Brooks: After dark chapter, flooded Minneapolis bookstore works to turn the page

After the flood came the flood of helpers.

The day before Valentine’s Day, a Minneapolis city water main burst at the intersection of 50th and Penn and broke the neighborhood’s heart. Frigid water flooded into nearby businesses and homes: the Sparrow Café; the Italian restaurant Terzo; Lake Harriet Florist; and Paperback Exchange, the neighborhood’s new and used bookshop, set to celebrate its 50th year in business this spring.

In the days since, the little bookstore has worked to turn the page. Warm air blasts from industrial-strength fans and dehumidifiers. The walls, floors and shelves are dry and achingly empty. The wreckage has been bagged and dragged to overflowing dumpsters — though it feels wrong to talk about 100,000 ruined books as garbage.

“We collected these books over the course of 50 years,” said store manager Rachel Pedersen, who has spent the past decade with this place and these books. “It’s more than just inventory. It’s like part of your soul. It’s so heartbreaking.”

The immediate aftermath of a disaster is awful. What comes next can be worse; when the rest of the world moves on and you’re left to keep picking up the pieces and trying to rebuild, alone.

But the Paperback Exchange wasn’t in this alone.

As of Monday morning, book lovers have donated more than $35,000 to a GoFundMe to support the shop and its employees. In a cruel twist worthy of a paperback novel, the water also flooded the nearby home of owners Marion and Keith Hersey. Their readers organized a meal train, set to deliver homemade mac and cheese on Monday, chili on Tuesday, and on and on into March. Donors also chipped in $3,600 to help the family deal with a ruined water heater, clothes dryer and other flood damage.

Next door, a GoFundMe for the 20 employees at Terzo has raised more than $13,000. Minnesotans' hearts are as big as our lakes.

At any given time, Paperback Exchange had at least 150,000 books on the shelves or in storage below. The fact that any were saved was due to the quick action of the staff and the compassion of the book community. At Moon Palace Books across town, owner Angela Schwesnedl rented a U-Haul and evacuated at least 50,000 books.

You can see some of the surviving editions on March 2 if you swing by the Paperback Exchange kiosk at the upcoming Pints and Pages book fair at Fat Pants Brewing in Eden Prairie.

The bookstore is trying to figure out what comes next — if anything can come next.

Like most of the water pipes in Minneapolis, the water main that ruptured was more than a century old. Installed in 1922, it had been lined and inspected in 2007, according to a city spokesman.

It’s not clear what caused the pipe to burst. There seemed to have been no warning signs or obvious cause for the break, according to the spokesman. The pipe has been sent out for independent structural testing.

The city would like to assure you that “Minneapolis has a water main failure rate well below the average for a water system of our size and actively invests in water system improvements based on asset management principles.”

The city has received six claims for reimbursement for water damage from the incident.

In the trashed bookstore, Pedersen walked by the empty shelves, still bearing labels — romance, sci-fi, death and dying/grief — and still bearing the muddy high-water mark, about 6 inches from the floor.

Carefully, Pedersen descended the mud-encrusted stairs to the basement. The force of the water blew out one of the basement’s foundation walls, and the dirt that spilled through churned the floodwater into soupy mud. Books soaked and swelled, bursting off the shelves and then freezing in place. The first time Pedersen came downstairs after the flood, she crawled across frozen books.

The Paperback Exchange lived up to its name. Customers could come with bags full of books, exchange them for store credit, browse and then leave with bags of new books. There were an estimated 150,000 books at any given time. Two-thirds of them ended up under water.

“Most people don’t know — we didn’t let them down here — but it was full to the brim with books,” Pedersen said in the basement. “I mean, if you thought our upstairs was full of books, the downstairs was twice as full. Every single shelf, wall, floor.”

The future is uncertain. The present is difficult. But the people who work at Paperbook Exchange are so grateful for what they still have: 50,000 books, and all of their readers.

“Tell people, thank you,” Pedersen said. “Thank you so much.”

If you want to pick up one of Paperback’s paperbacks, you can find information about the Pints and Pages event at fatpantsbrewing.com.