Alaskana Books in Palmer has storied history

PALMER — Lori Kirker turned in her chair and reached toward her wooden desk, a sturdy piece of furniture with a top that’s crowded but not cluttered. There’s a computer tower and screen, a credit card reader, a phone, and a caddy with scissor and pens. And Post-it notes, which Kirker uses to help guide browsers through the titles at Alaskana Books, the store she operates on Denali Street in Palmer. On the shelves, the colored notes stick up out of the pages. They’re like little semaphore signals and often have the name of a town handwritten on them.

A little flag means Kirker herself probably read the book, or at least scanned it for details about places in Alaska. A flag that says “Knik” or “Dillingham” can make a book move off the shelf and into the hands of a new owner. That’s the whole point of a bookstore, although there are times at Alaskana when the point might be about coffee and free cookies and storytelling or just visiting Kirker’s dog Do’Know, a chocolate lab whose main occupation seems to be taking naps.

There are people who stall inside bookstores and libraries, people who might forget to pick up the eggs and milk or fail to complete some errand because they are busily browsing titles and pages. This store might hold the largest privately owned collection of Alaska titles anywhere in the world, so it attracts a specific type of stalling.

“You have to see this,” Kirker said, pulling a paperback from the top drawer of the desk. The paperback isn’t really a book. It’s more of a government-issued tract. There are a lot of those in the collection Kirker purchased from Eugene Short, the store’s original owner. Most are a bit wonky and unassuming. A report on which species of trout were found in a specific lake in 1956 might sell to the right fisherman. Geology reports sell faster, Kirker says, especially when they include information about gold.

This paperback, the one Kirker says we must see, has handwritten notes by James Wickersham, the famous judge and delegate to the U.S. Congress who historians credit for shaping Alaska during the first half of the 20th century.

“You have to see what he wrote,” Kirker said, flipping the pages and scanning, looking for a specific margin note among many in a book about 90 years old. The paperback is a transcript of hearings by the U.S. Senate Commerce committee in 1922 and ’23. The hearings concerned Alaska’s government-controlled fur seal trade.

“Look at what he wrote here,” Kirker said, and handed the book to me, opened to a page near the end. “Right here, ‘He is… Lying!’” she exclaimed, raising her voice to try and match a politician’s outrage.

The transcript from the fur seal hearings, with the word “Annotated” in a large, red cursive on the front cover, seems to confirm Wickersham’s reputation as a dedicated public servant. It’s also one of very few items at Alaskana Books that Kirker won’t sell, at least not to a private collector. It’s bound for a museum someday, she says.

Wickersham lived in an era when people had bookbinding skills. Glued into the book is a foldout chart in the same careful, handwritten script. It details checks, paid between 1921 and ’22, from one government-favored fur company to U.S. Senator Seldon P. Spencer of Missouri. The company held an exclusive government sealskin contract, and had paid Spencer more than $81 million during the time the U.S. Senate was considering new sealskin legislation. The checks, according to a note below the chart were reported in the St. Louis Post Dispatch and were, the note says, “all admitted by Spencer!”

The name Alaskana Books has a reputation among collectors, historians and researchers of all types that goes back to the 1970s. The store was founded in a bright green house on Arctic Boulevard. Gene Short was a lifelong bibliophile and retired college administrator when he opened the store. By many accounts, he was as passionate about education as he was about books.

When Kirker set about moving the books to her home in Houston the job turned out to be bigger than she knew. The basement of the green house on Arctic Boulevard was full of books. She had never seen the basement. She had bought two shipping containers full of books, intending only to sell them on the Internet. Within a couple of years she started looking for a storefront. When the Matanuska Colony-era building became available in 2001, Kirker cut a deal with the book-friendly landlords. They had a basement under their building available for storage. She unpacked boxes and created an orderly store with sections organized by topics — dog mushing, Russian America, mining and Native cultures to name a few.

The city of Palmer, working with a $3.3 million budget, plans to buy up the whole block. Her landlords are the only owners on the block to have come to terms with the city Kirker isn’t sure whether that means she’ll have to move. The city has had a tough time buying up the land and has an option to back out of the deal with Kirker’s landlords.

Online sales are still part of Alaskana Books, but vintage book prices can change rapidly online. It’s not uncommon for a book’s price to change while it waits on the shelf for the right buyer. One of Kirker’s tasks is to check the price whenever it doesn’t seem quite right, as can happen with many of the older books in the store. Kirker admits to getting frustrated when it comes to the Internet, even though it’s where she originally set out to sell books. So she has a ringer, a business partner available by phone Friday and Saturday afternoons while Kirker is in the store. (Alaskana Books has limited hours: noon to 5:30 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays.) “My computer hates me, so she does all of that stuff,” Kirker said. “We split the profits, if there is any.”

Since Kirker bought the store, she has added more casual topics such as cookbooks. She’s added fiction, too. Gene Short always insisted Alaska had “too many good, true stories” for the store to bother with fiction. Kirker can recite that one-liner, but her store is quite different. Some collectors covet complete sets of the adventure stories of Rex Beech and romantic fiction of Barrett Willoughby. She keeps those in stock. She also politely buys a few copies of any Alaska memoir brought in by virtually any eager author who comes in the door.

Alaska, for some reason, inspired a great many otherwise ordinary people to publish memoirs. Bush pilot memoirs, hunter memoirs, policeman memoirs, teacher memoirs, and preacher memoirs all have their places on the shelves here, either in a category such as aviation, or next to a general history about a specific region or industry. One day, a little flag that says “Homer” might attract a reader to an otherwise obscure autobiography of a fisherman. “I like being able to show customers I have their town,” Kirker said.

For Kirker “everyday is like Christmas” when she opened boxes from Short’s old collection, or from other collections the store has added since it opened in Palmer. “I would go down to the basement and open a box and think, ‘Gene, what gifts have you given us this time?’” she said.

She really does mean gifts. Some of the gifts in the collection are valuable, but most are just notable.

One book contained a letter from a police officer, possibly a local cop or maybe a U.S. Marshall, in Knik. It was sent to a territorial judge in Seward, and was a request for a signed arrest warrant. “He was explaining that it took a long time for the judge to answer by letter,” Kirker said. The cop wanted the search warrant left blank where the suspect’s name would go. “He wanted a blank arrest warrant, but signed by the judge because the mail took too long,” Kirker said. The letter, evidence that territorial justice wasn’t always what the law intended, went to a historian.

Another strange find is inside a territorial legal book called Compiled Laws of the Territory of Alaska, 1913. The book as about five inches thick and appears to have taken a bullet. There’s a hole that goes through several hundreds of pages of law. The text appears to have been rebound with a new cover afterward.

Ever since she found it, Kirker said she has wanted a mystery writer to explore that idea.

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