I have found a treasure, a perfect gem. It's called The Jesse Stuart Foundation Bookstore. This is in a big, old building just a few minutes from where I live. Hubby and I visited it this weekend while we were Christmas shopping. I had found my Heaven.
Basically,the JSFB is a collection of books about Appalachia or books that were written by Appalachia authors. It was AWESOME!!!!! Books about coal mining, books about the strong Appalachian people, books about the wonderful Appalachian food, farming in the foothills, and how they did it. There were books about the rail road, books about indians, about the settlers that first crossed these wild mountains. There were fiction books there also! Anything and everything you can think about, if it had to do with Appalachia, was in this book store. Once again, IT WAS AWESOME!!!!!
As we were checking out,(with tons of books, I might add.) we got to taking to the "manager" of the place. I was telling him how much I love the idea of the Foundation. He said he appreciated us coming in and buying books because their business was extremely slow, scary slow. We got to talking about how people just didn't read anymore, especially about things local. They were into things more like 50 Shades of Grey or being on Facebook. No one wanted to learn about the history of Appalachia.
That concept made me sad. Appalachia is the best place in the world! (imho) Why wouldn't people want to learn about it? This building was teaming with so much knowledge from days gone by and from days yet to come, local knowledge. There was sooooo much stuff to learn here. It would be a HUGE shame if this place went out of business. It runs on grants and on the small amount of people who buy books from there. And, we all know how well the grants are doing now a days.........
So I'm asking a favor, if you were thinking about getting a book for someone for Christmas, could you please just check out their site to see if there is anything there that would be of interest. Yes, it may be a little bit more than Amazon, but you are supporting a foundation that is trying to do something good here, not some big corporation.
So once again I thank you,
And until next time,
Small Farm Girl, trying to save a good thing.
1 comment:
That sounds like a neat place to find information that someday may be vital for future times.
I work at a place that has a lot of books and information on our area over here in Virginia. http://www.blueridgeinstitute.org/heritage.htm
There are places out there to find out about the old skills but so many people just want to download an application but that may not work some day.
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