For the Love of Reading

Despite being only open for 16 years, Lange’s Bookshop became a beloved fixture in downtown Casper, Wyoming. Robert and Naomi Lange opened their bookshop in 1967, profoundly shaping Casper’s cultural life. 

Their daughter, Rebecca Hein shared her memories of growing up in the bookshop with WyoHistory.org Founder and Editor Emeritus Tom Rea in 2023. Both Rebecca and Tom worked in Lange’s Bookshop and then years later, together on WyoHistory.org where Rebecca worked as an assistant editor until her retirement in 2025.

Thank you to the Natrona County Library for providing images of adverts for Lange’s Bookshop found in the Casper Star Tribune.

Transcript

Editor’s Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Interview 1

Tom Rea: So this is for, Let's see. It's, February 8th, 2023, and I am speaking with. Oh, sorry. It's Thursday, February 9th, 2023, and we're speaking with Rebecca Hein, about her family's, business, Lange's Bookshop, in Casper in the 60s and 70s and 80s, I think. Right? And, and what her role in it was and, and how it got to be there and what happened? Is that fair? 

Rebecca Hein: Yeah.

Tom: All right. So, Becky, how did your family come to be in the book business?

Rebecca: Well, my parents were intellectuals, and, my father, until I was five years old, worked as an office manager for the Hughes Tool Company, first in Billings. Well, probably first in Casper before I was born, then in Billings, and then in Farmington, New Mexico. And, he always said that he hated it. And what he really wanted to do was run his own independent bookshop. I think, I think if he could have lived his dream, he would have been a Shakespearean actor, by the way he behaved, but he knew he couldn't support his family that way.

So, what he did was look for the right size of city in the region that he and my mother wanted to live in. I think he looked at Casper and Billings and Rapid City and, you know, made an assessment based on what sort of book sellers were already in those places. And I'm not sure why he decided on Casper over the other places, but he decided on Casper.

And so, we moved to Casper from Farmington when I was just going into first grade. That would have been, the fall of 1962.

And I don't think I think he opened his doors until maybe six months later because there were there were a lot of preparations, of course. And one of them I distinctly remember, this one, he took the whole family, drafted us all into, drawing lines on three by five cards. He made a little template out of a three by five card, which he cut little slits in, and then all we had to do was line up the template with the blank card and draw the lines. And that was for his inventory system, which he had undoubtedly learned as the office manager for the Hughes Tool Company. So we kept our inventory.

Of course, this was way, way before computers. on these three by five cards, there were, I think four, little file drawers, especially the right size for three by five cards. And for every book in the shop that we stocked, there was a card, they were in alphabetical order. And, with the quantity that, of, number of copies that we had of that title.

So then at the end of each day, after we'd closed for the day, somebody either my father or my mother or their manager or one of their employees would, update all the inventory cards based on the sales tickets that we wrote out for the books that we sold. So it worked very well. And I, I don't think we had very many inaccuracies.

I'm sure we did occasionally. But my earliest memory is of sitting there drawing lines on these cards. Many, many, many, many.

Tom: You did? Go ahead.

Rebecca: Well, so I don't have any very clear memories of the bookshop when I was in grade school. Well, that's not quite true. I remember sitting in the children's section. We had, the store front in the Odd Fellows building.

136 South Wolcott. I'm not sure what's there now, but, there were— 

Tom: Excuse me. It's part of what’s now… it’s the front, one of the two front store fronts of what's now called the Wolcott Galleria in the Odd Fellows building, on the west side of Wolcott between first and second in downtown Casper.

Rebecca: Right. Okay. So, I do remember my father had the shop sort of partitioned off by the bookshelves into various sections, and the children's section was in seems like the northwest corner of that, that shop area. And there was a chair in there that was the only chair for customers that we had. And I remember sitting in that chair, curled up in that chair in the afternoon, reading Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys hard backs.

We had a couple of shelves of them, probably every Nancy Drew and every Hardy Boys that was published at that point. I probably read other books, but I especially remember sitting there reading Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys. I was probably about nine, and from a very early age. So my sisters, Cathy was six years older than I was, and Barbara was, 16 months older than I was. And we were always allowed to bring any book home and read it as long as we kept it in perfect condition. And we always did keep them in perfect condition. So, you know, that was that rule was always it always held. So I got I sort of had a—we had a private library kind of, so that's those are my earliest memories.

And then I started to work at the bookshop when I was 14. and of course, I have all sorts of recollections from that time. I was trained to answer the phone, of course. Take messages, take orders for books. if somebody came in the shop, I was trained how to wait on them. And, if we didn't have a book, of course they’d ask, do you have thus and such? Unless they were browsing. And I would excuse myself to go into the back room and look it up. And if we didn't have it, then the next thing to do, which. Back. Back room. Sorry. the place where we worked, it was partitioned off by some floor to ceiling shelves.

A very, very small space. There were two desks, couple of file cabinets. That was it. so I would go in and go back there where we had our inventory records, and I would look and see if we had the book. If if they asked for a particular title and if they didn't, the next words out of our mouths were always supposed to be,

We'd be very happy to special order it for you. If it wasn't a case of a book that was going to be coming in anyway, and in which case we would just say we're expecting a bunch of these, we'll hold a copy for you and call you when it comes in. But if, if they wanted to special order then, we would look it up in Books in Print.

And in those days, of course, without computers, Books in Print was a three volume, very large set. those books were huge. They were like an encyclopedia, really. and there was titles, authors and subjects. So if we could find the book under titles, then we would be able to determine, because they were issued annually. So  if a book was in print and available, it would be in that current edition of Books in Print.

So we'd be able to look it up. And if we found it in Books in Print  we would, go ahead and tell the person that we would be able to order it. I never had a lot to do with the ordering procedure, but I know that, we had these pieces of paper that were basically, well, I should back up here.

My parents never wasted anything. Nothing. So when we sold a book, we would write out a sales ticket on these huge metal, ticket writers they had. Last time I was at Lou Tauberts in Casper, they were still using those things. They had smaller ones, but, it would create a copy for the customer and a copy for us.

And, so our copies became obsolete as soon as we had posted the sale and updated the inventory records. Or maybe there were some other things that had to be done with it, but then my parents would cut these in half and the backside was blank, and that's what we would write down special orders on. And so we had a, cigar box with, blank pieces that these were basically three by five pieces of paper that we would pull out a piece of paper and put on the title of the book, the author, the name of the person who wanted it, their phone number. Probably the price that Publishers Weekly said the book was, and probably whether it was a hardbound or a paperbound. And the date that we had made out the slip. So then that went through some process that I was never really part of where, that book would be ordered. And then when it arrived, there was a system which I also don't remember, probably because I didn't handle that where the slip would be matched with the book, and the book would be taken out and handed to the person who was manning the front counter for that person during slack times, to get on the phone and call the customer to let them know their book had arrived. And then we shelved it until they picked it up back in the back room area. I we must just have shelved them alphabetically. I don't know how else we would have been able to find them, but there were always a fair number of

Tom: When I worked there briefly in the mid 70s. I always thought this was quite clever. Was you shelve the shelf, you alphabetized the books for people to pick up by the name of the customer. People often forgot the name of the book, but they never forgot their own names. And so they come in there and, and yeah, I thought that was pretty cool. 

Rebecca: Yeah, I, I didn't recall that detail. 

So our special order business, we made less of a profit on special orders, I think, for the standard books that we got, like on what was called automatic distribution from the publishers, they'd send out their best picks every fall. we got, I think, a 40% discount, but we only got we typically only got a 20% discount for a special order.

But, it was the backbone of our business. People knew they could get any book they wanted from us, including out-of-print books. if they were available. I have that on my list for a little later of how that happened. So. Yeah. 

Tom: By the time I was working there, Scop, single copy order plan, which was, a form that you could, it was a way to save bookkeeping on the publisher's end so that you would fill out a form that had had an address back to you on it, and all they had to do once they got it was stick a book in an envelope and stick your label on and send it right back to you.

And for that, you could maintain a 40%, margin so that, that might have come in later, maybe after you worked there. but yeah, it was, it was a it was a nice thing for the bookseller. Yeah.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely. That's good. Okay. So, one of the first things I remember after being taught to answer the phone and wait on people and things like that, and the procedure of looking to see if we had a book and what to do if we didn’t, and how to find it if we did, and so on. How to find it on the shelf. I, I have a very clear recollection of it seems like in the fall we would get rather large boxes of hardbound books, which my parents explained to me they had not ordered. But publishers sent out on this system called automatic distribution, which apparently were the books that that the publishers were willing to take risks on or, you know, send out to booksellers, assuming they would sell better than others.

These were always new. And in those days a book came out in hardback first, and then a year later in paperback. So there were these hardbound books that I don't remember when I was 14, how much they sold for, probably never less than about $20, but I couldn't be sure that. So there were quite a lot of books that passed through my hands.

I kind of got a feel for what current authors were and what they were writing and things like that. And then of course, books that were runaway bestsellers or books that, authors that people, were basically fans of, for example, your Uncle Bart, he would always want the latest Michener James Michener book. as you know, Michener wrote what, works of fiction that were basically historical fiction.

And he would go back to the very beginning of known history for an area like Centennial, Colorado or Hawaii. I don't remember the other books. They had quite a series. And, people would come in and ask for the latest Michener book, which hadn't been released yet, and we’d take their name, and then we’d get 20 or so copies, which were nearly all spoken for, and we would get them out to the front desk.

There was a there was a little desk. You probably remember this behind the counter where we waited on people, little desk where the phone was and where we could sit down to call people, and where we piled books that we had to, call people about. So we’d call people about their Michener books being in. And then they'd come swarming in on their noon hour, and by the end of that day, there wouldn't be more than one left. 

It was just astonishing. I noticed that, and and of course, I noticed when there were bestsellers like, this is going to be all out of order, I'm sure, but, let's see. James Herriot was a vet. he was a large animal. Well, no, he wasn't a large animal veterinarian. He was a country vet, basically in England somewhere.

And he started writing about his customers or clients or whatever, and the the animal and human personalities that he dealt with regularly. And he had, he had a knack for telling these stories, probably had good, good material. But All Creatures Great and Small, the first one, we couldn't keep it in the shop. We just we just could not keep it in.

It was a runaway bestseller, and I read it, of course, part of the job was keeping oneself familiar with the merchandise. So, I did a lot of reading. I would have anyway. I mean, my parents raised me and my sisters to be bookworms, but, All Creatures Great and Small was deservedly a runaway bestseller. And then his the three sequels also were, All Things Bright and Beautiful, All Things Wise and Wonderful. And then The Lord God Made Them All. I think that's a hymn or something. Words from a hymn. So they were all equally good, which was kind of rare for a series of books. My experience is that if there's somebody writes a really, really good book and then has, another try at writing a book as good, they never quite make the grade.

So, those Herriot books, every single one of them was a success. So I noticed that. And then there was the year—it seems like this always happened in the summer.  I'm not sure it did, but maybe the wave of sales continued into the summer when I was working full time. But I remember one summer when it seemed like every second or third person that came in asked for, a book by Colleen McCullough, The Thorn Birds. I read it; it’s a very good novel. People just. We couldn't keep that book in the shop. It was so very popular. Okay. 

And then, a book entitled Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which was sort of a sappy book about life, you might say. And that was another one that people, I knew before they opened their mouths, they were going to ask for it because just about it seemed like just about everybody that walked in the shop that summer asked for that book. And, it spawned a spoof that the author entitled Jonathan Seagull Chicken, but that one never went anywhere.

Anyway, I only have two more books that I remember that were sensations. Well, one was, it was a local one, The Sandbar. You just told me Walter Jones. Yeah. Local history. That was very popular. I do not know how many people bought it. Probably the author came in and signed books for that. But I just remember that being tremendously popular.

And then there was a book. There was an artist, a Western artist by the name of Conrad Schwiering, Schwiering, I believe. And he had a big coffee table sort of book with his paintings in it called Schwiering and the West. And the these book signings were called autographing parties in those days.

And my parents had an autographing party for Conrad Schwiering and that book at one of the banks. I don't remember if it was First National or Wyoming National, but I clearly remember being there and seeing this set up with all these Conrad Schwiering books and him sitting there at a table signing books and my parents ringing up the sales and so on.

So, you know, that probably was not exactly a runaway bestseller, but it was pretty popular. So from all that, I got the idea that a person could write a runaway bestseller, because people did. And so of course, I got the idea that I could, and I have therefore been, as you might say, saddled with or afflicted with a lifelong ambition to write a runaway bestseller. So I think it just went with, with the atmosphere.

Tom: That's interesting. Yeah. And, so did you work there after school every day or a few days a week or Saturdays or Christmases or all those things?

Rebecca: You know, I, I really don't remember from when I was in junior high, but I do recall from high school, I would walk after school, I would walk downtown, and I would work until closing, and then I'd wait around in the back room reading.

I don't think I had any particular jobs. While, my parents posted the books that had been sold, posted them to the inventory cards, and my father added up the money to be sure everything balanced with what had been in the cash drawer at the beginning of the day, and how much we'd taken in and what was in it at the end of the day. That all took maybe 45 minutes, and then we'd all go home. And so it seems like maybe it was just my senior year of high school, but maybe it was my junior year, too. I got out of school a little earlier than 3:30 or whatever that was, and would walk downtown and work after school every day, except if I had a cello lesson or something like that. I'd show up at the bookshop after my lesson. And weekends. My parents were never open on Sundays, and on Saturdays in the summer, they started closing at noon. So I would work full time every summer and, after school during the year. And then during Christmas vacation, typically, school would be out for a number of days before Christmas. And of course, I'm sure you remember, the Christmas in the Christmas season. it was just a madhouse.

And so, of course, I worked full time until, Christmas Day and was very definitely needed. So maybe I should say a little bit about the Christmas, season. My parents always hired extra people. At that time. They did not skimp. And we had a we had a routine. There were only two ticket writers, so only two people could be at the front desk writing tickets.

But of course, people were buying gifts, and we always offered to gift wrap it. And our parents bought a large roll of one design of gift wrapping paper. They had it on a huge roller that had, serrated edge so you could just measure out your paper and then tear it off  neatly. And so two people would be writing tickets.

We would ask if they wanted it, gift wrapped. If the answer was yes, there was often a hardback you'd take it back to the back room and the first thing you would do would be get a pair of scissors and snip off the price off of the dust jacket just to take the corner off of the inside front flap, which is where the price was.

And then my parents taught me how to gift wrap a package quickly, neatly, very well, without any gaps or anything like that, with the minimum amount of paper and scotch tape. And we always had bows or ribbons or whatever that we put on, and to do that fast and then bring it back out and the person was out of there.

And, you know, we tried to make it so they didn't have to wait very long. So.

Tom: Yeah. I remember from working there that the gift wrap was just plain brown paper and, the, the so-called ribbon was actually a piece of cloth about an inch wide with, usually a bright print design on it and little, sort of serrated edges as though it had been cut with pinking shears, you know what I mean?

And yeah, and that was the, so somebody must have cut those out of fabric. Or maybe your mom could buy them that way. I don't know where, or your dad.

Rebecca: I don't know. Oh, and speaking of Christmas, one of the things my parents did for years until postage got too expensive, they would send out a Christmas letter to their list of the past year’s customers.

Apparently, they saved everybody's address that, people that had a charge account. That was it. That was how they had people's addresses. We had a lot of people who had charge accounts, so they'd send out a Christmas letter, kind of recapping the past year and everything. That continued for quite a while. But then they had to stop because postage just got to be too much.

Tom: And then. So when did you go when did you graduate from when did you graduate from NCHS in Casper?

Rebecca: 1974.

Tom: Okay. And, did you continue to work Christmases after that when you were home from school or anything?

Rebecca: I did pretty much whenever I was home. I would work even in the summer. Sometimes I think, if I was visiting, I think I always worked at Christmas, and I remember that was that was really fun because a lot of customers would bring in a paper plate with cookies on it or fudge or whatever.

You know, how Christmas is. so there would be something to snack on all day, and I would see a lot of people that I knew, a lot of old customers, and it was just really fun.

Tom: And do you remember anything about, the different ways your mom and dad ran the shop because they were such different people from each other?

Rebecca: Well, I do remember when I was being trained, when I was 14, my dad took me to the back room and he said, okay, here is how you. I think it was pack up a book to send out because we had customers that were like from out of, who lived in the state, but didn't live in Casper.

We'd ship books to them, and I don't remember if it was. Here's how you unpack a book or here's how you pack a book up. But he had his way that he wanted me to do it. My mother had her way and they were different. So I just had to remember according to which parent was in the back room at the time, which way was their way, and I was okay.

But I, I remember mostly that, my mom was, she, of course, was just as much of a reader as my father was. But my father was really the what you might call the life and the soul, of the place. He was the one that that, attracted, young men, like high school seniors or college freshmen or whatever, who, who cared very much about, say, excuse me, philosophy.

So they would they would come into the bookshop to talk to my father about, Nietzsche or Kant or, or Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. I don't know if you would call Dostoyevsky a philosopher, but, you know, very literary, very, heavy duty sort of books that most people would think these were, that they'd come into the shop to talk to my father about this stuff, and he would always take time from his, from his work to talk to them.

And he had there were older people that came in to, to talk to him about various things. but these, these young men, I always thought of them as very earnest young men. They would also come to our house on Sunday afternoons and talk with my father for hours about ideas and things. So he was he was kind of a one man attraction for Casper's intellectuals.

Tom: Yeah, he was a real force in town. It was nice. Yeah. So what's the store? You know. Yeah.

Rebecca: It made the place different from, for example. and I'm not denigrating these other places, but at the time when Lange’s Bookshop was operating, there was also the Westerner that was being run by Charlotte Babcock. And I believe she carried paperbacks and magazines to the best of my memory.

And then there was Ralph's books. Up in the Hilltop Shopping Center. And my dad, he wasn't going to carry greeting cards, and Ralph carried greeting cards. So he always commented he didn't carry anything but books. But then, of course, we also sold leather bookmarks and these things called book plates, which were nothing more than a fancy way to put your name in your proper, you know, book that you owned as a little square paper.

I don't know how they smaller than a three by five card, had a little bit of adhesive on it that you stick it on the, you know, the front of your book, and then you'd write your name on the book plate. And then, of course, they sold Casper Civic Symphony tickets, but that wasn't exactly merchandise.

Tom: I'd forgotten about that. 

Rebecca: Okay. Yeah. Well I there's something I want to say about out-of-print books because the procedure for finding them was so very different than it is now. of course. so there were dealers, antiquarian book dealers around the country. Not. I never got the impression there were that many of them. But somebody would come in and ask for a book that turned out to be out-of-print.

So we would always offer to try to get it. And what we would do would be send out letters to all the antiquarian book dealers in the country and find out if they had this book. And then I think the dealer would write it back and say, yes, it's in thus and such a condition. This is the price, do you want it?

And then we get back with the customer, and either the customer would want the book or not. So that that was how you did that. Then there was no other way to find out of print books. And it was by the. Yeah, 

Tom: I remember, by the time I was working there, I think your dad and mom would store up those requests.

And once every six months or a year maybe, I don't know, maybe more often than that, but not when they would put an ad in the Antiquarian Bookseller magazine. And, as a way to let the trade know that they were looking for these titles, I think.

Rebecca: You know that might have been what they did when I was working there.

And I'm just remembering well, it's been kind of a long time ago. I just know that you had to do it on paper, and it was a very slow process.

Tom: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you might have to wait six months or a year, and you'd be lucky if you ever found it.

Rebecca: Yeah, I do have some. I have some treasures. Books that, children's books that I regard as treasures from that period of time that my parents found for me that way. You were about to say something, I interrupted. Can I mentioned that the education I got by working at Lange’s Bookshop?

Tom: Yeah, yeah.

Rebecca: Well, so it wasn't just, doing a lot of reading.

It was episodes like, you probably recall that we had one shelf that was full of Bibles, commentaries and Bible dictionaries and, concordances and things like that. So one person came in, a young woman, she went over to our Bible section, and she asked me if we had the Apocrypha. Well, I had never heard of the Apocrypha before, and I had no idea what it was.

So my dad wasn't there. My mom was back in the back room, so I went back there. I excused myself from the customer. I went back and I said, we've got somebody asking for something called the Apocrypha. Do we have it? And my mom, of course, being quite literate and educated, knew what it was and came out and talked to the person.

And we didn't carry it. but I, I don't think there was any other means by which I would have learned that there was such a thing as the  Apocrypha. Which I'll just mention, just in case, just because I probably should that the, the Bible that we know of as the New Testament and the Old Testament, there were a number of books that were excluded.

I don't remember now if they were excluded from the New Testament or the Old Testament. Also, I'm not well enough informed, but that collection of excluded books became the Apocrypha. And real, firm you know that might have been what they did when I was working there., Bible believing people will have nothing to do with the Apocrypha. I know that. I, I don't really know what's in it. I haven't done more than glance at it, but, so I don't remember if we ordered the Apocrypha for that person or not.

I doubt if there was a Christian bookstore in Casper at the time. I really doubt they would have carried it or ordered it. Okay, so that's one example. There's another one. yeah, I read, Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt. Yeah. You know, that book is a lot of oral history taken from Black Elk. Very sad, but I learned a whole lot from it.

Yeah, he seems like a really. Yeah. And that book was just published around that in the early 70s. Yeah. yeah. I mean, I'm very sad. I remember reading over and over again in that book. He'd talk about somebody and I'd say he got rubbed out. They all got rubbed out. it's just very sad.

Yeah. Okay. then there was an episode. I really. This was so funny. And it kind of illustrates the fact that I had a very bad education in history. I mean, I would say that by and large, the Casper Public Schools did a great job, when I was a student there, but not I just didn't I didn't learn much about history at all.

So my parents had a manager, Dorothy Cogswell. I don't know if you worked there while she was working there, she went by Dodie. So, Dodie and I would unpack books, and we would look at them. I'm going to jump to the side. This isn't about. Well, I guess it's something about what I learned. We would unpack books and sometimes, some of the books that came in were, basically by, as far, as I know, fundamentalist Christian women about how to be a perfect wife.

So there was one book called The Total Woman and another one entitled Fascinating Womanhood. And Dodie and I would unpack these books and we would look at them and we'd read a little bit and we would just die laughing. It was just to us was just hysterically funny. The lengths to which these women were recommending that the perfect Christian wife go to be a good wife.

It was. I learned stuff like that, and then what? What I still remember, I think this is so funny. there was a, cartoonist. His name was B. I don't think he ever published anything more than his first name. Initial B. Kliban. He was very gifted, and he did a whole book of cat cartoons. And I still have a mug, a coffee mug, that has all these big Kliban. cats on it.

But he had another book that was, shall we say, a little bit off color, the cartoons. And one of them, there's a picture of a woman who was supposed to be a beautiful woman, and she was holding some kind of small animal, like a gerbil. It wasn't gerbil, wasn't a hamster, but it was sort of like that.

She was had her hands behind her back, holding on to this animal, pushing it up against her rear end. And the caption was Cleopatra committed suicide by holding a beast to her ass. Okay, so Dodie read that, and she started laughing so hard that she couldn't talk. She had to sit down. She had to finish laughing before she could tell me that Cleopatra committed suicide by holding an asp to her breast.

Right. And so I learned. I learned a little bit of history that, you know, it was also Dodie that told me about Dorothy Sayers, who, she was basically best known for her mystery novels. But a lot of people think mysteries are low class, whatever or not real literature, or maybe not a lot of people, the snobbish people that I'm related to and so on.

But she's a very good writer, and I started reading her books just because I was and continued reading, because I was attracted to the quality of the writing and the way she portrayed people. And sometimes she came up with some really, really funny situations, like Dickens. so, that was that was good. I would count that as something I learned.

And then there were other books that I just knew about because people bought them. For example, we had, as you know, a section devoted to, Western history books. So I was always writing up copies of A.S. Mercer's Banditti of the Plains. A lot of people bought that book. and then, we had the Travelers Guide to the Geology of Wyoming, which I never read, but, I knew about it.

A lot of people thought that. And another book that people bought a lot was, T.A. Larson's History of Wyoming. And, you know, they also bought, I think, Jack Gage must have written this book. It was entitled The Johnson County War is a Pack of Lies. And then you’d turn it over and you'd see another title on the back side.

The Johnson County War ain't a pack of lies. And so a lot of people bought that. And when we wrote it up, of course, we didn't write out the whole title. We just wrote JC War is/ain't, and the person that posted it later knew exactly which book it was.

Tom: Yeah, I remember that book. Yeah.

Rebecca: And then I remember one book that came in. It's like we had many, many customers and we knew a lot of them, a lot of our regular customers. So, when we got a copy, I'm not sure why it came in. Maybe it was on automatic distribution. I can't imagine that my parents decided to order it, but it was in the shop.

A coffee table book. it was a version of Alice in Wonderland, illustrated by Salvador Dali. $200.

Tom: Yeah.

Rebecca: So a friend of my parents from the Unitarian fellowship, Bill Young, who was an electrical engineer and apparently had enough money, but he came in and bought the book and we kind of knew he was going to.

I mean, nobody was surprised when he did. I'll just say that much.

Tom: Cool. And when. How long did your dad keep, when did he retire?

Rebecca: I can tell you that I have a few other things I'd like to mention. Okay, okay, I'll do that first. There were two books that my father refused to carry. Well, I should back up and say, nobody ever came in and asked for hardcore pornography, probably because they knew they could get it at the Rialto cigar store. Everybody knew George Panos, you see, you know, the little cubicle next to the Rialto Theater? Well, that's where it was then. He sold cigars and, you know, pipes and tobacco and all that. And then he also sold, from under the counter, hardcore pornography.

So we always called it the Dirty Bookstore. So he never had to tussle with whether he was going to, you know, order books like that. But, there were two other books he refused to carry. He would not put them in the shop. And no wonder. One of them was entitled Steal This Book. It was by Abbie Hoffman.

Tom: By Jerry Rubin.

Rebecca: Sure. It was Jerry Rubin. Yeah, I think so. I think I don't recall now for sure, but I remember the title. So of course, he wasn't going to carry a book entitled Steal This Book. And then the other book, which I had to ask him why he wouldn't carry it. It was entitled The Anarchist’s Cookbook. I think somebody asked for it.

I asked him, my father, why he wouldn't order it. He said, well, it's a book about how to make bombs.

Tom: Oh, right.

Rebecca: So I didn't know that, but I wondered, and then I also remember a story my father told. I assume he did not embellish it. Maybe he didn't have to embellish it. We had a big picture window in the front where we displayed books. And my father did a window once where, from the point of view of the person looking in the window on the right hand side was the John Birch Society Blue book. And on the way, on the left hand side was, I believe, the Communist Manifesto. And then in between we have the spectrum from left to right or right to left, whichever.

So my father told the story that after he set up this window, some man stepped into the shop and cornered my father and started swearing at him, for that window was just so offended and outraged. And when the guys stopped for breath, my father inquired politely of the man, “well, sir, can you read?” So, I mean, he never exchanged insults with anybody else that I know of. You know, it's a good story. Maybe it improved in the telling, but I do remember that. I mean, hearing about that, I wasn't there, and I don't remember the window—yeah?

Tom: So what was the man angry about?

Rebecca: I don't remember that either. Whether he was angry about the seeing the John Birch Society Blue Book or whether he was angry about seeing the Communist Manifesto, I don't know, I thought it was a clever idea for a display.

Tom: So I think it is too. Yeah, you're right, it was Abbie Hoffman, not Jerry Rubin. I just checked, I'm sorry. You're right. 

Rebecca: well, maybe. Maybe, maybe my memory is better than I thought it was. And maybe it isn't. 

Tom: You know, you're right. That's right, yeah. 

Rebecca: Okay. So, then, of course, there were some books that would come in. I don't know that they were runaway best sellers, but, you know, good and well, they were going to sell well. One of them was a book entitled The Sensuous Woman. And then, of course, The Sensuous Man. There was a different book. And then, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask. That was a very comprehensive book. A lot of people bought it.

So, times were so prosperous at one point that my parents debated on opening a branch at Sunrise Shopping Center, but they didn't do it. I think they realized that there would be a lot of overhead associated with that, and a lot of extra work, and, you know, foresaw some potential difficulties with getting enough help. And they never did it. But I remember they talked about it.

And another characteristic of my father, he never, never had a sale. If a book did not sell and the publisher would take it back, we returned it. And that was almost always the case. And I think there was a collection. The main part of the store, there was a very large table. You probably remember those that displayed a lot of the coffee table books, but I think he also kept the other books that were never going to sell. In a little corner on that table. but he never, as far as I know, he never marked them down. Probably they were still there when he closed his doors. It's interesting.

Tom: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Unlike nearly any other retail business in the book business, if a book doesn't sell after a year, you can return it to the publisher for what you paid.

I guess you probably have to pay the shipping. But yeah, there's a famous quote from Robert Gottlieb, one of those long term New York publishers who said, oh yeah, from the publisher point of view, gone today, here tomorrow. Oh yeah, that's the way they saw it. And yeah, I'm not I wonder if that's. Yeah, I guess they still have returns in the book business.

I don't know it, it makes it hard for publishers. You know they think they've got a sale and then they don't. So yeah that would be hard. Nobody ever seems to make much money in it. I'm glad you're parents were. Well, they put three girls through college. I guess that's, Yeah, I was with the, I think the Salt Creek oil field with Marathon Oil kind of being the backbone of the Casper economy, was what there was.

Rebecca: Those were the prosperous years or a set of prosperous years for Casper. That was. Yeah, they were, that's why. Okay, so I have one more thing to say about, a couple more things before I go to the closing of the shop. first of all, a lot of times when I was working at, at the end of the day, I'd be waiting around to go home with my parents, and as soon as my father did all the figuring up as far as the cash drawer balancing, he would make out a bank deposit.

This was a substantial amount of money. Of course, he would send me with the bank bag around the corner to First National Bank to their walk up window, which was open late. And, you know, I could walk down Wolcott Street and over on First Street with the bank bag in my hand. we all knew that that was a perfectly safe thing to do, and there was never a problem.

I always got to the bank with the money and it just when you think about it, that's kind of. It kind of says something about Casper. Maybe about any town in Wyoming, I don't know. But you know, I was, I was basically a kid most of the time that I was doing that. Work. So another thing, but with my parents, my dad was adamant he was not going to take credit cards. I think he did not want to pay the fees. but you have to pay when you have a merchant account. So instead, we would take a personal check from anybody, including out of town customers, and we got a fair amount of out-of-town customers in the summertime. So the conversation would go, oh, do you have this book? Well, yeah, we do. Okay.  Well, where do you take a check? Well, sure. Well, but I'm from out of state. We'll take your check. So we took checks no matter who they were from. And I think in the entire history, the bookshop, my parents only got stiffed once. And that was by a local person. That's kind of remarkable, I think. 

Tom: Yeah, that is remarkable. 

Rebecca: Yeah. Okay, so one more thing. On New Year's Day. my parents would go to the shop with their employees, turn on all the lights, lock the doors, put a sign on the door saying closed for inventory. I don't think I ever helped with inventory, but I do remember seeing them.

One person would be up on a stepladder, sitting there, pulling a book off a high shelf, reading off the title to somebody down on the floor with a clipboard who would make a note of it. They counted every single title in the store on New Year's Day. Which I think is maybe, I don't regard that as normal.

I think usually merchants go by their records and hope they're right. I don't know, but my parents never did. They always held their inventory on New Year's Day. So that was not a holiday for them. 

Tom: Right. 

Rebecca: Oh, speaking of holidays, they formed the habit. I don't remember when exactly. maybe sometime when I was, when I was in high school of closing for a full week, 4th of July, week for the express purpose of taking a family trip over to the Black Hills, where we had a cabin.

You know, it's nice. Yeah, that was cool. So, my father decided to close the shop in the spring of 1983. And there were a couple reasons. Well, three reasons really, you could say. The Eastridge Mall had recently opened up, and, there was a B. Dalton books there, and, Waldenbooks, and both of those places were selling new hardbound books at a 25% discount.

And there was no way Lange's Bookshop could compete with that. So, B Dalton and Waldenbooks started cutting into my parents’ business, and then my mom, in late 1982, was diagnosed with a fairly serious what turned out to be a terminal case of cancer. My father decided he'd better retire so that he could take care of her.

So, I was off in Evanston, Illinois, trying to launch a career as a cello performer, and my father called me and said, I'm going to close the book shop or retire. Do you want to take it over? I think one person managing carefully might still be able to make it  pay. So I flew home during spring break or sometime that spring and went over the books with my father, and he showed me the last 5 or 10 years.

And that was when I learned looking at, you know, how much money we took in every month and how much we spent that October, November and December up until Christmas Day floated the rest of the year.

Tom: Right? Yeah, I didn't know that. But the rest of the time we pretty much were losing money. But we weren't because it always balanced out.

Rebecca: By Christmas time, so I declined. I thought about it very, very hard. I discovered that I wanted to continue to try to be a professional cellist. So my father sold the books, sold the fixtures. There was a the Star Tribune did an article about it. I don't have it, but I could get it. I know it's on the database that the library has from Star Tribune.

Past Star Tribunes. So that was it. It was. He was in business for what would it have been? About 20 years. And it was enough to put us, me and my sisters through four years of college each. 

Tom: Yeah. Yeah. And he sold it to Dodie right. Well, Dodie actually, before he. I'm sure it was before he closed.

Rebecca: Not long before he closed. She, opened her own shop at a different location. Bookshop. She had a wealthy backer. so she was already in business before he went out of business. I remember that.

Tom: Okay. I thought he sold the inventory to her, and she moved it over to that place. That's not well, I you know, you know, I don't I don't have I'm not sure.

Rebecca: Now, you know, I, I couldn't tell you for sure. Just when she opened her first her shop at her first location, I think the first location was on the corner of, on the northwest corner of. I'll think of it. Second and Durbin, catty corner from the library. Oh, I didn't know that. Okay. Yeah. And then in, 1983, I remember this because I'd just gotten my first full time job in music.

I was home for a couple of weeks before the job started. I visited her at her place of business, and it was where the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra eventually had its office. For a while in the Bon Insurance Agency building, Park and second Street, I believe.

Tom: Yeah, right. That's the location I was thinking of.

Rebecca: Yeah. It was a strange experience to come back to Casper for Christmas and not work at the bookshop, because it wasn't there.

Tom: Yeah, yeah, bet it was. And your dad. So he retired your mom. Did she, When did your mom pass away?

Rebecca: She was diagnosed in November of '82. And she died in August of '84. Oh. 

Tom: That's hard.

Rebecca: She was pretty young. She was 56 when she died.

Tom: And your dad lived, into the. He died in the late 1990s, right?

Rebecca: He died in 2003, okay, at the age of 83.

Tom: 20 more years. 

Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah, almost 19 years.

We made a lot of family friends through the bookshop. Lifelong friendships. 

I never knew that Charlotte Babcock ran the Westerner. Right. I'm sure she did, Tom. I—maybe I'm wrong.

Tom: But no, I just, I just, I mean, I've only known her since that time and so I, I just never put that together before. That's interesting.

Rebecca: I, I'm always I'll always be happy that I grew up basically in a bookshop. because I learned a lot of things, not just about books and history and things like that. But later on, when I was working in an office in Illinois, when I was trying to I, I'd moved to Evanston because I wanted to be in a big city where I could go to the Chicago Symphony concerts, which was amazing.

Have a lot of teachers to choose from, have a lot of schools, choose from a lot of other concerts. I'd never really lived in a large metro area before, unless you count San Juan, Puerto Rico, where I’d had a job playing the cello. But anyway, I was living there and I was working in this office, an insurance underwriting firm, where they, their customers were all somewhere else.

Interview 2

Tom: This is Tom Rea, I’ll be asking Becky Hein more questions about her time working with her family at Lange's Bookshop, in  downtown Casper. It's the first of March, 2023. So Becky, could you recap again a little bit for us about when the shop opened and how long you worked there and what years you worked there and how long your family had it.

Rebecca: Okay. My parents opened the bookshop, Lange’s Bookshop, sometime during the school year 1966-67, I don’t know exactly when. I was in first grade, and I would have had my seventh birthday toward the end of that year. I started working there when I was 14, so that was in 1970. I worked there during all my secondary school years, on weekends, which meant Saturday, because we were never open on Sundays. I think I did not get out of school early enough during ninth grade and tenth to work very much during the week. I really don’t remember. But definitely during Christmas break, up until Christmas. We never had enough people working. My parents took on extra help. That was just a crazy time. The shop was stuffed with customers waiting four or five deep in line with their purchases written up and waiting have them gift wrapped. I worked there every Christmas season until the bookshop closed. I would regularly visit my parents at Christmas.  I don’t think I missed one year the whole time.

If I was home during the summer, I would work there during the summer. And in my junior and definitely my senior years of high school, I would walk downtown from NCHS, after school and work until closing.

My father retired and sold all his fixtures and all of his inventory and everything in the spring of 1983. So, I had worked there the previous Christmas; that would have been 1982.

The shop was open from 1967-1983.

Tom: That’s only 16 years.

Rebecca: Right

Tom: It felt like a lifetime. By the time I worked there briefly in around 1975 it just felt like that store had been there and would always be there.

Rebecca: It is only 16 years; that’s amazing. It does seem to me like it was much longer.

Tom: Yeah. And your dad was a strong and memorable personality, and an important part of Casper’s cultural life; he was and his store was, and your store.

And one thing I remember about your dad is having conversations with him about fiction and about what we liked to read and stuff, and I was in my early-mid 20s then, and I liked to read new novels and I was trying to follow everything that was coming out, or the stuff I was interested in anyway, and I’d been to college and been an English major, and had enough of classics and wanted to read a lot more of what I wanted to read, and your dad was such a well-read person, especially in terms of, well his great loves, his pair, were Tolstoy and Shakespeare, and I remember thinking Oh God, and now that I’m over 70 myself, I feel like there’s so many great books I’ve never read, that I’ve gotta, I’ve been reading much more older stuff lately, and I understand more how he was feeling, I think, so  anyway, I really admired him for that, and I think a lot of people did.

Rebecca: Yeah. He was a good resource for people that wanted to read and were thinking about things. I think his favorite section of Lange’s Bookshop was the Modern Library books; which the Modern Library was involved in putting out high quality hardbacks of basically classics. But not just the books we would think of as classics, but a lot of other ones; somewhere in my house I have a beautiful hardbound copy of Dracula by Bram Stoker. Which most people wouldn’t consider that literature, but it’s a Modern Library book. There were quite a lot of them.

And he attracted people, young, middle-aged, and old who were thinking and waned to read really interested in ideas; bibliophiles.

Tom: Right. And how old was he when he retired?

Rebecca: He retired in 1982; he was born in 1920, so he would [have been 82]

Tom: Okay. And he had a heart condition of some kind, is that fair to say?

Rebecca: He did. What happened, we might as well go into this, he was an alcoholic. I will never know how he succeeded in running the shop so well; he did not stop drinking until 1969. So for the first two years of the life of the bookshop he was drinking very heavily. I truly don’t know how he managed to keep the business going and run it with a clear head. But right after he stopped drinking, in July 1969, he had a massive heart attack that just about killed him. During his recovery time, my mom had to run the shop completely by herself, and of course cope at home and visit him at the hospital until he came home. That was a lot going on there.

And from that point on, he had to baby his heart, or thought he did; So he would work in the morning and would rest in the afternoon after lunch until about 4. And then he would show up at the shop at 4, and do some work and close at 5 and do the after-hours work.

Tom: Yes, I remember that pattern from when I worked there. So the {?] and his reputation and occupation is kind of Casper’s intellectual light bulb in a nice way. He also had all these AA connections in town, right?

Rebecca: That’s correct

Tom: Did he go to a meeting every day or every week?

Rebecca: At the beginning he went to a lot more meetings than he settled into. I do remember that Alcoholics Anonymous became not just a part of his life, but willy-nilly part of the family life, whereby one of the things that he did, as far as I can recall, just within a few weeks of quitting drinking he became involved with AA immediately. And he became a volunteer on their hotline. I have no idea if it was a national thing or  not. The phone would ring at our home, and all we heard was his end of the conversation; him reiterating to the person on the other end of the line, “Sure, if you want to talk about your drinking problem I’d be happy to talk to you about that; but I cannot advise you about problems with your wife.” I heard that a lot.

Tom: Uh huh.

Rebecca: Now when his friends from AA would come into the bookshop to talk with him, which was a regular occurrence, I don’t know that it was a frequent occurrence, but it certainly happened. They would go into the back room area where, you know, the help did the keeping up the inventory and the billing and all the grunt work that kept the shop going; they would go back there and talk. I never heard any of these conversations; I would just see somebody coming and realize that they were one of his AA friends, possibly a sponsoree, but I don’t think the people that visited him at the shop were often sponsorees.

Maybe I should say a word about the 12-step system of sponsorship here for people who don’t know; do you think I should?

Tom: Okay

Rebecca: Well, Twelve-step programs are probably very well known now. I couldn’t recite to you the 12 steps, but I know one of them is that once you have, I don’t know; attained a certain degree of time away from whatever it is you’re struggling with, whether it’s alcohol, would be AA, Overeaters Anonymous would be overeating, Smokers Anonymous; once you get a certain degree of relief from that; I won’t say control, because, I’m an outsider looking in, but I get the impression that alcoholics never feel like they really have control over their drinking; they just don’t; they’re not addicted anymore; they’re not drawn to it anymore. So where was I going with this? Oh, but part of the twelve steps is you start basically counseling other people who have less years of sobriety than you do, in the case of AA. And you help them work the 12 steps, things like, oh goodness, you make a list of all your faults, and you admit them to yourself, to God, and to another human being. I think; the other human being is your sponsor. You make a list of all the people you harmed while you were drinking, and you make amends to them, except when to do so would hurt them or somebody else. And I think you make a list of everything you did wrong, like broke the law or whatever when you were drinking, and you also tell that to your sponsor, and to God, and so on. That’s all things that go on between the person who is the sponsor and the person who is being sponsored. Having sponsors I think is an integral part of the 12 step program; I know it is in Alcoholics Anonymous. So, he would have these people, sponsorees, coming in to talk to him or sometimes just friends who were not his sponsorees [into the back room]. And he hired a couple , early on, of women [who were his sponsorees] and I worked with them. And they were very nice. I noticed that they smoked really heavily, although that’s not so notable, because just about everybody that worked at the bookshop smoked, my father included. My mother didn’t. But a lot of my parents’ employees did. They smoked a lot, and when they laughed, the laugh sort of became a hacking, sort of,cough-ish sort of laugh. I remember that very clearly. And I have strong associations with cigarette smoke and Alcoholics Anonymous because the one time, I think, when non-members of AA come to meetings  is on the birthday; the AA birthday of the person, [which is] the anniversary of when they stopped, and so I’ve been to a few Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for my father's AA birthday in late July; whatever the date was. And I clearly remember just being fogged out by so much cigarette smoke in the room.

Tom: Yeah

Rebecca: Anyway, the anonymous part  really wasn’t relevant for my father, because I think everybody that knew my parents knew my father had been an alcoholic, or was. Certainly when he went to the Wyoming State Hospital in Evanston for alcohol abuse treatment, from October 1955 to March 1956, he was absent from the shop of course, and people often came in and asked for him.

I can imagine the conversations they must have had until word got around and people realized they’d better not ask: “Hi, is Bob in?” “No, not right now..” Will he be in later?”  “No, he’s out of town.” I don’t know if anybody got as far as asking where he was, but I’m sure word got around. So there was a rather large gap in his involvement with the shop; four months.

And Thanksgiving and Christmas. And that was very hard for my mother. Harder [than for] anybody else.

Tom: So your dad quit drinking in 1969. And went back to working at the shop after his heart attack. So how was your mom doing during that time?

Rebecca: Well, I was nine. Wait a minute; yeah. I was nine when he went away to Evanston.

Tom: Okay

Rebecca: I don’t remember very much about that time, except that two things were different about Thanksgiving and Christmas. Normally my mother prepared enormous traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts on those two holidays. And she did not do that in 1965. She took us out, me and my two sisters out, to dinner at the Townsend Hotel. And I do recall that it was very, very sad. I could just feel it. Young as I was, I still remember that. And I also think, I think I said this in my previous Lange’s Bookshop interview, but I have very clear memories of sitting in the children's section at the bookshop; that was the only place in the shop that we had a chair, other than the chairs we had for the employees sitting behind the counter. Sitting in that chair in the children’s section reading Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books. I was pretty young. That might have been my mother's answer to the childcare problem. I don’t know; I have no recollection of where my sister Barbara was during that time, but Cathy was six years older, than me, so if I was nine, she would have been fifteen, and she would have had homework. So I know my parents relied on her to babysit me and Barbara, but, um, I’m sure that Mom realized that Cathy needed to do her homework and wanted to support that. So, by [age] nine, I was already a bookworm, and would be quiet sitting there at the shop reading for hours. So that’s my guess of what she did with me after school during that stretch of time when she needed childcare. And you know maybe Barbara was sitting on the floor reading, and maybe we took turns sitting on the chair; I don’t know.

Tom: Yeah, I remember like, so you said your mom eventually stopped working at the bookshop and took a job at the state employment commissions office in Casper, right?

Rebecca: Right. Yeah.

Tom: So when would that have been?

Rebecca: Approximately 1975 and 1976.

Tom: Yeah. I got the feeling from what you said, that maybe your mom was kind of glad to get out of there; is that fair?

Rebecca: Well, I think, it was my father's thing. Lange’s Bookshop was what he always wanted to do. Mom was quite [?]; I don’t think there was anything she disliked about the merchandise, but she wanted to be a librarian.

Tom: Yeah

Rebecca: And so she quit, and she, I think she had maybe a little bit of trouble nerving herself up to apply to Denver University because she had only two years of college; she had an Associates’ Degree from the University of Chicago. And I remember during the year that she was working on her application to DU for the Master’s program in library science, she talked about and worried about nothing but were they going to think her Associates’ Degree was enough. Would they let her into a Master’s program without a Bachelor’s degree?

Tom: That’s interesting. And they did?

Rebecca: Yeah, they did. So in June of 1977, she went; she was gone a year, and after that she worked as a medical librarian for the rest of her life, and loved it and was really good at it.

Tom: And then you said, you told me, so your dad must have been looking forward to his own retirement. And your sister Cathy and her husband Richard came home one Christmas to work at the shop and maybe take over the shop, is that right?

Rebecca: Yeah, Cathy and Rich got married in the summer of 1976, I believe. They spent a year in England and then they came back. And since my mom didn’t like to leave my dad all by himself, to do his own cooking and all that, uh it was decided that Cathy and Rich would live with my father for the year that, well in September. I was home the summer that she left for library school. I guess I was the person looking after my father. But that September, Cathy and Rich arrived with a plan for her to work during Christmas rush, Rich to start working right away with an eye to becoming manager and taking over the shop sometime.

Tom: Was he English? Did you say they spent a year in England?

Rebecca: No, they were Anglophiles basically. Some people are Anglophiles and they have to get over there and see it. And he was one of those.

So, yeah, and  so they came and I didn’t really have a clue how it was going until I came home for Christmas. I was not going to school at University of Wyoming that year; I was in Oregon, going to school at the University of Oregon so I was far away, and I wasn’t coming home for weekends the way I might have been when I was at UW. So the first I knew of what was going on was when I arrived for my first day at work, and it was obvious that things had not been going well for a very long time, and were not going well then, and it just was not working.

So with a family business you kind of can’t separate the family from the business, for obvious reasons, so sometime after the end of December, Cathy and Rich left Casper, and I guess Dad had to manage as best he could for the rest of that year until Mom got back from library school. And he did, apparently.

Tom: But he had Dodie Cogswell and other people. [indistinguishable]

Rebecca: No, he had Dodie, and I’m sure he had at least one other employee.

Tom: Okay

Rebecca: Although I will add, sometime during the time between when my mother came back to Casper and started working as a medical librarian. And I’m sure she never did pinch hit at the bookshop because she was employed full time so she couldn't. But she told me that Dad was putting more and more time into getting help.

Tom: Uh huh

Rebecca: I don’t know why that would have been, but I do remember her telling me that.

Tom: Uh huh. And [there was a] bust in Casper in the early 80s; a lot of people just leaving, and a lot of, um, yeah it was a hard time in Casper. So the bigger oil companies that had headquartered in Casper closing down and moving out. Okay; that’s pretty interesting. Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?

Rebecca: Yeah, I thought about two or three things. One of them was; I thought this was strange and interesting. I thought that my father insisted that Lange’s Bookshop was a shop, and not a store. I mean, he was just adamant on that point, and you know to me that has always seemed like hair-splitting. He never did say why, and I can’t remember what he said [?]. But I think maybe; I’m just speculating; this is total speculation; I don’t know if you recall this but at the top of the sales tickets that we wrote out, we had printed a quote by Benjamin Franklin: “Keep thy shop and thy shop will keep thee.”

Tom: Yeah, I remember that.

Rebecca: Yeah. So I don’t know if there is any correlation there or not. Anyway, um, that’s one thing I want to mention. Now I’ll mention another; a word about books for very young children. In those days, they were made out of cloth, and they were beautiful; I remember that. And I don’t think, well, it’s been nearly thirty years since my children were young enough for those books for very small children, but I couldn't find any cloth books; they were all board books, which were fine. They were durable; you couldn't tear them up, but they were just beautiful, I remember that. They [the cloth books] had pinked edges. Do people know what pinking is?

Tom: Pinked, uh, yeah. Yeah, zigzags. Made with pinking shears. I remember that.

Rebecca: One more thing. About book clubs. I’m not sure how I became aware of book clubs. Because we were never members of a book club. But I remember knowing enough about them that one of the big attractions of a book club was that they; you could get the same title, hardbound, and lower priced than an independent bookseller would sell it to you [for]. And I asked my mom how book clubs could afford to do this. And she said it was because the bindings were inferior; that those books themselves were more cheaply made.

Tom: Uh huh

Rebecca: So does that make sense?

Tom: Pardon me; are you still there?

Rebecca: Yeah

Tom: So that made a difference?

Rebecca: Well, it made sense to me how

Tom: Oh, I see

Rebecca: How a book club could sell a book for noticeably less than a normal place.

Tom: Yeah. You’re talking about mail-order book clubs. Yeah, my parents belonged to one or two of those. And, uh, but nowadays when you say book club, it just means a group of people who read the same book and get together.

Rebecca: Right, and discuss it, yeah.

Tom: Yeah, it’s a different thing.

Rebecca: Yeah, book clubs in those days definitely; you’d sign up for membership; I don’t know; you know more about this than I do, but you had to pay, like an annual membership.

Tom: Probably. We got to. I think my parents belonged to I think it was called, American Heritage. It’s a magazine. It was, uh, beautiful editions that came in boxes of classics like Ivanhoe and the Conquest of Mexico. Umm. I don’t know if there was a [?]. There were books that were not copyrighted, that were republished in fancy, handsome editions. Uh, I can’t remember any of it. It was like in the ‘50s, and probably the early ‘60s was the peak of the success of that. Yeah. Nice photography and really nice editions. Okay, that’s all I’ve got. Have you got anything else?

Rebecca: No, uh, there is one thing I want to mention after we turned off the recording. But we’ve covered everything I was going to say.

Tom: I think I’m out of questions. Thanks for doing this whole addition. It’s very nice. It’s really interesting to me; thanks so much. 

Rebecca: Yeah, let me try to stop the recording. 

(end of transcript)