My Beloved Daughter,

As I had spent so much money through War Games West the summer after high school, they sent me a five percent discount coupon for my next purchase.

I never used it.

The Reading Corner opened in Poplar Bluff the year that I started college.  The proprietor, Kevin Arnold (yes, we often teased him about his connection to the main character in the old television series, The Wonder Years), was a fellow geek who enjoyed books, comics, and gaming in all their forms.  More than a bookstore, the Reading Corner was a gathering spot for those of us who were not “the IN crowd” . . . those who wanted to embrace their inner dragon slayer or super hero.

First of all, it was a bookstore.  He sold new and used novels of all genres, particularly in what we now call the area of “speculative fiction.”  For used novels, he had a policy of trading two-for-one.  So I often had friends who would bring bags-full of paperbacks in, taking half as many unread tomes home with them.

Secondly, it was a comic store.  I had a pull list here of new Spiderman comics.  Ironically, I had subscriptions to all of the major Spidey titles at that time.  But the books would arrive at the reading corner days before my copies would arrive in the mail.  Needless to say, this prompted me to not renew my subscriptions.

Thirdly, it was an RPG store.  The fact that Kevin initiated an immediate ten-percent discount on all RPG titles was the reason that I never used that discount that I got from War Games West.  I could get pretty much any volume of any game there and he could order anything that he didn’t have in stock.  This is something that you might be familiar with now, given that you live in the Greater St. Louis area and have Barnes and Nobles and Fantasy Shops abounding.  But being able to do this in the mid-nineties in Poplar Bluff, MO, was ahead of its time.

Finally, it was a gathering spot for us.  At one point, a group of geeks (me not included) planned to start a branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) from the store, but it never took off.  At this point, Kevin started selling fantasy-type weapons and I purchased my first ninja sword there.  I ended up selling it to another friend later.

Kevin also hosted weekly Dungeons and Dragons games there.  He would select a person and ask them to prepare an adventure as the Dungeon Master.  I played in several of these weekly games as a player before he asked me to lead one.  I selected my favorite setting at the time, Dragonlance.

I couldn’t, to this day, tell you the plot of that campaign.  What I do remember most were two boys who joined the game during the first week and kept coming.  I’ll call them Michael and Jeremy.

I was always perplexed by the friendship of these two adolescents, as they seemed so different.  At first, I didn’t know much about the two of them, other than the fact that Michael always had a wallet-full of spending money and spoke with such proper English, that my high school English teacher would have swooned.  He was the more “nerdy” of the two, if I could really use that term to describe him.  He was certainly intelligent enough to fit the mold, at least from what I could tell at first.

Jeremy was the more outgoing of the two.  He tended to have girls hanging onto his every word and most of the people at the store would often joke about “Jeremy’s harem.”

I will discuss these two friends in the upcoming weeks.  But I want to finish this entry as it began.

The Reading Corner eventually moved from that small location, in the heart of the Bluff, to a larger building on the outskirts of town.  Kevin added arcade games, as well as the product line that was to be the undoing of the store . . . bongs.  He did post a sign over the display case that insisted that they were intended to be used only with tobacco.  But this did little to dissuade some overzealous parents, who reported it to some overzealous police officers.  Eventually, after I had left Van Buren for Springfield, a police raid resulted in Kevin shutting down the store.  Some said that he was preparing to sue the city police department.  That never came to pass and I never saw him again.  While researching this article, I looked him up and found him on Facebook, living in another state.  My message to him went unanswered.  Perhaps he doesn’t want to be reminded of that time of his life.

To honor him, I named the bookstore in Lily’s Redemption “The Book Corner” and named the owner Kevin.  Maybe, someday, Kevin Arnold will pick up a copy.