Steal My Crawl: William Patrick Tandy
Need ideas for your crawl? We asked some folks to share how they participated last year, or what they’d like to do this year. Take inspiration or copy them outright–we won’t tell!
William Patrick Tandy, publisher of Beach Badge
William Patrick Tandy has published the storytelling zines Beach Badge, Fire Pit, and Smile, Hon, You’re in Baltimore! under his own imprint, Eight-Stone Press. Learn more at EightStonePress.com.
The Bent Book, nestled in a forlorn Bayville strip mall, where I scored cheap, musty paperbacks on my lunch breaks from Admiral Farragut. Manahawkin’s Encore Books, where I discovered Carl Hiaasen’s pastel misanthropy among remaindered self-help and military histories. Keltie News on Cape May’s Washington Street Mall, where I bided time between issues of The Twilight Zone with tales of Borley Rectory, Kaspar Hauser, and the Philadelphia Experiment.
All now belong to memory, like most of my Jersey Shore—the place where I grew up, that set me on the course to becoming who I am. Bookstores here were always few and far between. Most were seasonal, and largely catered to vacationing Philadelphians and New Yorkers with an insatiable appetite for easy, breezy “beach reads.” Still, a young mind cursed with curiosity in pre-internet South Jersey could sometimes turn up a diamond in the rough of mass-market disposability.
There were other places, too, of course, like Atlantic Books, nestled beside what remained of the old Beach Theatre in Cape May. The spinning wire racks of classic five-and-tens like Hands on Long Beach Island, Hoy’s in Ocean City, and Dellas in Cape May reliably dispensed small-press chronicles of shipwrecks, ghosts, and other local lore, as did the gift shops of cultural cornerstones like Batsto Village and the Long Beach Island Historical Museum. The library, of course, was our greatest resource. Most anything I special-ordered from the larger branches of the Ocean County Library would arrive at our Stafford Township outpost within a week. And best of all, it didn’t cost a thing, outside of the occasional replacement fee for a “lost” out-of-print biography.
Indeed, most of my old haunts are long-gone, though curiosity still gets the better of me whenever I revisit my home shores. While working on the debut issue of Beach Badge, I envisioned a modest literary journal dedicated to creative non-fiction about my native shores that would be at home among the wealth of voices and experience housed at Asbury Book Cooperative. To this day, ABC is the only brick-and-mortar bookstore anywhere in Jersey that you’ll find Beach Badge. It’s also my go-to for any new or recent titles.
From Old Barney to AC’s diving horse, Down the Shore Publishing is today’s virtual equivalent of those rotating wire racks of local interest found once upon a time in every Jersey Shore museum gift shop and old-school five-and-ten. (I highly recommend Great Storms of the Jersey Shore, Shore Chronicles: Diaries & Travelers’ Tales from the Jersey Shore 1764-1955, and anything by the late John Bailey Lloyd.)
Books proved to be my hard-won ticket out of Jersey when, shortly after graduating from Stockton University, I took a job as a traveling rep for a remainders dealer specializing in high-quality art and architecture titles. My beat included everything east of the Mississippi, from Miami to Montreal, and antiquarians were our bread and butter. Amazon took its toll on them, yet a handful have weathered the onslaught of online commerce, and today stand alongside libraries as bastions of knowledge and understanding lost on any algorithm.
So, show them some love. Bezos doesn’t need another rocket.
Photo by: Davida Breier