Ogden is a photographer and saloon-owner, a married rascal who enters into a boomtown business scheme with Marc Leval, then enters Marc’s wife, Maggie. The novel, as realistic as any history and as absurd as any Pirandello, follows Bill Ogden from saloon to bed, from Kansas to California and back again. Ten years back, Scott and I chatted about the O’Connors and that store, as Roger O’Connor happened to have been the self-proclaimed leading expert on the Bloody Benders, the serial killers in Cottonwood, my favorite Scott Phillips book. I spent a good deal of time in that store while I was in Kansas. The store had opened in 1988 by Roger and Jan O’Connor and, when it closed in 2009, held 50,000 used books. Most of the books had come from the Pittsburg bookstore, Mostly Books.

The draftiest wall was floor to ceiling with books, shelved on planks and cinderblocks.

I nailed them up along each wall, like you would in a drafty castle that had fallen intro disrepair when your mad uncle died. When the duplex I was renting got too cold one winter, the woman at the Salvation Army in town gave me busted electric blankets that no one else wanted. At the time, my money was split among rent, books, and, for a reason that escapes me now, mail-order cigars. My girlfriend (now wife) and I took poet Henry Taylor there when he visited the university and asked us to help his search for unusual dictionaries. The bookstore, suitably dark and musty with a wonderful loft that hid cheap Penguin paperbacks, opened in 1988 just off Pittsburg’s main drag, Highway 69. A few decades back, I was in Kansas, researching the works of Luigi Pirandello and Eugène Ionesco in a cavernous bookstore I’d eventually be banned from.

Cottonwood by Scott Phillips