Richard Howorth is easy to talk to, even when he’s hard to hear. Earlier this year, while men hammered away on the other side of a wall in his hundred-and-sixty-year-old house, the fifth-generation Mississippian told me about raising his three children there and how one of them had already had her wedding reception on the property and another will have hers there soon and why handymen are so difficult to find these days and what one of the hammering men was doing a few weeks ago when he put his foot through the roof. Later, from a friend’s nearby home where no one was banging away in the background, Richard’s wife, Lisa, offered her own explanation for the construction work: “It’s so we don’t look like we live in fucking Grey Gardens.”
The Howorths’ home is nowhere near the Hamptons, but still merits its own documentary: the grit-lit author Larry Brown used to sober up on the front-porch swing; the novelist Donna Tartt stayed the night; the writer Darcey Steinke helped hatch a skinny-dipping plot in the parlor; the Jack-of-all-genres Alexander McCall Smith once showed up in a kilt and conducted a Southern outpost of his Really Terrible Orchestra. “We can’t talk about some of the people,” Lisa said, “because those stories end in the hospital or the county jail.”
The Howorth house has more bookshelves than windows and has hosted more writers than some M.F.A. programs, not because its owners confer any degrees but because they run one of the most beloved and influential bookstores in the country. Like City Lights, in San Francisco, or Shakespeare & Company, in Paris, Square Books has become as well known for nurturing writers as it is for selling their work. It has also become a small empire, consisting of four stores with some fifty thousand books on five floors of three different buildings, all in the town of Oxford, Mississippi. The Howorth family will tell you that they don’t know how this happened, but everyone else will tell you that it happened because of the Howorth family.
The current Howorth house is only a mile or so from the first place in Oxford that Richard called home. His parents moved back the year after James Meredith integrated Ole Miss, settling into an outbuilding of an estate once owned by James Buchanan’s Secretary of the Interior, Jacob Thompson, who resigned that post and became inspector general of the Confederate Army, in which capacity he was dispatched by Jefferson Davis to Canada, where he organized attacks on American prisons, steamships, and politicians, in an effort to free Confederate soldiers, disrupt shipping routes, and assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. But Howorth was less interested in the house he grew up in than in the one across the street: William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak.
Although Faulkner died a year before the Howorths moved in, Howorth’s great-aunt Ella Somerville could easily conjure his ghost. The daughter of the dean of the University of Mississippi’s law school, Somerville had lived her entire life in Oxford. She got to know Faulkner through the Marionettes, the university theatre group, and the novelist visited both the private salon she ran at home and the public one she operated during Prohibition called the Tea Hound. Eudora Welty called Somerville “one of the great ladies of the South,” and Howorth grew up listening to stories about her and all the writers she had known.
Back then, there was no reason to believe that Howorth would help keep the family’s literary tradition alive. He wasn’t much of a reader—or, for a long time, much of an anything. There are five Howorth brothers, and Richard is the middle of them. Two moved away, one to become a lawyer on Wall Street, the other to become an architect in New Orleans; two stayed in Oxford, one overseeing admissions at the University of Mississippi, the other running a law practice in town before serving three terms as the Lafayette County Circuit Court judge. Howorth wasn’t sure if he wanted to stay or go, and he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life.
“I was directionless,” Howorth said. “Luckily, my older brother always had these big ideas and schemes about what we ought to do, like joining the circus.” David, that brainstorming big brother, had at least one slightly more realistic idea: all throughout their childhood, he had said that the town of Oxford really ought to have a bookstore, partly because of Faulkner and partly because of the university, but mostly because any town worth living in needed to have a place to buy books. “I was never a terribly good student in high school or college,” Howorth said, “but I managed to graduate, and I kept thinking about David’s bookstore.”
“David’s bookstore” became Square Books, in 1979. Convinced it would need foot traffic to survive, Richard went looking for a retail space but couldn’t find anything suitable until another one of his aunts, Vasser Bishop, offered a second-floor walkup next to Neilson’s department store. The daughter of an English professor who once gave Faulkner a D, Bishop charged her nephew rent, but volunteered her time at the bookstore.
Lisa, Howorth’s wife, took shifts as well. Originally from Chevy Chase, Maryland, she had found her way to Oxford from San Francisco in the early seventies via a Volkswagen bus, ditching the California scene after it got “very dark and very weird,” heading South on a lark after remembering how much she had loved reading Faulkner in high school. “I didn’t know a soul here,” she said. “I fell in with a handful of hippies. They had a house near the university, an old house where we had a bunch of parties, and that’s where I met Richard one crazy night.”
Howorth wasn’t a regular at that party or any other, but he was taken by the clever, lanky girl with the house cat she had trained to do tricks. Inconveniently, he was about to take off for the very coast Lisa had lately abandoned: “I had this buddy whose sister lived out in Oregon, and we went out there and worked at a window-shade-manufacturing plant,” Richard said. “I was afraid I wouldn’t ever see Lisa again, so I wrote her this letter, saying I wanted to stay in touch, and I left it for her at the big house. And, the next morning, I get up at the crack of dawn to drive West, and there’s this letter on my windshield, and I tell my buddy that I’m not opening it until we’re a few states away.”
Howorth read the letter as soon as he crossed the third state line. Although her feelings matched his nearly enough, it still took him a few weeks to call the number she’d given him. When he came home to Oxford a few months later, the first thing he did was leave again, for Washington, D.C., where Lisa had returned to be with her family. She eventually came back to Oxford with Richard, and they got married there before settling for a while in Washington, where they got their start in bookselling, at Georgetown’s Savile Book Shop. “More stop than start,” Richard jokes, since part of what the couple did during their two-year apprenticeship was help shut the place down. “It was a great store in its day—it really was, but it was on its last legs, and when they decided to close the store we stayed long enough to close it.”
At the Savile, the Howorths learned about inventory, supply chains, cash flow, credit, and, crucially, community. They got to know bookstores around the city, including Kramer Books, which had a café, an uncommon feature at the time, that functioned as a neighborhood watering hole, turning a city as big as Washington into what felt like a small town. They saved up ten thousand dollars, which, together with a bank loan for the same amount, became their seed money for Square Books. Still, it was Lisa’s salary as a librarian at the University of Mississippi that kept their lights on during the first few years. By 1986, the store had outgrown its second-floor space and moved across the square into the stuccoed brick building it still calls home.
No. 160 Courthouse Square was burned down by Union troops during the Civil War and rebuilt just after Reconstruction. It is painted a shocking shade of orange and looks like it wandered into Oxford from New Orleans or maybe Venice: a balcony the length of the store runs along Lamar Boulevard, offering a ten-degree respite from the heat in the summer and conjuring lazy afternoons whatever the season; an ornate parapet and fancy finial top off the façade out front, while a vintage sign hangs from the second story advertising Fortune’s Ice Cream—a remnant from the building’s soda-fountain days, although the bookstore’s café did once sell ice cream, along with espresso.
“You could get a cappuccino in Oxford when it was hard to find one in some major cities,” William Ferris told me. While Square Books was trying to become something of an institution downtown, Ferris, a renowned folklorist, was building another institution on the campus of Ole Miss: the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Richard had met Ferris during the Savile years when the historian screened a documentary that he’d produced about a man from Bentonia who taught his pigs to pray. (It was called “Hush Hoggies Hush.”) Later, when Ferris’s center published its definitive, decade-in-the-making “Encyclopedia of Southern Culture,” the Howorths planned an “encycloparty” for the launch, and dozens of contributors came dressed as entries, from Elvis to kudzu to Brown v. Board of Education. Square Books sold hundreds of copies of the more than thousand-page volume, advertising them as the bargain they were: “Only $5.98 per lb. Same as catfish fillets.”
Lisa eventually ditched the Volkswagen bus that brought her to Mississippi but kept her freewheeling spirit. She decorated the bookstore as if the party house where she first lived in town had grown up and got a Ph.D.: it is full of mismatched throw rugs and random sitting chairs, and every possible inch of wall space is taken up by books or photographs of the people who write them. Now that the Howorths employ more than thirty people, she jokes that the only thing she does there anymore is help water its small delta’s worth of plants. (She’s present in the store in other ways these days, too, since it stocks both of her novels.) Richard shares his wife’s impish spirit; he’s been known to dress as the Man in the Yellow Hat from the Curious George books, and once decided, at around two in the morning, while surrounded by a bevy of last-callers who had come to Square Books for a nightcap, that the bookstore should double as a night club. (He tried to christen it “Club Caribbean,” but ran out of room on the wall where he was scribbling the name in Magic Marker, so, until the wall was repainted, a few years later, that part of the store was known as “CLUB CARIB.” )
Even when Square Books is functioning more or less like a conventional bookstore, its business model is unusually creative. The store offers wedding registries that allow bookish couples to list high-dollar volumes like the Oxford English Dictionary instead of KitchenAid mixers; sells souvenir pieces of its old balcony with certificates of authenticity to go along with them; and hosts a weekly variety show, “Thacker Mountain Radio,” that airs on public-radio stations around the South. It also has one of the country’s longest-running signed-first-edition clubs, whereby subscribers in Oxford or anywhere else can get books autographed by the store’s roster of visiting writers, which over the years has included everyone from Alex Haley and Alice Walker to Allen Ginsberg and Toni Morrison.
Publishers were and remain somewhat reluctant to send writers anywhere but a handful of the original colonies plus a couple of cities on the West Coast; to persuade them to add readings in the Magnolia State, Howorth partnered with an acquaintance from college, John Evans, who was running his own store, Lemuria Books, down in Jackson. The two men realized that their stores could guarantee the sale of a few hundred copies of any given book, making it worth the trip. “We called it the I-55 tour,” Evans told me, “and we’d say to publishers that Mississippi is a real cheap place to send a writer.”
One of the reasons it was so cheap was that when writers came to Oxford, they often bunked with the Howorths. “Originally, there was nowhere in town for them to stay,” Lisa said. She and Richard had an extra bedroom in their house, and, in addition to putting writers up, they cooked for them and entertained them with sing-alongs, driving tours, juke-joint visits, and, in the case of the Irish novelist Patrick McCabe, an impromptu St. Patrick’s Day parade. One morning, the couple woke to find James Dickey, best known for his novel “Deliverance,” drinking beer on a stool in their kitchen while regaling their son, then in his single digits, with heaven knows what kind of stories while the boy ate his breakfast cereal.
Whether the Howorths’ hospitality was born out of necessity or instinct, they put up dozens of the more than two thousand writers who have come for events throughout the years. Soon enough, writers weren’t just visiting: Southern expats, such as the “North Toward Home” author Willie Morris and the novelist Barry Hannah, moved home to Mississippi, and local authors launched their careers at the store. One of these in particular stands out for Richard. “I had a friend, he was a lawyer, and he called one day and told me I needed to meet this friend of his who had written a book,” he said. “A few days later, they came and we sat down, and this young lawyer friend asked me how Square Books could help him sell books. He wanted to sell a lot of books, and I remember telling him that was a really difficult thing to do.” Still, he agreed to read the man’s novel, and he liked it so much that the store hosted an event. The author, John Grisham, was so grateful that, more than thirty novels and four hundred million copies later, he still makes sure the store always has plenty of signed books on hand.
The need to host writers at the Howorth home faded as Oxford prospered. After the son of the famed quarterback Archie Manning started playing for Ole Miss, in 1999, the “Eli Effect” helped cause a boom not only in college enrollments and hotel accommodations but even, it seems, in housing prices and the city’s total population. Ten thousand or so people lived in Oxford in the nineties; around twenty-five thousand live there now. Historically, bars in town had been few and far between—there was a reason people had nightcaps at Square Books—but more opened, and they stayed open later. The square now boasts restaurants featuring not one but two James Beard award-winning chefs and enough high-end boutiques to bankrupt a lesser royal.
The Howorths have their own claim on the town’s transformation, not only because of the bookstore but also because of Richard’s two terms as the mayor of Oxford. In 2001, he ousted the incumbent by only a hundred and nineteen votes; four years later, he ran for reëlection unopposed. He spent his eight years in office balancing growth and the preservation of the historic downtown, lobbying for affordable housing, and working to create a public bus system. After his mayoral terms, he was appointed by Barack Obama to the board of the Tennessee Valley Authority. He found the job fascinating, and served on all four of the board’s committees, providing oversight for everything from staffing and financials to operations, including at nuclear facilities. After nearly a decade, Howorth, the last Democrat on the board, was fired from the New Deal agency by Donald Trump and replaced by a Republican appointee.
Howorth made a point of keeping his political career and the bookstore separate, and the business thrived even while he juggled other roles. He credits the store’s staff, in particular his No. 2, Lyn Roberts. Now general manager, she began working there during law school, and kept working there after she got her J.D., passed the bar, and clerked, never finding anything she liked better. Thirty-four years later, Roberts believes customers love it for the same reason she does, not chiefly as a place of commerce but as a space for community. “Could you spend an afternoon in a haberdashery?” she asked me. “People visit Square Books and stay there. And they come back. And, when they are driving across the country, take a detour to visit Square Books.”
“I always joked that there should be a bookstore on every side of the square, and Richard’s just about done it,” William Ferris told me. In 1993, the Howorths added an annex down the street, Off the Square Books, that now houses a huge selection of used books and what they call “life-style material,” including gardening guides and cookbooks. Ten years later, on the morning that the fifth Harry Potter book was released, children and families eager to get a copy of J. K. Rowling’s latest found a sign on the door of Square Books from the Ministry of Magic saying that the store was closed and directing them, via a Marauder’s Map, to a different building: Square Books Jr., a children’s bookstore unveiled that day. Sixteen years after that, for the fortieth anniversary of Square Books, the Howorths opened Rare Square Books, in the same second-story space as their original store, specializing in signed and collectible books by Southern authors. (When their aunt Vasser died and left the building to all five of the Howorth boys, Richard bought out his four brothers, all of whom have returned to Oxford. Whether it was the Eli Effect or the Howorth Effect, real estate was more expensive than ever: that building ended up costing Howorth over fifteen times more than 160 Courthouse Square.)
The Howorths’ children—two daughters and a son—all worked at one time or another in Square Books, but Rare Square is where the family of stores officially became a family business: the Howorths’ son, Beckett, began running it after training at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar. (Beckett is not a nod to the playwright but a family name going back four generations.) Like his parents, Beckett worked at another store before coming back to Oxford, spending a few years at Vroman’s Bookstore, in Pasadena, California. “People called me Mississippi out there. I was definitely kind of exotic, although everything out there was exotic to me,” he said. When he returned home, he fell in love with Katelyn O’Brien, a bookseller at Square’s main store. More than a few people have got engaged on the balcony at Square Books; Katelyn and Beckett were married, last year, at Rare Square, in a Zoom wedding. She now works for “Thacker Mountain Radio.”
Eventually, Square Books extended its reach not only across the square but across the country, when Richard became president of the American Booksellers Association, the trade organization for independent bookstores. He helped train other booksellers at the A.B.A.’s annual boot camp, generally by teaching a seminar on customer service, and he made a point of emphasizing advice from his mother, to kill anyone you could with kindness. He relied on one story in particular to prove this point. An irate stranger once claimed that someone from the bookstore had kicked dirt on her car, and, when Richard deduced it might have come from a flowerpot on the store’s balcony, he offered to take her to the car wash. When that turned out to be closed, he washed the car himself, at his home.
Every year, thirty or forty would-be bookstore owners heard that story, including, one year, a bright-eyed newbie from Seattle, who later said that Howorth’s car-washing story inspired him to make customer service a cornerstone of his company, Amazon. Howorth jokes that his years running the A.B.A. were partly a mea culpa for that accidental mentorship of Jeff Bezos. During his tenure, the A.B.A. sued Borders and Barnes & Noble for violating federal and state antitrust laws, and, after settling that suit, sued six publishers for providing illegal terms; moved into online commerce; and lobbied local and state tax authorities to collect sales taxes from online retailers to level the playing field for small businesses.
“I know everyone will want to talk about Richard’s genius as a reader and the way indies build community, which he is and Square Books certainly does,” the novelist and fellow bookstore owner Ann Patchett said, “but can I just be on the record praising his business chops?” When Patchett was opening Parnassus Books, in Nashville, she and her co-founder, Karen Hayes, looked to Howorth for advice and inspiration. “He owns so much real estate now, he can avoid worrying about rent in any of those stores, and, honestly, who would have thought to open four stores on the same square? He doesn’t even have to worry about parking there. People who run bookstores, any small business, lose sleep over parking and rent, and Richard bought his buildings and figured out how to get by on foot traffic.”
Patchett got to know the Howorths after she published her first novel, in 1992, while she was driving herself around the country doing book events. She got to Oxford late one night, and the whole front window of Square Books was filled with copies of “The Patron Saint of Liars.” “It was kind of like ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ ” she said. “I just stood there in the dark with tears in my eyes. There are so many of us driving around, and taking that time and going to that trouble to make us feel welcome just speaks such generosity.”
Square Books now hosts more than a hundred events every year, so plenty of other writers have had their own Patchett-like experiences. “Square Books would be a great bookstore in Duluth or Del Rio,” the novelist Richard Ford wrote over e-mail, “but in Mississippi, to be such a rare locus of humanist and literary decency has conferred a missionary zeal which they and their entire family take completely to heart.” The native Mississippian has known the Howorths for years, and considers Richard one of his closest friends. “Richard and Lisa’s profound, mirthful, decent dedication to books, writers and intelligence shine like a bright beacon out of the most benightedly ill-run state in the Union.”
The Howorths are well aware of their state’s reputation; Richard has fought unsuccessfully, for years, for the removal of a Confederate monument on the square, and Lisa remembers her family’s skepticism when she told them she would be making a life in the Deep South. Richard told me a story about the time one of Larry Brown’s novels was translated and published abroad. “I think it was in Holland,” Howorth said. “It was his novel ‘Joe,’ and they changed the title to ‘Mississippi Joe,’ and the jacket had this design—what they call a belly band that wrapped around the front of the book—and it said something like ‘Just as every animal has its own hind part, every nation must also.’ That’s how a lot of the world sees us.”
Yet he and his family have never tired of trying to make the place better, and better known for its arts and culture, the only way they know how: one reader and one writer at a time. “Square Books is one of the biggest reasons, outside of my grandmother, why it’s so hard to leave Mississippi,” Kiese Laymon, the author of “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America” and “Heavy,” wrote over e-mail. “The Howorths treated me like family from the first day I met them. The stores are filled with literary tradition but also bubbling with a commitment to an innovative, much more radically kind literary south. It will always be my home bookstore and really it’s always going to be home.”
Apparently it is always going to be Richard Howorth’s home, too. He’s a few years and a thousand pages into his memoirs, but he dismisses the project as “that hairball,” and can’t seem to stop prioritizing other people’s books over his own. After the construction crew finished their work at the house, Howorth sent them to the store to repair the stucco and give the balcony a fresh coat of paint. “I’m pretty sure his deathbed will be in the back of the store,” Lisa said, laughing. “He’s there seven days a week. That’s what you do when you love what you do.” ♦
