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HURRICANE — It’s no secret that Margaret Sorensen, owner of The Book Arbor in Hurricane, loves books. But it’s not until you stop and talk awhile with the proprietor of the only used bookstore in Washington County that you realize just how much.
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Her voice gets hushed and reverent when she talks about the books that have fueled her reading habit over the years.
Growing up in British Columbia, she enjoyed reading L.M. Montgomery’s “Anne of Green Gables” books, identifying with the sweeping imagination of the young protagonist – who lives on Canada’s Prince Edward Island – and her earnest desire to meet “a kindred spirit” who understand her completely.
As an adult, Sorensen then fell in love with James Michiner’s sweeping sagas, often based on geographic locations and spanning generations and even eons. She says he wrote some beautiful stories, with a startling amount of detail.
“Like his book ‘Hawaii.’ He starts off underwater … with how the island built up underwater, and the first bird that dropped a seed on the land and created a plant,” she said.
Sorensen is not from Hawaii but Anaheim, California, best known for being home to Disneyland. In 2004, she and her husband retired to Hurricane.
“He was retiring to the golf course, and I don’t golf,” she said. “I said, ‘Well, I want something fun to do, and I like books.’ So, I said, ‘I want to open up a bookstore.'”
Sorensen said she drew inspiration from a friend who worked at a bookstore back in Southern California.
“I said, ‘Where do you get the books?'” Sorensen recalled. “She said, ‘The customers bring them in.’ I said, ‘What? People part with their books?’ I never knew that could happen.”
The biggest challenge for Sorensen was finding a suitable place to rent. One day, after a three-month search, she decided to stop at the Mercantile antique store on State Street.
“They had all this stuff out on the sidewalk. It looked interesting to me, so we pulled right up to this door after we’d been looking for three months,” she said. “And it said, ‘Suite C available.’ There was a pole in the middle of the room and a row of shopping carts, and a bunch of lumber leaned up against the pole. I said, ‘Ah, this would be perfect.'”
The building had a new furnace and air conditioner and the ceiling had recently been lowered. All that was needed to set up shop was bookcases. Luckily Sorensen’s husband felt a little guilty about spending so many hours on the links. He built large bookcases for the shop, running all around the room, and with four more in the middle against the pole.
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Sorensen next spotted a front counter for sale in front of what is now HurriTan and decided she had to buy it. It was extremely heavy, taking the combined effort of her son-in-law and all her teenage grandsons to lug it into the store. Sorensen’s family, which includes four children and 18 grandchildren, continued to pitch in with the store’s opening by placing books on the shelves.
“I’d never designed anything myself,” she said. “And they’d say, ‘Mom, where do you want this? Grandma, where do you want this?’ And when it was done, it was the place I had designed. Because I had put everything where it was supposed to go.”
The final step was adding an arbor at the front of the store, a white latticed garden entrance – again put together by Sorensen’s handy husband – and bedecked with grapevine string lights. The Book Arbor was off and running.
Open-door policy
Sorensen’s California friend was correct about how a large number of titles find their way to a used book store. It’s often her own customers that come in with leftovers.
“Book-lovers, they don’t want to throw the book away,” Sorensen said. “They share them, they give them to all their friends and they end up still with a box in the house.”
It keeps the shop’s selection vibrant, providing reading material for local regulars or tourists heading toward the world-famous Zion National Park.
“We get visitors from all around the world, and, for me, it’s not just meeting people from all around the world,” Sorensen said. “For me, it’s that we discuss books with people from all around the world.”
Sorensen also shared appreciation for the synergy between her shop and its neighbors. The Book Arbor is located in a large historic building that also houses the Mercantile antique store and the Hurricane Flower Market florist shop. They used to be kept separate with their respective doors shut until an infrastructure upgrade intervened.
When the city widened State Street from two to four lanes, the sidewalk in front of the Mercantile was removed. With antique shop owner Myka Desormier’s entrance turned into a construction zone, there were only two ways to get bigger items like furniture into the Mercantile: through the doors of the Book Arbor or the Flower Market. Having the doors open between the businesses, Sorensen began to notice a wonderful comradery.
“I would hear, ‘Oh, you go ahead, honey. I’m going to look at books.’ The husband or the wife would say it, and one would be a reader and the other was looking for furniture or knick-knacks,” she said. “And all day long I’d hear that. ‘You go ahead honey. I’ll look at books.’ So it was a no-brainer for me to leave the door open. But we just liked how friendly it was.”
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Sorensen is especially friendly to younger visitors.
“One of my goals is to put a book in the hand of a child. To me that’s so important,” she said. “If they’re on the floor and start flipping the pages, even if they can’t read, they are learning to read. They’re speaking the worlds that their mother read to them. And that’s learning to read.”
Sorensen is also struck by the way older kids respond to the Book Arbor’s beckoning shelves.
“When a teenager comes in and she’s not on her cellphone – when he’s not on his cell phone, they go, ‘Ah, it smells so good in here. I love books.'” she said.
One of Sorensen’s favorite things to read, when she was young, was the various installations of Carolyn Keene’s “Nancy Drew” mystery series. Her taste has remained somewhat constant, with her favorite genre being mystery romance.
“I like a little mystery with my romance or a little romance with my mystery,” she said.
Sorensen’s own romance began about 57 years ago. She’d been working in British Columbia a couple years after high school and had a friend whose parents retired to California. The young women determined they would give the Golden State a try traveled to California and got jobs, then returned to Canada to finish paperwork and get a work visa.
Not long after, Sorensen met her husband.
Finding a balance
Sorensen is at the store some 38 hours a week. Busy as she is, she still finds time to indulge in her own love of reading. Every day, after she’s worked six hours, she gives herself permission to read a book or crochet and watch a movie.
“I have to force myself to sit down because there’s still stuff to do,” she said. “I have to remind myself I’m retired.”
Sorensen, who says she’s “78 years old and happy,” enjoys being one of the independently-owned stores in Hurricane. If she had it to do over, she’d still tell her husband she wants to open a bookstore.
“We have never, ever regretted it,” Sorensen said.
The Book Arbor is located at 21 E. State Street in Hurricane. It’s open Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m.- 6 p.m., and from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturdays. The phone number is 435-635-7323.
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