I grew up in a family business within an ethnic immigrant Lebanese community, and from the time I was nine years old I worked in my father’s grocery store, as did my older brother, my mother, and my two sisters. There I learned hard, dirty, sweaty, honest work: good work, neat work. I swept floors, loaded and unloaded trucks, stacked boxes, and learned to wait on people my father’s age. He was a stern taskmaster, and though I can’t count the times I resented his relentless demands, I now thank God for him. He taught me not only the value and satisfaction of a job well done, but also endurance, and not to feel sorry for myself because of having to work hard.
Through high school and college and even into my early married life I continued working for my father and with my family. I loved them and was reasonably content to have the two discrete halves of my life going on simultaneously. I worked hard because I had been taught to, and I read and probed and discovered new and delightful things about my faith because I loved the pursuit. Work and that deeper sense of delight remained in entirely separate spheres. And I could live with that. As I said, I was reasonably happy.
On May 17, 1987, my wife Barbara, on her way home from work, was hit by a drunk driver who ran a red light. Some two months later, injuries from that accident took her life and the life of our unborn third child.
I felt that my life had also ended in certain deep ways, and that I had to start over. For a number of months I had no idea what to do. When I began to recover from the numbness that goes with grief, I began to ask myself obvious questions. What kind of job could I look forward to going to every day? What kind of work would involve the tendencies, loves, talents, and gifts that were part of my particular makeup? With only a BA in religion and classical studies and not much desire to teach, and with a family, and a firm and wholesome attachment to a home and a thriving Orthodox community in Wichita—the thing I could look forward to was opening a bookstore.
You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out—perhaps a little at a time.
————-— —Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
The old circle of friends and the tossing around of ideas about what the ideal bookstore would contain came into play. As I drew on those discussions, the advice of my friends both past and present, my experience in the evangelical world, my studies in college in the humanities and in literature, my exposure to church history and the fathers, my deepening convictions about the fullness of the Orthodox faith, my growing sense that all things good and true and excellent and beautiful belonged together—the essential elements of Eighth Day Books—converged.
There came a time when I knew that I could not not do this thing. Whether or not I sold a single book, I knew that this was the thing that I had to do.
My experience in the world of retail sales and all the grunt-work that went with it—these became the wheels for carrying this vision forward. The two discrete halves of my life seemed to coalesce. All the seemingly separate and distinct strands intertwined. Life began to make sense. I remarried during this time, and my new wife Chris became a longsuffering and inexhaustible support to the fledgling venture, teaching me the meaning of true friendship and sacrifice. And my brother and sisters graciously blessed my departure from the family business, despite the difficulties it created. I see now that following a vocation requires nearly as much of your loved ones as it does of yourself.
It is marvelous to see how the geography of the Christian universe has recreated itself in microcosm through the store: Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant folk rubbing shoulders, rubbing their eyes, unexpectedly encountering rather than confronting one another. The Orthodox owner with some evangelical influences discovers the riches of a long-germinating Catholic theology of culture. Evangelicals look at icons and find evidence of the Bible being read before 1517. Catholics stumble upon equally triumphalist Orthodox cousins. And everyone learns the difficult but beautiful art of maintaining honest conviction together with humility.
A lot of this I can only see in retrospect. The journey has not been an uninterrupted rapture. Far from it. There are days of chaotic frustration, confusion, overwhelming insufficiency or mind-numbing paperwork (each of those thousands of books has a paper trail). Finances are always an adventure tinged with terror. But there are also days pervaded by a sense of golden wholeness and completion, days of almost heartbreaking beauty. You continue.
I had a feeling of strangeness and a feeling of being free; I had no more obligations, no more fear of failure, for failure had already come and, in a way, had gone.
————-— —Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
The store is one of those early twentieth-century quasi-Victorian houses that abound in certain parts of Wichita, in a neighborhood that turned commercial in the 1960s. We’ve inhabited this building for only three years, but the space down the street where we operated for thirteen years looked and felt just the same. Our books occupy two levels plus a basement—euphemistically called “the hobbit hole” and devoted to children’s books—and an attic converted into an office full of odd angles, with a view of trees and the old neighborhood. This attic is where I live about seventy hours a week. Downstairs, the house is sectioned into rooms that naturally divide the books into subject categories, and the four levels make for a fair bit of daily exercise for the staff. It’s three thousand square feet and the mortgage is $906 a month. We stock around fifteen thousand titles, or forty thousand books, compared to the estimated one hundred fifty to two hundred thousand books in the average Borders or Barnes & Noble.
Eighth Day Books is not huge. In a certain sense we may even be negligible. But we’ve looked at each and every one of those forty thousand books, and made a decision about each one, all conforming to a vision, not a projection of “turns per year.”
Our mail-order catalog includes these words:
We hope there is a coherence within this eccentric community of books, an organizing principle of selection: if a book—be it literary, scientific, historical, or theological—sheds light on ultimate questions in an excellent way, then it’s a worthy candidate for inclusion in this catalog. Reality doesn’t divide itself into “religious” or “literary” or “secular” spheres, so we don’t either; we’re convinced that all truths are related, and every truth, if we pay attention rightly, directs our gaze toward God. One of our customers found us “eclectic but orthodox.” We like that. We also resonate with Saint Justin Martyr in his Second Apology (paraphrased a bit): that which is true, is ours.
This is a used bookstore, right? I’ve heard that seven days are for new books, and the eighth day is for used.
————-——customer to Eighth Day Books employee
Christ’s resurrection is the lodestone of my life, my hope, my faith. And the early church had a rich symbolism for this: the resurrection took place on the first day of the week, which was also the day after the seventh day—the eighth day. This Sunday of all Sundays represents a new creation, eternity breaking into time. The eighth day represents eternity contrasted with the time of this world.
Though many things about our business change, these organizing principles never will. Our vision is all about the unbreakable connections between all things that are true and good and beautiful. I’ll live and die for Father Alexander Schmemann’s insistence that you can’t compartmentalize reality—you can’t separate the religious from the secular. I believe that doing so is a denial of God’s good creation. Do we believe that God created all things and called them very good? Do we believe, as Saint Paul tells us in what may be the earliest Christian creed, that Jesus is Lord? Believing these things means believing a book that tells a human story well, that tells history truly, that speaks poetry beautifully—belongs to the Holy Trinity. If we are to be consistent and honest to our confession, we have to claim all of creation, all that we know and all that exists, for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Whether it looks religious in the conventional sense doesn’t matter. I’m increasingly convinced that God doesn’t care about us being religious, but that he does desire that we be honest and true and loving—that we be, as Saint Irenaeus put it, “human beings fully alive.”
In the simplest of terms, Eighth Day Books specializes in classics in religion, literature, and history. These criteria are surprisingly spacious. Classics are endlessly fertile; as other writers engage with them down through the centuries, they tend to beget excellence in turn. We try to stock that which is of perennial, not ephemeral interest. A wise theologian friend told me thirty years ago in answer to my anguished adolescent query about whether to engage “non-Christian books” that if we lay all the cards on the table, the truth will make itself known. His answer has become one of the foundations of title selection at the store.
Over the past thirty years I have come to an apprehension of Orthodox Christianity as the fullness of truth. But during that process I have also seen that other Christian—and to some extent non-Christian—traditions manifest varying and often great degrees of that fullness, and I have been wonderfully enriched by them. At the store and through our catalog, we try to offer all these traditions to the public. To me, it comes as a relief to trust a God from whom all truth ultimately flows, and who makes himself known in myriad ways to every human being born into the world. What a liberating relief to be quiet and trust the truth and beauty of the church to speak for themselves.
This store is interdisciplinary without being chaotic.
————-——new Eighth Day Books customer brought in by a regular
We don’t try to push the Orthodox or even the Christian vision on anyone. We believe that God—and the church, when it is being true to itself—respects freedom and abhors force and manipulation. Love is incompatible with both. If Orthodoxy is true, it will be known simply by being available, not by being forced on anyone. Its beauty and truth will be self-evident. I am by necessity and choice both very open and very quiet about my faith.
The voice of God is silence, exerting a pressure that is infinitely light, never irresistible.
————-——Paul Evdokimov
We believe that overarching principles have to manifest themselves in messy particulars. If indeed, as Paul Evdokimov writes, “no form of life or culture escapes the universal reach of the Incarnation,” then we must stock Saint Athanasius’s On the Incarnation and H.A. Rey’s Curious George, Belloc’s Path to Rome and Kerouac’s On the Road. That’s how C.S. Lewis and Friedrich Nietzsche, Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow and Oswald Chambers, Bertrand Russell and Frederick Copleston, Martin Luther and Robert Bellarmine, James Whitcomb Riley and T.S. Eliot, Michael Novak and Wendell Berry, Camille Paglia and Lucy Maud Montgomery—the antinomies can be multiplied endlessly—all find common space on our shelves.
Breathe in: “I don’t have it.” Breathe out: “but I’ll get it for you.”
————-——advice from my priest shortly after we opened
We opened in September 1988 in about fifteen hundred square feet, with a few lovingly chosen books, staffed by the owner and one part-time employee, a friend and New Testament scholar who has since made his mark internationally. He worked for $186 a week, biding his time until a research position opened up somewhere—which one did, nine years later, at a major seminary. He was the first in an unforgettable series of friends who came to work at the store, and of strangers who became friends and even family. I consider the staffers brothers and sisters—or, now that I’m nearing fifty, sons and daughters.
They came not just because they wanted jobs, but because they wanted to work at a place like Eighth Day Books, and their terms here have mostly been long because they knew the scent of the place, identified with its vision, and added their sweat to the pursuit of that vision. We have dwelled together and formed one another. I have seen them discover and attain vocations; I have seen them marry and divorce and give birth. I have seen conversions to faith and unfaith and faith again. I have witnessed remarkable convergences of lives and friendships and whole communities. There have been a few who could keep the store going if I passed from the scene. I’d be interested to see who it might be.
When they call for an out-of print search and then they call back directly and ask when they’re going to get it, I just want to say, “I don’t know. How long is a piece of string?”
————-——Eighth Day Books employee to rest of staff
A year after we opened, knowing we would have to reach beyond Wichita for customers, we sent out a few thousand of our very first catalog, twenty-four pages long and roughly modeled on that literary mail-order institution, the Common Reader, but with our own constellation of titles. Our catalog has since grown to a nice, fat 168 pages, and is sent pretty much everywhere. It’s a collaborative project, with over seven hundred books annotated by writers including a brilliant collection of employees, a few trusted customers who’ll trade a blurb for a book, and myself.
Your catalog gives me something to live for. It makes life better than it should be.
————-——letter from a mail-order customer
The catalog gives us the luxury of idiosyncrasy. A crazily specialized selection that would be impossible for the local clientele to support, no matter how dedicated, becomes possible when the pool of potential customers includes the whole country, or, through the internet, the whole English-speaking world. Twice a year, production of the catalog calls us away from the mundane details of bookstore operation to the task of writing accurately and honestly about what we’ve read. The transition from left to right brain can be intimidating, some days nearly impossible.
Who would have thought that you could find The Shape of the Liturgy in Wichita, Kansas?
————-——customer calling from Berkeley, California
Who would have thought they’d be reading it in Berkeley?
————-——Eighth Day Books employee
Another atypical feature of our store is that we take it on the road: we’ll pack up two to three thousand books, a cash register, and several changes of clothes and set up shop at conferences like Image’s Glen Workshop, Dallas’s Trinity Arts Conference, Baylor’s Art & Soul, Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Writing, and Touchstone’s biannual conference. We’ve brought a piece of Eighth Day Books to sites as far flung as Chicago, Santa Fe, Denver, Austin, and Jackson, Mississippi. These excursions are grueling, but they also offer adventure, fun, learning, and a refreshing solitude. My paternal grandfather arrived in Wichita as a teenager in 1905, where his uncle, one of the earliest members of the Lebanese immigrant community there, provided him with a wagon filled with pots, pans, and linens and sent him out peddling to farm families in central and western Kansas and northern Oklahoma. As I’ve put the miles behind me in the blue 1995 GMC cargo van, I’ve often mused about the way—through chance, Providence, or the quiet, insistent force of heredity—I’m doing pretty much the same thing he did. And I’ve wondered if he might have been motivated by something like the same cocktail of joys I find in this work.
Giussani is the post-Christian Justin Martyr.
————-——an Eighth Day Books customer prone to cultural analysis
The catalyst for a number of these trips can be laid at the door of a journal called Image and that quixotic incubator for writers of faith, the Milton Center. Both efforts began in Wichita around the time we opened our doors in 1988, and though Image and the Milton Center are both based in Seattle now, our paths have continued to cross ever since. I remember a conversation with Harold Fickett, a friend and one of the original movers behind the Milton Center, concerning how, historically, “Christian writing” might be defined. Take Dante for instance, he said. To ask whether the Divine Comedy fits into any contemporary category called “Christian writing” is to make a laughingstock of that definition. In Dante’s age, the idea of literary creation apart from the world of faith would have seemed nonsensical. Granting that between this age and Dante’s a great gulf is fixed, and that we live at the postmodern end of the Enlightenment, can we recover that integration of faith with imagination? The answer to the question gives clues to why we exist as a bookstore, why Image delicately flourishes, and why the Milton Center has always been near—and now has come—into its orbit. We have always felt that our efforts and our books have fit hand-in-glove with Image’s vision, and when they asked us to bring our books to the Glen Workshop in 1997, it seemed only natural to go. And we’ve gone ever since. Image editor Gregory Wolfe has become not only a fellow pilgrim, but a friend.
This place is a fricking umbilical cord for people like me.
————-——Eighth Day Books customer, a teacher at odds with the educational bureaucracy
This enterprise has always been a synergistic exercise between us and our miraculous clientele, who have affirmed, prodded, and taught us along the way. Our customers have pointed us in directions we could not have dreamed and pointed out embarrassing shortcomings we hoped they couldn’t see. Being an “umbilical cord” for this strange community has been gratifying, but it’s just as true that this community has been an umbilical cord for us.
That Philokalia kicks your butt. That book is your own personal traveling butt-kicker.
————-— —a buyer of the first volume of The Philokalia, returning to buy the other three.
Our customers teach us about new books and writers. They’ve also taught us not to judge by outward appearance. One our most erudite regulars wears jeans and a torn T-shirt, is missing a couple of teeth, and barely said a word to us for five years. He would buy a Penguin Classic or two, say goodbye, and leave. He eventually loosened up, and now offers impromptu lectures on Matthew Arnold, Henry James, the mountain men of the early American frontier, or the upsurge of tuberculosis in Africa. Another customer had seen a reference to the classic Orthodox anthology of spiritual texts, The Philokalia, in a book by Erich Fromm; he phoned us, was amazed that we had the title, and walked into the store the next day. He turned out to be an Eric Hoffer–type, an alcohol and drug-abuse counselor who had learned his trade through hard experience. His intellectual and vocational ramblings have brought him to Kierkegaard, Saint John Chrysostom, William James, and Charles Peirce—who all left him hungry for more. This man reads the books, looks at the footnotes, and continues to follow the trail. At the store, we glean from this sort of expedition.
