Fall Partner Bookseller: (1) Dragonfly & The Silver Birch in Decorah, Iowa!

In the heart of rural Iowa, bustling bookstores at a lively crossroads

Decorah, Iowa, is in the Driftless region in northeast Iowa, southeastern Minnesota, and southwestern Wisconsin, “tucked into wooded ridges and limestone bluffs,” an “idyllic setting that draws canoeists, hikers and bicyclists,” in the words of some of its admirers, to panoramic views and sparkling waterfalls. In the mid-nineteenth century the town, founded by English settlers, became a destination for waves of Norwegian immigrants (between 1825 and 1930 nearly the 1825 population of Norway emigrated, we learn), who founded Luther College in Decorah in in 1861 and whose presence is still felt in the Vesterheim museum village at one end of Water Street and an annual Nordic Fest featuring “painting bowls and stitching costumes in the old style” and “foods poor Norwegians ate in the nineteenth century.” Until 1972 Decorah still had a Norwegian-language newspaper.

After the unexpected death of her husband, Kate Rattenborg Scott returned to Decorah, where she had grown up, with her two teenage daughters. Her great-great grandfather, the first pastor to bring the Norwegian-American Lutheran Church west of the Mississippi, was one of the founders of Luther College, and generations of her family had taught there. Her great-grandfather was pastor at Decorah’s First Lutheran Church for a generation in the early part of the twentieth century. Kate came from a reading family and had been for many years an academic librarian. She and her late husband had dreamed of opening a bookstore in retirement, and then, one afternoon, driving “home through the rolling fields,” from a seminar for her current job in financial services, a prompt from the seminar about envisioning her life goals found her saying, yes, I’m going to do that now.

Though like many book people Kate believes that there are many many towns in which a bookstore could thrive, Decorah had particular attributes lending itself to bookselling. Though deep in rural Iowa it has a lively, foot-trafficked main street; its nearby liberal-arts college brings not only students but their families and teachers and visiting speakers and scholars, music, exhibits, and performances; its beguiling topography attracts outdoorsy types; its bounteous agricultural setting supports a food culture of pizza farms and destination breweries. All these assets land it frequently on lists of nicest towns (Forbes, Smithsonian, USA Today, and so on) and make it an attractive place to retire (local bookselling has been flagged as a marker for promising retirement destinations, as I’ve noted a few times).

And Kate herself had within her not only a hungry reader but a perhaps unrealized capacity for small entrepreneurship and civic engagement. After she opened Dragonfly Books on Water Street with fanfare on her fiftieth birthday, the store thrived, and Kate and Dragonfly became advocates for reading and for local business. She brought the Decorah Chamber of Commerce an American Booksellers Association study of the harms of Amazon, to strengthen its practices in support of shopping local. In 2019 she even married the owner of the Decorah News, a rare regional independent media outlet surviving on its earnings: one family, all in on reading local. (An unexpected benefit of becoming a bookseller, Kate found, was having a workplace that she could share with her growing children. One of her daughters is now a manager.) In 2022 she received a grant as part of an innovative program (in which I am involved as a consultant) supporting bookstores developing nonprofit fundraising capacity to underwrite community programs—as Kate describes it, “the community-centered, mission-driven work” that people turn to bookstores for, but does not necessarily contribute to the bottom line. The store’s nonprofit partner, the Oneota Valley Literary Foundation, collaborates with a local group to help under-resourced families with young children to build home libraries and shared reading habits, distributes a wide selection of books alongside a local free lunch program (kids are more engaged with reading when they chose their own books, studies show), and brings book giveaways with authors into schools. The foundation has been closely involved with a nearby school serving new Iowans arriving from Georgia, Ukraine, Somalia, and Guatemala, among other countries, 60 percent of whom do not speak English at home, seeking out books for them in their native languages and supporting reading in English. Kate is conscious of the good fortune that has brought her these opportunities, and anxious to use it to help others without dictating or lecturing to them. The foundation also maintains a writer’s residency that allows visiting authors to stay for a few days and enjoy the bounties of Decorah, which helps Kate to tempt them off the beaten path of big-city author tours and introduce them to regional audiences.

Kate notes that her background in academic library science predisposed her to stock her store with unusual breadth: she is comfortable with a “long tail” selection of books that add to the depth of the store’s offerings without promising immediate turnover. She says you can be surprised by what works when you are prepared to take risks, and it makes for a store that is a more satisfying experience for regulars and visitors than one whose selections are dictated by pursuing short-term sales. In a part of the country where many political views come together, she can be supportive of books that have been denounced in some quarters—she has a “banned books” table and a “controversial books policy” on her website that says “we strive to maintain a balance on controversial issues” and “using our professional expertise, we look for accuracy of information in what we stock … and we do not stock books that seek to do harm.” The welcoming and neighborly spirit of Dragonfly encourages these conversations to take place without raised voices.

One aspect of Dragonfly’s embrace of a larger community conversation was Kate’s decision in 2019 to bring on a neighboring Christian bookstore, now called The Silver Birch, as a “sister store” to Dragonfly. The Silver Birch sells mostly Bibles and devotional literature; half of their business is in books and half in gifts and religious items. Having the two stores together creates economies, but Kate says she mostly took it on as a benefit for the community. For anyone uneasy with Dragonfly’s banned books table, staff can point them toward The Silver Birch.

One thing that has struck Kate in the years she has been operating The Silver Birch is the extent to which people come there at crucial moments in their lives—births, confirmations and first communions, weddings, memorials, moments of personal crisis—making the store an even more intense instance of the kind of individual care and fellowship that makes independent booksellers such intimate and powerful advocates for reading. The staff is prompted to think about how to make an environment in which people can feel welcome in a moment of seeking or vulnerability, about how to help them find ways to cope, about treating tenderly people who may be questioning faith or newly coming to it. The store’s “core values” speak of love of neighbor, community care, and forgiveness and reconciliation.

Christian publishing and bookselling inhabits some contradictions that are emblematic of the promise and peril of the book industry as a whole. At the moment the sector is thriving—total revenue in Christian publishing grew by 7.8 percent between 2022 and 2023, ahead of all other publishing categories, and Christian retail book sales grew by 8.1 percent, while the overall print retail market shrank 2.6 percent. One out of every twelve books sold in the United States is a Christian book, led by the Bible; if The New York Times bestseller list included Bibles, they would dominate every week. Asked why there is currently “almost a 9 to 10 percent gap between Christian publishing and trade publishing,” and Bibles and Bible studies sales are “through the roof,” InterVarsity Press President and CEO Terumi Echols told Publishers Weekly, “people want to understand each other and to connect again after the isolation of the covid pandemic and the polarizing politics of today…” (Read Part Two of this post here)

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Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post. You can find her portraits of Book Post’s previous partner booksellers here.

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Dragonfly and The Silver Birch, sister bookstores in Decorah, Iowa, are Book Post’s Fall 2024 partner bookstores. We partner with independent booksellers to link to their books, support their work, and bring you news of local book life across the land. We send a free three-month subscription to any reader who spends more than $100 at our partner bookstore during our partnership. To claim your subscription send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com.

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Photo: The Indie Bob Spot