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The 40-year history of Prairie Lights bookstore, an Iowa literary institution

Zach Berg
Press Citizen
Prairie Lights bookstore is shown in Iowa City on May 25, 2018.

Jim Harris likes to sit at the tallest table inside Prairie Lights bookstore's cafe. 

He's tall, so it gives his legs some room. But it's also a sweet spot in the cafe — he can see everyone, and say hello to anyone, who comes into the cafe inside the business he started 40 years ago. 

Prairie Lights co-owner Jan Weissmiller cuts a cake celebrating the store's 40th birthday while employees and store supports toast to the Iowa City bookstore on May 18, 2018.

“I never had any time to enjoy this space until I retired,” Harris, the store's founder and former owner, said while drinking a coffee from the cafe. 

Harris, along with a small crew of staff and volunteers, opened Prairie Lights on May 13, 1978. Decades later, it's still standing, just in a different location. 

Today, the Iowa City bookstore is a nationally respected and internationally known bookstore that has hosted a sitting U.S. president, numerous Pulitzer Prize-winning authors and a radio show, "Live at Prairie Lights," which broadcasted author readings across the state on Iowa Public Radio for 18 years. 

It's also a local institution in a UNESCO City of Literature, an unofficial home for literary types. Many students have bought books there, many locals have read the first chapter of a book sitting in the second-floor window sills, many University of Iowa Writers' Workshop students have written their stories in its cafe. 

Lan Samantha Chang, director of the Writers' Workshop and a graduate of the program, remembered her time at Prairie Lights as a student with bright fondness. 

"We came to the bookstore itself as if to a candy shop. The bright, smooth covers of new books, the exciting discount table, and the perceptively chosen rows of poetry and fiction volumes were magical, delicious to look at," Chang said in an email. 

During the store's 40th anniversary month, both Harris and current co-owner Jan Weissmiller discussed the store's legacy in Iowa and abroad, and how what Weissmiller called a "mildly hippie" store has gone on to thrive for decades. 

READ:It was no secret the late Philip Roth wasn't fond of Iowa City

"I always considered the key to our success and growth was the community," Harris said. "The whole area, not just the workshop, embraced us fully. That's the reason we're still around."

After graduating from UI in 1969, Harris spent years out in the Seattle area for more school and service in the Army. He had a desk job at a large Army hospital. His whole class was "lucky," he said, and never sent to fight in Vietnam. 

Jim Harris is shown inside Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City on June 29, 1978.

He moved back to Iowa City in 1977 when he was 30. His grandfather, David Earl Harris, had died and had given him one-ninth of the family farm near his hometown of Bloomfield. The farm was eventually sold, and Harris had some money to do what he wanted.

As a kid, he explored the caves of Hannibal, Missouri, the same ones written about in "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." Since then, books had been a large part of his life. 

"I wanted to open a bookstore. I spent so much time at bookstores, new and used," Harris said. 

Mark Isham, a longtime professor in UI's Department of English, came to Iowa City as a student in 1971. He described the bookstore scene then as "grim." 

The Paper Place, a paperback bookshop that would regularly stay open until midnight, had closed after a lethal combination of urban renewal and a dramatic fire that destroyed the store on Jan. 20, 1970.

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In 1977, Iowa Book and Supply was in town, and the bookstore at the Iowa Memorial Union had just started, but there was no independent, non-UI affiliated book stores in town. 

It took Harris a year to find a space, get a loan and get the store stocked and ready. One fateful decision came early when a publishing industry sales representative visited to sell the store books. Harris picked books by George Orwell, Eudora Welty, authors he revered but knew weren't "strictly commercial." 

In May of 1978, Prairie Lights opened at what is now 104 S. Linn St. with 1,100 square feet and a couple employees. 

The name Prairie Lights came because "prairies are beautiful, as is the word itself," Harris said. To him, the name represented the physical and metaphorical, as it was used in the Canadian folk song "Alberta Bound." 

Weissmiller, who was taking writing and history classes at UI at the time "found Prairie Lights as soon as it opened," as did Isham. 

"Anybody can get the popular books," Isham said. "But in Iowa City, you get loyalty of the locals by getting the books they really need. That's what Prairie Lights had." 

A large selection of poetry books, poetry chapbooks, a wide range of magazines, books from small and local presses, a big fiction section, an essays collection, nature books and baseball books all came together to partially define the store. Weissmiller said they were also the only store in town that carried The New York Times at the time.

"It felt vital then, even seven months after it had started, ” Weissmiller said. 

Weissmiller entered the store in December of 1978 to pick up a graduation gift that had been ordered for her. Harris knew she had graduated and offered her a job. 

"I said no at first because, I told him, I wouldn't make enough money. Eventually, he convinced me, but it didn't take that long," Weissmiller said.

Harris said he knew "from the first minute" that he had hired someone who would be loyal to the bookstore.

The first thing she did as a Prairie Lights employee was shelve the books for the Writers' Workshop classes that would start in early 1979. 

Jim Harris, owner of Prairie Lights Books, stocks a shelf. Prairie Lights, which carries about 85,000 titles, will order any of the million books in print and will search for out-of-print books.

"I wasn't tied to the workshop, but they adopted us, as did the townspeople," Harris said. 

By the early 1980s, Harris knew the store was doing well commercially, well enough to take over the space next-door, expand to the corner of Linn and Washington Street and double its size. 

"At the time, the small book store could do it — you could start small and grow," Harris said. "You can't do that now, unfortunately. Eventually the big box stores, Barnes and Nobles and Borders, would come around and everything else just gets swallowed up. 

"We just didn't do anything really stupid. We obviously made mistakes as a business, but we didn't make the big one." 

After a dispute with the landlord over who would pay the air conditioning bill, Harris knew it was time to move. For two months in 1983, Prairie Lights closed and prepared to move to the ground floor of 15 S. Dubuque St., where it stands today. 

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"That could have been the stupid thing, the big mistake, but people couldn't wait for us to reopen," Harris said.

People volunteered to help move the store's selection of books and shelve them in the new location. Around Thanksgiving 1983, the store reopened, now with a staff of about 10.

The move was huge for Prairie Lights. Weissmiller remembered seeing more customers almost immediately thanks to its new location downtown. The store was selling more course books, too, since it was closer to the university.

Prairie Lights co-owner Jan Weissmiller poses with longtime customer Mark Isham at the store on May 18, 2018.

The Old Capitol Mall had opened in downtown Iowa City, and it was drawing more people to downtown than before.

"They never had a bookstore, which was very lucky for us," Weissmiller said of the mall. Rumors floated around Prairie Lights that Borders was going to setup shop at the mall in the early 1990s, but it never came. 

Soon, Prairie Lights' reputation began to grow nationally. Harris remembers local writer Charles Drum writing a story about the store and it getting national attention. Soon, Harris was serving on the American Booksellers Association's board and serving as a poetry judge for the National Endowment for the Arts. The store was also named in the internationally exemplary literary magazine "The Paris Review." 

"Those are things I'm very proud of," Harris said. 

Few things helped establish the store more than "Live at Prairie Lights," the live radio broadcast of readings at the bookstore that was carried throughout the state on Iowa Public Radio.  

Readings had been taking place at Prairie Lights with UI's International Writing Program years before. It was a collaboration between Dennis Reese of IPR and Paul Ingram, the boisterous bookseller of Prairie Lights who retired from the store in 2017 after nearly 30 years there, that made the show happen.

1997: 'The English Patient,' based on the novel by Michael Ondaatje.

"Those two did it. That show gave the store more of a national profile," Harris said. 

The same year the radio show started, Prairie Lights expanded to the second floor of the building. 

Soon, the store started to draw some of the best known and respected authors of the time.

Annie Proulx came for a reading of her first novel "Postcards." Chang remembers there being "an enthusiastic five-person crowd" featuring longtime Workshop director Frank Conroy, current workshop professor Ethan Canin and herself. 

"Looking back, I'm so grateful to Prairie Lights for having the good taste to bring (her) here before the Pulitzer Prize," Chang said. Proulx won the Pulitzer for her next novel, "The Shipping News," in 1993 and drew hundreds for her next Prairie Lights reading.  

A similar thing happened with author Michael Ondaatje. His first reading for "The English Patient" drew 40. When he came back after the book had been made into an Oscar-winning film, he drew 400 people. 

Chang was part of the "large, fevered crowd" to see Ondaatje read the first chapter of the book to the crowd of hundreds. During the question-and-answer session, someone asked the author if he would quit writing because he wouldn't be able to top "The English Patient." 

"He was visibly shaken by the thought. I remember being surprised that such a brilliant writer could ever have a moment's insecurity, a thought I now recognize as one of hilarious naivete," Chang said. 

Harris said booking big-name authors became a bit easier in the 1990s because publishers had become willing to send authors to more than just Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. Still, Ingram recalled it being a rather cut and dry transaction.

"If we sold the author's books, they would send us more writers. If it turned out to be a dud, we were getting nothing," Ingram said. 

Lan Samantha Chang is director of the Iowa Writer's Workshop. She is shown in the Dey House.

He recalled one reading for the famed Australian writer Peter Carey. 

"Jim gave the greatest introduction of all time. He introduced Peter and said, 'And one more thing: Everyone has to buy the book.' By God, most did buy it," Ingram said.

The readings hosted by IPR's Julie Englander teetered between great and sometimes disastrous. A reading featuring a rather curt Tim O'Brien, the Vietnam veteran who wrote "The Things They Carried," brought back memories of exhaustion for Weissmilelr and Ingram.

Still, the readings were building the store's reputation across the globe. Martin Amis, the famed rebel of English literature, wrote about both Prairie Lights and Ingram in The New Yorker. In the essay, Amis defines the term "Johnson" two ways: first as a slang term for the male sexual organ, secondly as a nickname for a regular guy and stand up American.

"Paul is definitely a Johnson of the second kind," Amis wrote. 

IPR broadcasted "Live at Prairie Lights" on its airwaves from 1990 until 2008. Today, the reading series is often shown live online at writinguniversity.org

As the store's national prestige grew, so did the store physically. After adding the second floor, in 1993 the building's basement was expanded to become a home for children's literature. An additional space on the second floor became the cafe, the first Java House location in town.

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The space where Harris drinks his coffee regularly has a treasured literary history. Long before it was Prairie Lights' cafe, it was the home of Iowa City's literary club, the Times Club, in the 1930s. The likes of Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg read in the room decades before Prairie Lights existed, Harris said. 

“That gives a real example of how important Iowa City was to literature, it could attract that magnitude of people to read in here," Harris said.

Paul Ingram meets with his book club at Prairie Lights on Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2017.

Since then, the cafe has regularly housed writers along with Writers' Workshop students and graduates plugging away at their latest work.

Harris recalled one morning waiting for his coffee and talking about a short story he had just read, and loved, in The New Yorker. 

"All of a sudden, this woman with headphones on sitting behind turned around said 'That's me, that's my story," Harris said. It was Yiyun Li, a future MacArthur genius grant award winner. 

"I didn't know who she was, and I had just read her great story that weekend. It was amazing," Harris said. She had written nearly an entire book in the cafe.

When Li came back to Prairie Lights for her book reading, Harris had to ask one question: "What were you listening to on those headphones? She said it was rock music."

By the late 1990s, after 20 years of building and growing Prairie Lights, Harris was "out of energy" and knew he had to sell the store soon. He asked Weissmiller to buy the store in the early 2000s. 

"Jan knew the store, I knew she would carry it on," Harris said. "She was just this infusion of energy." 

Author Nathan Hill reads from his novel "The Nix" at Prairie Lights Books as part of the Iowa City Book Festival on Saturday, Oct. 8, 2016.

It took a few years to iron out. With the California-based poet Jane Mead, who graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from UI in 1988, as Weissmiller's partner, the two agreed to each buy one-third of the store in August 2007. Harris would maintain one-third ownership until 2009, when Mead and Weissmiller would buy the rest.

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They announced the sale to the staff and to the public in spring of 2008. To celebrate the sale, and the store's 30th anniversary, Prairie Lights hosted a event at The Englert Theatre featuring readings from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon and the former Hawkeyes women's basketball coach and Basketball Hall of Fame inductee C. Vivian Stringer. 

Now, Harris is a fixture at the cafe's tall table. He can watch Weissmiller and staff continually grow the store in stature, be it through booking authors like Stephen King or Colson Whitehead or having President Barack Obama buy books at the store in 2010.

He pointed to the events like hosting former presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders at Hancher as to why he wanted Weissmiller to own the store. "That event was probably more than double any audience we've had and it sold over 1,000 books," Harris said.

For Isham, the store has also evolved into something more than a bookstore.

"It's a place to meet people," he said. He'd meet his former students at the store, he'd meet famous and local writers at the store. He became better connected with the city through Prairie Lights. 

"I'd just meet them in the stacks. There's not a better way to meet someone than by looking at books together," isham said. 

No one knows exactly what the future of Prairie Lights will be beyond the fact there will be one for years to come. It's weathered the big box stores: Barnes and Noble is in financial dire straits, and Borders went under in 2011. Prairie Lights has even the growing use of Kindles and e-readers. 

"The prediction that everyone would be reading a Kindle has not come to pass, so we can't predict the future obviously," Weissmiller said. "How Prairie Lights changes is something I can't conceive." 

Sen. Bernie Sandiers (I-Vt.) speaks to guests at Hancher Auditorium on Thursday, Aug. 31, 2017.

Harris would like to see the store he founded stay on a similar course. Asked what he'd like the store to do the next 40 years, he said "stay the same and have continued success."

Weissmiller knows that with a community like Iowa City, and a university like UI, that continued success is possible. 

“The city and the university are more focused on literature than they have ever been. The legacy here will require that there will always be a vital, good bookstore. I don’t see any reason that it wouldn't be Prairie Lights for years to come," Weissmiller said. 

Reach Zach Berg at 319-887-5412, zberg@press-citizen.com or follow him on Twitter at @ZacharyBerg. 
https://www.press-citizen.com/story/entertainment/2018/05/29/40-year-history-prairie-lights-iowa-literary-institution/624272002/
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