"It's not the first place you'd think you'd run to set up a bookstore,
but there's something about this place," said Jamie Kornegay, who with
his wife, Kelly, runs Turnrow Book Co., which opened at the end of
August in Greenwood, Miss.
Roughly halfway between Oxford and Jackson and with a population of
18,000, Greenwood is a former cotton trading center that fell on hard
times in the '60s and is being slowly revived in large part by one man,
native son Fred Carl, the founder and CEO of Viking Range, the high-end
kitchen stove company, who also studied city planning. "We need to
renovate buildings, not just for our company but also for our town,"
Carl said in a recent profile in Inc. Magazine. "My aim is to
bring life back downtown 24-7." Carl and the company have bought many
of the old buildings in downtown Greenwood, refurbished them and used
some for company operations but also helped set up such businesses as a hotel
and bakery. Carl also wanted a bookstore. As Kornegay put it: "He had
the foresight to know a good bookstore could the linchpin of a strong
cultural town."
Jamie Kornegay had worked seven years at Square Books in Oxford, when
he and his wife, who has a graphic design background, visited friends
in the rejuvenating downtown of Greenwood. "We were looking for
something different," he said, and he found it in Greenwood. The town,
he said, is "progressive but also frozen in time. The old buildings
were not torn down, and although it had a dark turbulent period during
the civil rights era, it also has an inspiring cultural history."
Kornegay called the Delta landscape "mesmerizing. It's flat with lots
of cotton fields and looks almost like the savannah."
In January, the Kornegays took over the Dancing Rabbit Bookstore, which
mostly sold used books. During the year, they worked on the new store,
creating a new name, "scrapping everything and starting over" in the
new location in August.
Carl is the "silent partner" in Turnrow, which has nearly 4,000 square
feet in the former Fountain's Department Store, including a mezzanine
with a café that is, Kornegay acknowledged with a laugh, "well outfitted." The
Kornegays had "access to Viking resources" in the design and
construction of the store.
Turnrow is a general bookstore, with new books in "all categories," but
has an emphasis on regional, Mississippi and cooking titles. Between
the many restaurants that have opened in Greenwood, the Viking Range
cooking school and the many foodies that Viking attracts, "there's a
lot of interest in cookbooks," Kornegay said. The store also stocks music CDs, with an emphasis on blues. "We're a
big Delta blues mecca," Kornegay said. "There are a lot of Highway 61
blues tours." The store aims to riff into other musical genres.
The Kornegays and two other people work full time in the store, and another four or five work part time.
Turnrow already has attracted some big name authors, in part, Kornegay
said, because of Greenwood's fortuitous location between Oxford and
Jackson, homes of highly regarded bookstores Square Books and Lemuria
Books, respectively. "We're getting many authors who those stores
attract." Among the authors appearing this year at Turnrow or its
predecessor, Dancing Rabbit: Greg Iles, Sebastian Junger, Steve
Yarbrough, Rick Bragg, Edward P. Jones, Dennis Lehane, Paula Deen, Tom
Franklin, and for the grand opening William Gay, Ashley Warlick and
Jack Pendarvis.
"The town has really responded" both to the store and its events,
Kornegay said. "People are really excited about the new big bookstore
that is not a chain. Mississippians have been trained to respect a high
standard of bookstore because of Lemuria and Square Books." Kornegay
said that Richard Howorth of Square Books "provided my inspiration" and
that "pretty much everything I know about bookselling I learned from
Richard." And John Evans, owner of Lemuria, "helped a lot with
encouragement and advice." He noted happily that both Howorth and Evans
came to the store's grand opening.
Turnrow Book Co. is located at 304 Howard St., Greenwood, Miss. 38930; 662-453-5995; www.turnrowbooks.com.--John Mutter
