Ethan Lam

I try not to go into my interviews with a thesis. But the notion of a couple who has run a bookstore on Maine Street for over four decades was catnip to an already hopeless romantic. Before I even met Gary and Beth of Gulf of Maine Books, I was already writing their love story in my head—the kind with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan and a bookstore that smells like old paper and devotion. I have a “You’ve Got Mail” poster on my dorm wall. I was not going to be objective about this.

In my defense, the story writes itself. The curtains open on the Bookland at Cook’s Corner in the 1970s, where Gary—freshly returned to his home state after hitchhiking to California to apprentice with his favorite poet—was working the register. It was a remarkably mundane day, compared to his recent exploits, which included translating for seven Japanese carpenters reassembling a temple shipped from Kyoto to the Zen Center of San Francisco.

Then, a book slid across the counter. Poems by the very mentor Gary had just been living with. He looked up. The fluorescent strip-mall lights hummed their most romantic hum. Time did whatever time does in the movies. Everything faded away, because there was Beth.

Before long, she had joined him behind the counter. Decades later, they’re talking to me from behind a counter of their own. Forget watching the movie—I was mentally writing the script. I was cueing the swelling violins. I was accepting the Oscar for best picture when Gary, sensing my spiral, smirked.

“She’s getting really into the romance part of this. I’m not sure it’s accurate,” he said.

“Of course it’s not,” Beth said.

“Well, I’m not a reliable narrator.”

Beth, who adores her husband’s colorful storytelling enough to refuse to let it go entirely unchecked, promptly introduced the missing detail: a massive wall of pornography.

Despite its family-friendly branding, Bookland stocked an increasingly offensive array of adult magazines for the neighboring naval air station—including Nazi porn—which Beth was once assigned to shelve. She didn’t.

“They took me off that detail. Just a little civil disobedience,” she quipped, eyes twinkling.

The porn wall was just the beginning. Gary and Beth had been pushing to stock the kind of literature they actually cared about—small press, independent work that chain stores refused to touch. They wanted a women’s section. The owner said no. They insisted it would sell itself. He relented, on the condition that it be placed next to the cooking aisle. They wanted a gay and lesbian section. This was 1974. That was a flat no. They quietly slipped progressive literature into shelves where corporate wouldn’t think to look. Finally, they opened their own store—trusting that audiences for feminist and gay and lesbian literature were not only real but waiting. Gary paused mournfully. “Not so much for poetry.”

Having the store was one thing. But Gary and Beth understood that these readers wouldn’t expect to walk in and ask for what they actually wanted. They brought books directly to the people—hauling tables to LGBTQ+ gatherings across Maine, setting up at rallies to close a nuclear power plant.

The Common Ground Country Fair was their longest commitment. They attended for 39 consecutive years, running its social and political action area for 25. When they started, 500 people showed up. By their final year, 65,000 did. Organic farming went from a fringe hippie idea to something so universal it brought people across political lines for nothing more than good food.

“We grew an audience by showing up,” Gary told me. “Not by waiting here for them, but by going and showing up. And they’re saying, ‘Oh, these people are interested in what we want to know about, you know?’”

When Gary said “we knew we’d won,” he wasn’t just talking about Gulf of Maine’s background music: the buzz of conversations between strangers who care too much to stay that way. He’s talking about a world where the gay and lesbian literature the couple once smuggled into Bookland is mainstream—more than mainstream.

“Gay hockey books are hot,” Gary reported.

He’s been watching Heated Rivalry, the queer hockey romance that has taken the world by storm. He loves it. He also has notes. His father was a semi-pro hockey player, so Gary grew up around men looking like they’d been through a war by the end of a season.

“Those guys are having sex a lot. They’re naked. But not one bruise or scratch or cut,” he said incredulously. “These beautiful bodies—great to watch, but for cynics like me … that guy would not have that.”

Beth described another literary craze with amused disbelief.

“They call it romantasy. That’s when they add a unicorn,” she said.

She suspects the trend is less about mythical creatures and more about needing an escape from reality. Maybe. But perhaps sex with a dragon—and I can’t believe I’m writing this in a school newspaper—is less about escaping the world than insisting on one where love conquers all.

This world is where the couple has been living. After ten years in a two-room cabin with no plumbing, a customer asked if they’d move into her late mother’s farm and watch over her horses. Eventually, she left them the property and the kind of sentimental weight Gary, of course, shrugs off—as if people normally hand over family farms to their local booksellers. The horses are gone now, but the couple cares for two donkeys.

It’s thanks to their donkey sitters—sorry, “ass-caregivers,” Gary corrected me—that these native Mainers can travel abroad nearly every year. They’re particularly fond of Naples, first staying with the Flaming Rainbow Tribe, “wild and crazy and all Neapolitans,” running a macrobiotic restaurant.

“I’m in Naples, Italy, the home of pizza, and they’re serving us brown rice and wakame,” Gary said. They’ve gone back three times—once so Gary could give a poetry reading in a half-drunk tattoo bar, accompanied by a gypsy jazz band.

Then there was when Gary’s wandering Japanese poet mentor called from the Mexican desert to declare, “I must see icebergs,” prompting a camping trip through northern Newfoundland. But even the riches of Turkey, Beth’s favorite destination, have not displaced her love for the town she grew up in.

Strip away the meet-cute, the activism, the romantasy, the icebergs, and you’re back in the bookstore, surrounded by it.

It looks like the “Maine” bookshelf as the main display in a store decorated with gifts from customers-turned-friends. It looks like remembering a customer’s London trip as the reason for her month-early Mother’s Day card request.

It looks like Beth painstakingly wrapping a raffle donation for a fundraiser she’d learned about a day before.

“It’s not a lot of, you know—”

“—poster time?” Gary offered.

We crack up—at her earnestness, at the glass window already overflowing with flyers. Beth ignored us.

“Yeah, it’s not a lot of time to inform people,” she said.

Beth told me that years ago, a student at this very newspaper reused an old photo of her and Gary “looking a little funky” with a caption warning readers to pay attention to their studies, lest they end up like this. I came in with the opposite problem—I romanticized them instead.

Beth and Gary might not shout their love from the rooftops, but they pour it into every customer and every book. That is exactly how you want to end up.