Booked Solid

By Jody Jaffe

The Barnes & Noble store in downtown Bethesda is the hub of the Saturday night social scene—and the only “cover charges” are the prices on the books

New York has Times Square, Baltimore has the Inner Harbor, Washington’s got Georgetown and Bethesda has the Fountain.

Sitting in a tiny triangle of concrete and stone in front of the Barnes & Noble bookstore on the corner of Bethesda and Woodmont avenues, the Fountain is the place to be on a Saturday night. It’s where lovers meet, teens hang out and little girls throw pennies into the water.

“I made four wishes,” says 7-year-old Tamara Soueidan, who goes to the French International School in Bethesda. “One: To get a new bike in about three days. Two: Make it black. Three: Make it my size. And four: Make it motorcycle shaped.”
Tamara is dancing around with her friend, Tala Asaad, who’s 6 and goes to Rosemary Hills Elementary School in Silver Spring. Sitting on a bench nearby is Tala’s mother, Nadai Asaad. “We come here every Saturday,” says Asaad.

Along with the rest of Montgomery County, or so it can seem on a clear, warm Saturday night when the triangle is jammed with people and musicians have set up shop, singing and strumming for spare change. But even on this night, with heavy clouds and threats of rain, there’s plenty of foot traffic.

A clump of six teenagers stops in front of the Fountain. The boys are swallowed up in baggy jeans and boxy T-shirts; the girls, swaddled tight in sprayed-on hip-huggers and even tighter tops that stop way north of their bellybuttons.

“Let’s push someone in,” shouts one of the boys.

“No,” shouts another, “I know a perfect place, like where there’s no cops.”

They move on.

The clouds make good on their threats and people huddle under the bookstore’s eves.

Joe Trotter, a 17-year-old Whitman High School junior, is waiting for a friend. “We show up here every Saturday night and spend the next two hours wondering what we’re going to do,” he says.

A lot of people know exactly what they’re going to do: head inside. In two minutes, from 9:54 to 9:56, 21 people walk through the bookstore’s front doors, past the information booth where Sarah Hulsey fields questions.

“It’s crazy,” says Hulsey, 26, who’s been working at Barnes & Noble for 18 months. Saturday nights, she says, are at least twice as busy as any other time. “Lots of teenagers, lots of people coming from movies or waiting for movies to start, or waiting for dinner reservations.”

Or waiting in line for a latte upstairs at the café.

“We usually have a line all Saturday night,” says Jennifer Gillen, a 32-year-old barista from Silver Spring. “It’s consistently as long as this (12 people), if not longer.”

According to store manager Catherine Sprouse, Saturday is their biggest sales night, both in books and eats. “Take a Monday, and double it,” she says. “We’re talking the whole store environment…Last week we sold over 500 of our smallest cups of coffee. Probably over 120 of them on Saturday night. And that’s just coffee, not even lattes.”

This is a bookstore, after all, so while you’re waiting, you can read. Two strategically placed tables full of books offer an assortment of titles such as: The Breast Book, A Brief History of the Smile, and Mouth Sounds: How to Whistle, Pop, Boing and Honk.

But that’s not what they’re reading in the café. On this Saturday night, all 34 tables and seven stools by a counter are full of people sipping drinks, eating sweets and reading everything but The Breast Book.

For instance, Cherie Finkelstein, an acupuncturist from Silver Spring, is thumbing through Intermezzo, the magazine about “fine interludes of food, wine, home and travel.” “We mostly come on Friday nights,” Finkelstein says, “when it’s not so crazy and there aren’t so many teenagers.”

That catches the attention of Mark Maver, 17, and Agnes Sibiliski, 15, sitting at the next table. Maver, a junior at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, says he’s there to study for International Baccalaureate pre-calculus exams. “I come here to study a lot,” Maver says. “I can’t study at home. Too many distractions.”

Stan Benton, a retired history teacher from Columbia, Mo., is in town on a pilgrimage of sorts. “Fifty-five years ago, this is where it all began for me, at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. I haven’t been back since.”

Benton is standing in the bookstore’s lobby, surprised to see so many kids there on a Saturday night. “Instead of mall rats,” says the smiling Benton, “you have book rats!”

Writer Jody Jaffe, author of the novels, Thief of Words, Shenandoah Summer and the Nattie Gold mystery series, teaches journalism at Georgetown University.