A Trip to Visit the Wimpy Kid
Little Bean Tells An Unlikely Story
Little Bean walks straight up to the counter. “Hi, is Jeff here?” She’s holding three copies of her Wimpy Kid books.
We are down in Plainville, Massachusetts at An Unlikely Story, the remarkable bookstore and cafe owned by Jeff Kinney, the writer and author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series.
The woman behind the counter hesitates and for a brief moment, I think we might actually pull this off. Like she’s trying to decide if this ten year old has an appointment or… what’s the best course of action.
I’d been kicking myself all the way down for not trying to pull some strings and set something up for the kid. I figured we’d wing it and see what happens.
Finally, the clerk says, “Oh I’m sorry hon, he’s sooo busy and he travels a lot.”
The vagueness of the response, of course, suggests he’s actually here but we don’t push. I imagine staff must get many, many requests like that from eager young readers every day. We walk the books back to the car and then head back inside to explore.
Kinney is an interesting guy, taking it upon himself as a private entrepreneur to try to single-handedly revitalize the town where he lives with his family. The bookstore, opened in 2015, used to be an abandoned warehouse. Kinney has plans for the whole area around the bookstore; parks, mixed use with coffee shops and so forth. He’s even including a food truck parking area!
You can check out the plans here, at a website Kinney developed called Plainville Square.
And he appears to be doing it mostly out of his own pocket since the bookstore is losing money. Kinney himself, in an interview just last December, said the bookstore is losing “six figures.” Of course, since 2007, Kinney’s Wimpy Kid series has sold nearly 300 million books so it’s interesting to see an author put that sort of success back into the community where he lives.
“This is an ambitious plan, maybe a foolish plan, but also really an exciting plan," Kinney said on the podcast last year.
Here’s a link to a nice interview with Jeff Kinney: Diary of a Wimpy Kid interview
For our part, we head over to the cafe for a lunch of grilled cheese and panini sandwiches and then hit up the Minecraft / Pokemon shelves first before spending some time in graphic novels. We check out the auditorium space upstairs and Little Bean picks out a wolf bookmark and one of those sparkle sticks to take home.
Back when my other “children” Aaron and Janelle were with us, we used to go to Barnes and Nobel and sip coffee while they read Wimpy Kid books, so the trip here with Little Bean feels like a full circle sort of trip.
After we return, it occurs to me that I didn’t buy anything for myself - something I usually do when visiting an independent bookstore. For the record, we have loads of amazing indie bookstores right here in the Granite State, including our hometown bookstore, The Bookery, and Gibson’s in Concord where I launched so many of my own books! Other include RiverRun in Exeter, the Toadstools in Keene and Peterborough and Morgan Hill up in New London.
Back at An Unlikely Story, Little Bean is telling me about Greg Heffley, the protagonist of the Wimpy Kid series.
“Is he really wimpy?” I ask.
“I don’t think so,” she says, “but he does get picked on.”
“Does he have an enemy, like a bully or something?”
“Rodrick!” She spits the name, like she knows him personally. “And Rodrick is his brother!”
“Oh no!” I say.
And so it goes.
Look, I’m not one to diss Barnes and Noble. Lord know Little bean and I have spent many an afternoon sucking down pizza pretzels in the cafe reading books. For years, I worked at and managed a B. Dalton Bookseller in the Philly area.
But I don’t know, there’s something about the futile comfort of a tiny indie bookseller, toiling away out of love and desperation. When I was in college, there’s was a place up the street called Talking Leaves. Of course I was broke back then, so maybe I’m trying to make up for supporting indie bookstores now. And to find one run by a successful author is, well, inspirational? Is that the right word? Maybe more like bold. Us writers all want our books to be sold in those stores, but to actually run one, well, even James Patterson doesn’t do that.
Back at the bookstore, Little Bean picks out a newish graphic novel called Warriors about a clan of forest cats and she settles in with a juice and bag of chips for the ride home. She finishes the book long before we get home.
“Daddy, we have to go back to get more.” We sure do, kid-o, we sure do.
I didn't know he owned a bookstore! Thanks for teaching me something new today.
Not even home yet, and the kid's telling you to go back for more books. I love it!