Leroy Soper
Bookseller, Mentor, Friend
In the 1960’s, while I was in high school living with my family in South Seattle, our idea of a special evening was to drive all the way to North Seattle – in the days before the freeway – to enjoy eating at our favorite Chinese restaurant, Lun Ting’s. This fabulous little place used to be right about where General Books is now. If we were lucky enough to be there on a Thursday night, all the stores on the Ave were open and invariably I was allowed a few moments (as the only reader in the family) to gape longingly into the windows of the huge University Book Store next door and sometimes to go inside. I remember a tall handsome man in a sky blue suit who always courteously asked me what I was reading. I could not know that he would change my life.
In 1970, returning to Seattle in disillusionment after leaving graduate school on the East Coast, the one and only place I applied for work was that same University Book Store, where I was hired and after ten months made the book-buyer for the HUB Branch. I was an idealistic buyer with little sense of business – I packed that little store with face-outs of Signet Classics and Penguin Classics, every available play by Shakespeare, and a science fiction section bigger than the one at the main bookstore. My zeal landed me in front of the general manager, and earned me a stunning and devastating evaluation.
Shell-shocked by the scolding I’d received, I was scarcely out of the general manager’s office before Leroy Soper took me out to lunch. I was too shaken then to remember the restaurant now, but it was on the water and all Lee did was build up my confidence, that my love of books would make me a good buyer. It was the closest I would ever come to leaving the bookstore.
I can honestly say that in the 40 years I’ve worked at the bookstore since, no bookseller has been my model, mentor and hero more than Lee Soper. Throughout my career, he has presided benevolently over my bookselling world, both as the head of General Books and as the head of Raymar Northwest, his fabulous, too-briefly-lived Northwest distributor. There’s no counting our many wonderful coffee breaks together and conferences in his office. He convinced me that what I was doing mattered. I recently decided that I had to send him a copy of my most recent novel. Why didn’t I just send it to Horizon House? I’ll regret waiting to get his exact address for the rest of my life.
Every day at the HUB Branch I try to talk to students about the books they’re reading the same way Lee always showed an interest in my books and reading life. I honor Lee every time I remember a student’s name and the book they bought last week, and guide a young person further into the world of books.
– Nick DiMartino