Editor’s Note: This essay first appeared in the summer 2011 issue of the Montana Quarterly. We are publishing it today on Last Best News because it is included in a new anthology, “An Elk River Books Reader: Billings and Livingston Area Writers,” which is officially being released tonight at Elk River Books in Livingston. The Mai Wah Building on Mercury Street in Uptown Butte is a Chinese cultural museum these days, but when I lived in Butte in the early 1980s, the main room on the ground floor housed a junk shop. The first time I saw it, the store was closed, so I pressed my face to the window to see what was inside. What I saw, amid the heaps of tools, battered home furnishings, tennis racquets, bottles and decomposing rugs, was a small collection of books. (more…) Continue Reading →
