Two Pint-Sized Literary Institutions Prosper in the Land of the Sagebrush : How the West Is Read

KETCHUM, Ida. â€”  It’s the weekend, and the, ah, ladies of Idaho’s Ketchum Library have invited the, ahem, good ol’ boys of Montana’s Clark City Press to pass some stories, fire-roast dinner and celebrate the prospering of two distinctive but pint-sized literary institutions of the American West.

So, let’s hear it for books not published in New York and libraries that stand against the wind.

And let’s hear it for writing, overeating, reading, boozing, painting, fly fishing, local history, small-town culture, friendship, free-ranging wildlife and blue-sky Western vistas--some of the American values at play here recently in the town where Hemingway lived and died and where his legend lives on.

Surely this is a long way from the cities to be talking book publishing or progressive libraries. But sagebrush and pine and Rocky Mountain granite, along with other essentials--talent and money and camaraderie--tend to bring out dreams in people. And sometimes, dreams turn bookish.

The Ketchum Library was the dream of a handful of women who drifted to this resort area, next to Sun Valley, during the mid-1950s. They found themselves exchanging paperbacks and wishing for something better.

A modest enough idea, so why not take it to the extreme?

Today, the board of directors of the Ketchum Library is composed of 45 women who preside over an institution that sets a standard, if not the standard, for what a community library can become with enough will and wherewithal.

Most other towns in the 1990s could hardly imagine a community library like this: vaulted wood ceilings, a towering rock fireplace, glass-and-lawn-and-Berber-carpet, vast rows of tidy, well-tended books--all the product of the largess and affection of local citizens.

Virtually everyone in town is asked to contribute something to support the library, even if only $10 a year. That, along with a library-run thrift shop, means no public funds, not even a penny. Ketchum residents contribute to the library because the library is so thoroughly Ketchum.

“If this was tax-supported, I’m afraid it would be a small cinder-block building tucked away somewhere,� says chief librarian Ollie Cossman.

Instead, the library resides in one of the most imposing buildings in town. It has 50,000 volumes, the equivalent of 15 books for every resident. And its staff is twice as large as a typical library its size. That means there are enough people to tend to books, maintain extensive reading programs--and still undertake such tasks as the painstaking collection, cataloguing and indexing of oral histories from the settlers of this resort valley, histories rich in encounters with Hemingway and Gary Cooper and legions of other storied Americans who passed through and were charmed by and raised hell here at the original Western destination resort.

The Ketchum Library’s place in its community is uncommon indeed:

Bill McDorman, a local flower-seed rancher, is chatting over dinner one evening. The library is mentioned, and he says nonchalantly, “I can remember my first library card, No. 184. That was in 1959. I was 5 years old. . . . Understand, we are surrounded by wilderness and dusty little towns. When I grew up, this was the only place with a real library.�

Among other novelties here, there are no fines for returning a book late. Logic maintains that it is impolitic to punish someone who will be asked to donate later.

But Heaven help you if you try to keep a book.

The story is told of a medical student who came to town and checked out 40 volumes from the Hemingway collection. He left town, and the books went with him. The library board tracked him to San Francisco, and tycoon Walter Annenberg’s private airplane was then dispatched to retrieve the collection. The local newspaper covered the story of the books’ return and ran a picture of stern library board members at the airport as the plane arrived.

Ever since, theft has remained well below average for libraries.

Such a special place as the Ketchum Library in such a grandiose place as Rocky Mountain Idaho naturally has become a literary stop-by for any number of writers. Public readings are frequent, and it’s wise to show up an hour early on a Friday night to get a seat.

On one summer weekend, the library’s guests are from a newer institution, the upstart Clark City Press, a publishing house founded four years ago in, of all places, Livingston, Mont., a couple hundred miles away. It is the work of landscape painter and fly fisherman extraordinaire Russell Chatham. This is the second time this year that Chatham has been invited to bring some of his authors to the Ketchum Library for reading and revelry.

Fitting, too, because Chatham dreams of becoming to American publishing what the Ketchum Library is to community libraries--a distinctive voice for quality in a tattered, bottom-line world; an institution rooted in the literary buddy system; a small Rocky Mountain spring with ambitions of becoming a river someday.

Publishing in New York, of course, is often described as a restless ordeal of wheeling and dealing, money and promises, hoopla and hogwash. At least that was the experience of Chatham, the sometime author of droll essays on fishing and eating and romping. He lamented that his collections of writing used to be published from time to time, distributed and quickly forgotten.

“I didn’t start out to formulate a business. It was a very accidental thing,� he says.

Indeed, Chatham began with the idea of merely keeping his books in print for the sake of his sport-minded fans. He threw his own money into the project, the profits from his rising fame as a painter of moody, earth-tone Western landscapes. But Chatham had an even more valuable asset to bring to publishing--his friendships with writers like Jim Harrison and Tom McGuane and others, storytellers and out-sized personalities known for their Western outdoors vitality.

These writers, in turn, brought along their friends to form an expanding troupe of buddies, novelists, poets, essayists, sportsmen, characters and carousers who are drawn to play or work in the West and who are willing to forgo New York’s fat advances to roll the dice on higher royalties with Chatham--if only once in awhile.

Harrison, whose daughter Jamie Potenburg is editor of Clark City, helped raise the publishing house’s profile when he asked Chatham to publish his 1991 book “Just Before Dark: Collected Non-Fiction.� Harrison explained in his introduction that a man could stomach only so much of the Manhattan whirligig.

“My choice of a publisher far from the centers of ambition was based on wishing to avoid the enervating hoopla that tends to accompany the publication of books in New York,� he wrote simply.

Since then, Clark City (the original name of Livingston) has republished a volume of Harrison poems, as well as books by Barry Gifford, Rick Bass, James Crumley and a half-dozen others--an overwhelmingly male assemblage of the type that might have a mix of leather, sweat, pine bark and fly flotant in their cologne.

“Gluttons for life, we are,� says Bass, who reads from his new, bittersweet environmentalist reportage about the return of wolves to the Rockies, “Nine Mile Wolves.� It was published this year by Clark City. Bass, not alone among Chatham’s stable of writers, had to work around his contract with another publisher.

“But if you believe in something like this, you can’t sit on the sidelines and not help,� Bass says.

Most Clark City books feature a Chatham landscape on the cover, typically in shades of brown, olive and ocher, with oily brush strokes thick as frosting. The paper and printing used in the books are of uncommonly high quality, and production is flawless. In other words, there are no typos or errata sheets, the margins are wide, the typeface readable and the heft honest. Even the trade-sized paperbacks have glossy jackets. Next year’s list promises up to 14 titles.

And Chatham pledges never to let a Clark City book go on the remainder table at a bookshop: “If they’re worth putting in print, they’re worth keeping in print.�

So this, you say to yourself in wonder, is what it would be like if writers were publishers and if publishing was done among friends.

At this recent reading, Dan Gerber recites poems and chooses a short story from his reissued “Grass Fires.� The new edition of the book is doing better in sales than when originally issued by a more established publisher.

He says, “Clark City makes beautiful books. Writers really don’t have an object to work with--nothing but this thing that comes out called a book. In New York publishing today, you become a number, a commodity. Clark City is like New York in the 1930s, when literary people ran the business. . . . It just feels good.�

After the library reading, the writers and board members visit a bookstore for a late-night book signing in downtown Ketchum and later perhaps wander into one of the saloons where Hemingway shot craps, drank and demonstrated the subtle points of the bullfight. Next day, they gather for a curry roast under shade trees at the remote cattle ranch of library board member Sana Morrow.

The library pays only modest honorariums to writers, but there is plenty else to induce the literary imagination: Fly fishing in famed Silver Creek, one of the nation’s foremost spring-fed trout streams. Browsing among the bird guns at Ketchum’s Silver Creek Outfitters. Walking the streets of a community where the library sounds a paean to books and where history is steeped with the blustery memory of a 20th-Century literary giant.

And, too, there is the warm evening to pass at the vast Morrow spread, where the only noises are the barking of dogs, dry breezes across the sagebrush and the quiet chatter of bookish Westerners as conversations wander from Zen to wolves, to poetry, to Budweiser, to scorpions, to forests, to the price of feeder calves and to the high notes in a well-balanced sentence.

“This is the way publishing is supposed to work--eccentric, beautiful and in good taste,� says James Crumley, the beer-drinking, self-described ex-hippie who once commanded mastery over hard-boiled detective fiction. His latest collection of odds and ends, “The Muddy Fork and Other Things,� was issued by Clark City this year.