American magazine: March 2017

Book Smart
The purveyor of Capitol Hill Books likes what
he likes—just don’t say that word in his store.
By Mike Unger
“Jim can be grumpy,
irascible, difficult, and
he certainly takes distinct
joy in being contrarian
sometimes. [But] once
you get to know him you’ll
realize there’s much more
to the man.” —Matt Wixon
PHOTO BY ARIEL ZAMBELICH/NPR
Jim Toole harbors a reverence for words.
“The language people use today,” he says
incredulously. “Awesome; like; perfect. You tell
someone to go to the back room and look to
your right and you’ll find that book. ‘Perfect!’
You hear that 30, 40 times a day and it drives
you crazy.”
Toole’s discerning vocabulary was shaped
not only from a lifetime of reading, buying,
collecting, and selling used books, but from
years serving aboard destroyers and cruisers in
the navy. He’s still a sailor at heart, as reflected in
both his colorful vernacular and the managerial
style in which he runs Capitol Hill Books.
It’s a gray, gloomy January day, but even
if the sun were shining Arizona-bright you
wouldn’t be able to tell in here. Bookshelves
reach from the worn blue-carpeted floors to
the white, water-damaged ceilings, obscuring
the windows, creating a sort of literary eclipse.
Toole, SIS/MA ’66, is sitting in a wooden chair
in the middle of the fiction section upstairs
where, like everywhere else in his store, he’s
completely enveloped by books. Not only is all
the shelf space occupied, but piles of novels
are shoved into the crevices and alcoves of
the nineteenth century row house. As a group
of young women ascend the creaky stairs,
their eyes widen at the sight of the legions of
tattered paperbacks and worn hardcovers.
They almost look like museumgoers gazing
at ancient artifacts. For twentysomethings
like them, many of whom prefer to read on a
REDACTED*, seeing this many bound books
in one place is a rare occurrence.
*The names of the popular digital device used
for reading e-books and the company that makes
it grace Toole’s list of 15 words and phrases
forbidden from being spoken in the store.
“I love the smell,” one of the customers
remarks.
“You like old book dust?” responds Toole,
implying that not only does he not, he’s
perplexed how anyone could.
“Yes, it’s oddly comforting,” the woman says.
Toole, 80, simply shrugs his shoulders.
A Capitol Hill Books baseball cap covers his
white hair, and his weathered face wears an
expression that teeters between scowl and
wry smile. Even now, he still exudes a military
bearing. He’s been fighting a pesky cold for
weeks, which is one reason why he’s not in a
particularly cheery mood. Then again, Toole’s
seldom in a particularly cheery mood.
“Curmudgeon is the word that everyone
uses and it’s totally apt,” says Matt Wixon,
a former employee and current “friend of
the store.” “Jim can be grumpy, irascible,
difficult, and he certainly takes distinct joy
in being contrarian sometimes. He can get
genuinely pissed off at people quickly, and can
be capricious and draconian . . . but those are
only the first two strata. Once you get to know
him a little bit, or if you’re lucky sometimes
almost immediately, you’ll realize there’s
much more to the man.”
Lording over what almost certainly is
Washington’s densest—if not its most
highfalutin—bookstore was never Toole’s
intention. The military was his destiny. He
grew up in California the son of a career army
officer, then graduated from UCLA with a
degree in American history before securing a
waiver from the navy that allowed him to be
commissioned at age 20. After six years at sea
he moved to the nation’s capital to work on
guided missile systems.
“I figured if I was going to be in the navy
I should know something about what we’re
doing internationally,” says Toole, who
enrolled at AU and took night classes to earn
his master’s degree.
His next assignment was aboard patrol
boats on the Mekong River in the Vietnam
War. He finished his thesis in a Saigon library.
When he retired in 1987 he had reached
the rank of rear admiral. He hoped to do some
writing on military history, but the same month
he left the service he remarried (“like a fool”)
and began raising stepchildren. In the early
1990s he started frequenting a small, cramped
bookstore in an 1870s row house across the
street from Eastern Market. Bill Kerr lived
upstairs and maintained Capitol Hill Books
on the lower level. When Kerr died of a heart
attack in 1994 (in his bedroom, which is now
the store’s mystery section), his sister sold the
place to Toole.
“There was no other bookstore on the Hill,”
he says. “There were new books, but there’s
a big difference between new bookstores
and used bookstores. Everybody doesn’t
understand that.”
For the uninitiated, Toole is more than
happy to explain. The shelves of Barnes and
Noble and other big box booksellers are
stocked by publishers, which return to remove
titles from the premises if they don’t sell.
“I have to go find my books because
people bring crap in here and want me to
FOLLOW US @AU_AMERICANMAG 33