Text by Landon Charlebois

Photos by Caitlin McFalls

I ordered a beef au jus sandwich and a Stag at Crusoe’s on Osceola Street.

“Why would you order a Stag?” asked Knez. “Isn’t that kind of a cheap beer?”

“Do you cook?” Jovanka asked.

Peter dozed off politely in the chair to my right.

I hadn’t expected to have dinner in St. Louis, but after receiving a speech on the importance of spontaneity by Jovanka, one of the owners of Hammonds Books, I was convinced. Their many questions, she assured me, were mostly because of my relatively young age. The four of us had just left Hammonds, where I had conducted a long, conversational interview with her husband, Peter Hammond, her brother Knez Jakovac and Jovanka Hammond herself, about their bookstore. Now, over dinner, they would interview me.

Walking up to the storefront earlier that day, I was greeted by a window display of patinated costume jewelry and elaborate hats in retired styles. Bricked onto Cherokee Street in 1896, the building that now houses thousands of antique books, jewelry and other collectible items, Jovanka speculates was once a boarding house and store. The building had accommodated a popular distillery, beer brewery and bar during prohibition; you can still see the wear on the basement stairs from the illegal club’s many visitors.

Tall, dark shelves jutting this way and that confronted me upon entering the shop. Thousands of books organized by genre and subject towered over me and dared me to explore. Squeezing between angled shelves and catching a glimpse of a fascinating book spine around the corner feels like spelunking – nothing like perusing the uniform, terminating rows of shelves found in a Barnes & Noble or other chain bookstore.

“My theory of arranging furniture at home is the same as at the store,” said Jovanka. “Things should be at angles – it opens up your thinking tremendously. When you have all your shelves straight, it just gives a path for people to go in and go out. People want to go around corners, they want to see what’s there. It’s very freeing to your mind to see things at angles.”

Knez manned the counter on the cramped first floor of the store. In the largest space we could find – which was not large – Peter, Joavanka and I sat on small chairs and drank very small, very full cups of coffee. The late-afternoon light poured through the storefront, spotlighting dust waltzing in the air between us. I smelled mothballs.

“My mother told me one day that the woman who owned this building wanted to sell it, and so that was when we decided to change our whole lives.” Jovanka looked thoughtful about that time in 1979. “This used to be three rooms, and we had to move out of our house. We decided we can’t let this pass. So we did what we had to do: We stored a lot of stuff and we moved into the back room here, which had a bathroom and a kitchen, and we put our bed there.

“When you’re getting ready to open a store, that is the most beautiful period. You have all these wonderful things that you’re gonna put around that you think are so beautiful and they’re just waiting for you to put them in a home and the whole store is totally your world.

“I love being in this store. I can’t bear to think of the day when I won’t be here in this store, if that should ever happen. When I’m here, I’m at peace, very comfortable. When I’m at home I’m a bit nervous – he makes me nervous!” She nudged Peter, who was nearly falling asleep with his coffee in hand.

“Sorry!” he said in a British accent.

“I don’t like looking at you with your eyes closed,” jeered Jovanka, “it’s like death!”

Jovanka had bright red hair arranged playfully, resting like a crown on her head. Peter sat to her right in a black suit and tie.

“We met and decided to get married in just three days – 52 years ago,” Jovanka said. “I had just come back from Yugoslavia, and he was working in Toronto. Peter is an architect. He came to St. Louis to visit a cousin who lived here. I knew his cousin – she was a terrible snob – and she invited me to a party on a Saturday night.

“I hadn’t been back to St. Louis in a while – all my friends were married – so I said to my sister, we might as well just go there, who knows who we’ll meet. That night, he wanted my phone number, and he took a black magic marker – he had on French cuffs and he rolled them back – and he wrote it on his left arm, and I thought, ‘Oh how romantic,’ you know? ‘How gallant.’ Well, after we got married, I found out he had another number on his other arm!”

Peter laughed, almost on-cue.

“But being the detective that I am, I figured it out: He’s left-handed, so he had to have written the other number first. As long as there was no number after mine, it was all cool.

“After a few years, we moved back to St. Louis. I lived in many places after leaving, and they all . . . I mean, there’s a certain kind of glamour in living in New York or something like that, or even Toronto, and you think, ‘Oh, coming back to St. Louis, I don’t know . . . ,’ but I’m really glad that we did. I think St. Louis is really a great place. The trouble is that people don’t know it.”

The door chimed and several customers walked in. They slid by us, walked to the back of the shop and climbed the stairs to the second floor where more of their approximately 80,000 in-store books (about 200,000 more are in storage) and about 200,000 original news articles, on paper, from the 1850s through the 1960s, are stacked.

Dumbfounded by the number of books and range of subjects, I asked, “How do you decide which books to buy?”

“I would always buy the standards. You have a sense of what people like, you know what you like, you know what’s attractive, what’s interesting. There are a lot of old copies of Pride and Prejudice, but one day somebody brought a 1945 copy with a dust jacket, a beautiful dust jacket. It’s so rare to find these old books with beautiful dust jackets.

“But I like buying things that I’ve never heard of, especially if you don’t have to pay a lot of money. That’s the value of going to the book sale in West County (the Greater St. Louis Book Fair)…. I would go on Bag Day and buy everything that I didn’t know anything about. I occasionally came across a treasure, but I always had an education. If you research all those books to find out what they are, you’ll have a great education.

“We’re willing to go to a house if they have a lot of books and buy them out; we’ve done that several times. Recently we got a huge collection from a guy who was a costume designer for all the big shows in St. Louis, and he had a huge collection of books on textiles and fashion and oriental art, all kinds, almost 3,000 books.”

I wondered how they survived, especially with online monsters like Amazon.com. “We don’t get fifty or a hundred people buying from us a day like in a Barnes & Noble store. We get lookers, and we get people who just keep coming in and buying from us. And then the other thing is, we still have many of our old customers who want us to search for books for them.

“This is hard for people to understand, but these are people, a lot of them have money, that don’t wanna do it themselves, they don’t wanna bother, they don’t wanna analyze what the book is, and then be disappointed ‘cause it isn’t the right one — and they trust us.”

Jovanka and Knez will search online catalogues of booksellers’ inventories across the world and find books, original newspaper articles, long-forgotten academic journals or specific reprints of vintage books for anyone willing to pay the commission. “I could almost write a book about our relationships with all these people that we’ve never met,” Knez said, laughing from behind the desk. “One man, he buys books on health, but he doesn’t believe anything after 1950, so that’s what we have to find for him.

“We’ve had production companies order mass quantities of books from us for movies – like they’ll need text books from the fifties, you know? I went to school in the ‘50s, so I pointed out to them that most of the textbooks we used in the ‘50s were published in the ‘30s. So we sent them some from the ‘50s, ‘40s and ‘30s. One of the films was October Sky.”

Jovanka and Knez are Serbian, and their family migrated to the US in the 1950s. “The Serbs, we’re full of tradition. Each family has a patron saint. The Serbs adopted this when they were pagans, because they had gods to protect the family. So when they became Christians, they transferred the gods to saints.

“I can trace my family back 600 years, and they’ve had this patron saint all this time. I like what our priest says: Serbia was occupied by the Turks for 600 years and people prayed and practiced their religion in secret, but they always kept their traditions. And those traditions are what kept their faith alive, not some Pope somewhere telling them what to do. They were doing it . . . it was a grass roots thing, you know?

“I really believe that tradition defines us in a non-limiting way, not like religion or dogma. The traditions that we carry on, they say where we came from but they don’t say who we are, they don’t limit us. I think that it’s invaluable for a family to have celebrations, things that they celebrate that are a part of who their children are and where they came from, it defines them in a very open way.

“It’s not telling you what you can’t do. It’s telling you, ‘this is the strength from which you come, celebrate it.’”

No matter the changes – digital books, the death of many newspapers – at Hammonds, you feel that same, adamant strength of tradition in a persistent showcase for the ongoing love of printed books.

– – – s s l – – –

Landon Charlebois is a gigging bassist and guitarist, journalist, poet, graduating college student, permanently enrolled student of the universe, practicing agnostic and certified air-fryer operator. Caitlin McFalls takes pictures, draws things and paints things. She graduated from SIUE and teaches at Art Gecko Studio & Gallery in O’Fallon, IL. She knows that her fear of zombies is irrational.