While East Lansing's massive Barnes & Noble is set to close at the end of the month; a tiny shop just up the street, Curious Book Shop, recently celebrated its 42nd anniversary. It's one of the oldest shops in East Lansing and owner Ray Walsh has been there through it all.

A book lover could easily walk past the inconspicuous storefront at 307 East Grand River without ever knowing of the treasures that sit on the packed shelves.

Perhaps that comes from the toned-down cream-on-black sign that reads "Curious Book Shop: Used books -- Nostalgia." Or it could be because it eschews the big plate-glass windows that dominate many businesses along Grand River Avenue's 300 block.

For a store in a busy section of town -- facing Michigan State University -- it's odd to see an unguarded cart of books sitting outside the doors. At only 18-feet wide and overshadowed by apartments on one side it seems squashed between Cosi and newer, modern offerings such as the Silver Streak and Stateside Deli.

It doesn't have the flash of most storefronts, including the Barnes & Noble Booksellers on the same block, but it does have staying power. Now in its 42nd year, Curious has been a mainstay in the city since it was founded by Ray Walsh.

"I started when I was a student at MSU to help pay my way through college," Walsh said. "This was back in the day when I was working a minimum wage job for around a $1.70 an hour and basically ended up having a lot of spare time in which I spent reading books."

Although he started out selling his own books, eventually a departing MSU professor offered him 1,000 paperbacks for $100.

"I sold some and I kept some," Walsh said. "But suddenly I was a book dealer."

Even though the store has existed since 1969, it didn't move to its current location until 1973. Since then, he said, Curious has made its mark on the downtown area.

"Part of the appeal is that Curious is a cultural Mecca," Walsh said. "That's one way we've been surviving. It has been, in the past, a destination location for a number of people from out of town. We even have alumni coming back and saying, ‘Gee, you're still here. I remember the store from when I was at MSU.'"

It might be that the shops simplicity sticks in the mind. It's three stories of books, magazines, posters, comics and more. If one is in the market for it, there is a $10,000 first edition of Dracula. Not surprisingly, Curious smells of old paper, and while it is narrow, it seems to stretch back into infinity. Walking through the rows could be claustrophobic for some, but when it comes down to it there is no denying that there is something personal about the experience.

"I‘d say one of the big differences between us and Barnes & Noble is that we're more of a small-town feel," said Employee Sarah Bridgewater. "We have very few employees, so we really get to know our customers; here you've got that personal-service-type feel."

It was this personal touch that attracted another employee, Liz Cizek. Cizek's first encounter came when she stopped in to browse for books and drop off her resume with Walsh. The next day she came in and Walsh had a pile of books waiting.

"He said, ‘We also found some other stuff you might like,'" Cizek said. "He knows everything. Ask him anything and he'll give you a dissertation on it."

Walsh's dedication to books also has manifested itself in another store, Archives Book Shop (519 W. Grand River Ave.), as well as in donations made to Michigan State University Libraries' Special Collection. Community connections such as this might be part of what enables Curious to stick around even as other booksellers, such as the Barnes & Noble down the street, close.

"When they moved in we were a little bit concerned, but we were still glad to have them as neighbors because more bookstores help bring literate people into the neighborhood," Walsh said. "It worked out. We would send customers there and they sent customers here."

And now that Barnes & Noble is packing up shop?

"It's not a positive thing," he said. "Any time a supplier of books closes in a community, it can't be a positive."

But what's done is done. Walsh said he thinks another book store will open in East Lansing, although he thinks it will probably be smaller. Until that happens, Curious Book Shop will remain East Lansing's top dog, a place where, according to Cizek, "Behind the actual story in the book, there are stories behind the books."

Photo: Liz Ledford

The Michigan Humanities Council has announced the next Great Michigan Read, tapping Detroit native Kevin Boyle's National Book Award winning Arc of Justice as the new selection. It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

The story delves into the fascinating 1920s civil rights case of the Sweet family, a black family represented by attorney Clarence Darrow in one of the biggest murder trials to come out of Detroit. In 1925, Dr. Ossian Sweet moved his family into a white neighborhood and was greeted by an angry white mob. The family barricaded themselves in the house with friends and when shots left a white man dead the entire group was charged with first-degree murder. Boyle's book covers all aspects of the trial including the political climate of Detroit at the time. REVUE recently caught up with Boyle, here's what he had to say about the book.

Why did you choose this story?
Back in the late '90s I spent a year teaching in Ireland at University College Dublin and they had asked me to teach a course about civil rights history. I loved that course and it when it was finished I thought I should write a book about civil rights, but you know, I'm from the north and I didn't want to write a book about the south. There are a lot of really great books about civil rights in the south and it just kind of hit me that there was very little at the point written about civil rights in the north. In many ways the most enduring form of segregation in the United States is neighborhood segregation and I thought of the Sweets as a great way of talking about that side of the civil rights story that people don't really talk about. So the book started out as a way of talking about civil rights but not in the place and the time that we normally think of as civil rights.

One of the things I found most striking about this particular story is that it happened so long before the big civil rights movement, so while the Sweet family won their case it didn't really help the cause at the time.
In many ways it didn't stop the spread of segregation either. One of the things that was really hard for me in writing this book is when you set out to write a civil rights history you basically want to write about the triumphs of civil rights and for a long time I was trying to do that. But the sad truth of it is that here were the Sweets who had risked literally everything, for a whole bunch of reasons, to challenge the idea of segregation in American cities. In the end they won the case, they didn't end up in prison for the rest of their lives, but segregation marched relentlessly forward and the Sweets paid this enormous personal cost for what had happened. It took me a long time to realize that really what I was doing was writing about the tragic side of civil rights.

What is one of the important aspects of the book you hope people won't overlook?
With the Sweet family, I really wanted to work as hard as I could to get at their motives for moving into that neighborhood and it's not all about the civil rights struggle. It's really about ordinary things. They move into that neighborhood because it's a nice house, it has a backyard, and they have a little girl who's a toddler and it's kitty corner to a school. They bought the house for really ordinary reasons and that's really important to me, because what historians have a tendency to do is to judge people in the past as somehow purer than we know we are ourselves. So I liked that in this book a lot of people act in lots of ways for lots of different reasons - it's an important theme to me. There are the immediate facts of the case, which I tried to represent fairly, but there's also a sense I wanted to deal with as a historian to say, ‘Yeah, people in the past were just as confusing and interesting as we are in the present.'

Lansing author and journalist James Sanford, 48, (who is also A&E editor at Lansing City Pulse) had an exciting taste of success recently, when his newly released e-book The Sum of My Parts sold 1,000 downloads in the first six days of being on sale. REVUE talked with Sanford about his memoir of surviving testicular cancer (he's been cancer free since 2002).

Q: How did you manage to do sell so many e-books in less than a week?

A: I think my friends did their job to support me, but also the Kindle Singles people are terrific in terms of really pushing what they publish. The Kindle Singles agent contacted me and said, "Oh, this is such a terrific book; it's going to be a big seller." I said, "That's really kind of you to say, but I don't really think there's a big market for a book like this." Maybe it will sell to people who are going through it or who have family members going through it, and that's primarily why I wrote it. I thought maybe hearing my story would make someone else feel better or give them some kind of support, but I did not believe for a minute that it was going to be broadly appealing.

Q: What is Kindle Singles?

It's an arm of Amazon that's dedicated to pieces ... that people can read in the course of a few hours. I had no idea what to do with it because it was much too long to be a magazine piece and I didn't feel like padding it out and turning it into a book. So I was kind of down-hearted for a while, but I received an email from author Susan Orlean (author of the Orchid Thief) and she told me about an essay she had published by Kindle Singles. I said, "I've never even heard of Kindle Singles before." I sent a query letter over on a Sunday night and literally Monday morning I got an answer back saying "I'm going to send you a link so you can upload the manuscript and we can take a look at it."

Q: Do you have to have a Kindle to read it?

A: The good thing about Kindle is that you do not actually have to have a Kindle unit to read it, because you can download the Kindle application for PC or for Mac and you can put it on your smart phone.

While earning critical acclaim and acknowledgment is inherently a goal for most writers, the more highly one's work is respected, the higher the bar is set for future pieces.

Kalamazoo-based author Bonnie Jo Campbell thrives on that kind of pressure.

After being named a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her short story collection American Salvage, Campbell was catapulted into the literary spotlight in 2009.

Campbell's latest novel, Once Upon a River, lives up to the hype earning spots on numerous summer reading lists including those for Newsweek, NPR and the Daily Beast. The story is surprisingly quiet yet unsparingly violent.

Set in the isolated small town of Murrayville (bordering Kalamazoo) around the turn of 1980, the book's main character is Margo Crane, who belongs to the town's namesake Murray family. Margo's father was a bastard child of the Murray patriarch, an outcast living across the river from the family homestead in a tiny shack with his daughter.

The teenaged Margo has an unearthly beauty that makes her a target. Ultimately a string of events leaves her father dead and Margo embarks on a river odyssey through rural Michigan in search of her vanished mother.

Reading with Bonnie Jo Campbell Schuler Books and Music, Eastwood locations Sept. 22, 7 p.m. Free schulerbooks.com, (517) 316-7495

Margo is a fascinating character, an almost silent heroine who transmits most of her communication through action. In crafting the character, Campbell was drawn to the idea of how the girl's beauty would affect her life.

"I'm always interested in how beauty really is as much of a curse as a blessing," Campbell said. "For a young woman, it's very much a curse."

The struggle for survival is also entrenched throughout the tale; Margo even takes on the character of Annie Oakley, her chosen idol (Margo also has an uncanny ability with a rifle).

"She works hard in the way farm women used to work hard," Campbell said. "She doesn't really think about her own pleasure, her own advancement or her own self-actualization. I was trying to capture that feeling of [pioneer life]. I think it's a peculiarly American thing that we are aware of survival - the idea that you could live off the great American land somehow."