ON A RECENT TRIP back to Phoenix, I went to Changing Hands Bookstore. I’d made a point to stop by every time I came to the area, to see the place and take in what are, for me, positive associations. I frequented the store when I started my time in the English program at Arizona State University in the early nineties, roaming the aisles, browsing the thousands of spines. I bought all my books for school here instead of at the university bookstore, where the editions were correct but the prices were through the roof. My knockoffs meant my page numbers wouldn’t match up with those on the syllabi, but knowing my books were bought at the venerable Changing Hands was more than compensation. This was the place I’d bought my first Faulkners and Hemingways. This was where I’d started entertaining the idea of becoming a writer. This was where the dream crystallized.

Only it wasn’t this place at all. The Changing Hands I went to back then was on thriving Mill Avenue in downtown Tempe, a minutes walk from A.S.U.’s Language and Lit building and amongst the clubs and bars where I played music at night. In 1998, because of high rents created by the systematic gentrification of Mill Avenue, Changing Hands moved from its old spot to this strip mall several miles away on Guadalupe Drive, still technically in Tempe but with more of a suburban feel. I’d made the trip out to this new Changing Hands a dozen or so times since leaving the Valley in 1999, even though my writing career—two self-published novels with a third on the way—had taken a decidedly un-Faulkner-like turn. This place is what’s left of the dream for me.

No doubt the owners would’ve preferred staying in that building on Mill, with its cramped aisles, wooden floors, and railing-ed upstairs that looked down saloon-like on the main level. The place defied the cookie-cutter nature of much of the rest of the Valley, almost like it didn’t belong. To my mind, it belonged more than any of the rest of it.

I often found myself in its basement used section. There I discovered these red Scribners hardbacks of all of Faulkner’s popular titles, and I decided I would piece together the set. The first thing I did when arriving at the old Changing Hands was thump my way down the stairs to see if one of my red titles had shown up since my last visit, and many times it had.

This new Changing Hands is all one level, and finished in adobe, an ancient technique but somehow more contemporary than the old store. It shares its parking lot with Trader Joe’s. A cafe is accessible from inside its walls, through a metal detector.

Then there’s the product. I call it product because there’s no other word for it. Like seemingly every independent bookstore, Changing Hands has had to find ways to pay the rent besides selling books. The entire front of the store—I’d estimate thirty percent of the total space—is lined with scarves, hats, funny magnets, T-shirts, pottery. In keeping with their independent mantra, all of it seems to be made by mom and pop enterprises, and some of it is fun. You get the sense this section goes a long way to keeping the place solvent. It’s grown over the years, and no doubt will continue to grow.

The brunt of the books are on wooden shelves in the back, shelves much like those in the old Changing Hands but fewer of them. The fiction and literature section seems reduced from back in the day, two lines of shelves maybe twenty feet long apiece, housing both new and used titles. For comparison’s sake, I searched out John Updike, which in this store contains about a half dozen books. I picked up The Centaur, a favorite of mine, and read a few words. I didn’t get into Updike until after I left the Valley and moved to the Bay Area, cherry-picking paperback copies from San Francisco bookstores. Still, I’ll always remember the Updike section in the used part of the old Changing Hands, one whole shelf, his many titles stretching the width of it. What if today someone wants a copy of Rabbit is Rich? I guess that’s an Amazon order.

None of this is Changing Hands’s fault. It’s not so much about what the store lacks but what the culture in which it exists has lost. The literary world that Updike and his ilk dominated is long gone, replaced by millions of books, ebooks, blogs and other ephemera. Book-books somehow seem both more and less than what they used to be. Holding a book in your hand is still more substantial than having it digitally available to your eyes, but with so many of them occupying the market—self-published, indie press, corporate publishing—it’s become harder to see any one of them as valuable. We’re deep in the age of the book as marketing collateral, as a link in someone’s chain of narcissism, as something dashed off for an advance large enough to remodel a kitchen, as anything but “an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us,” as Kafka wrote. Maybe that’s what I sense at the new Changing Hands, that the sea of titles has nothing left to crack my own facade. I left the store that day with a T-shirt. Maybe it’s me who wants to stay frozen.

Changing Hands still hosts some of the best author events in the Valley, if not the state. Literary writers, dignitaries, rock stars have graced its podium. I’ll never forget my first reading at this new Changing Hands during the promotion of my first self-published novel Stuck Outside of Phoenix. I’d traveled down that week from Oregon, stopping to do readings in both Northern and Southern California, only to find fewer than three people at both events. By the time we arrived in Tempe, I felt like a phony. Luckily, forty-some people showed up to my Changing Hands reading, making it my first real success as a published writer. After the event, an employee took me into a back room to meet the owner. He was a thin man in his fifties with grey hair and a beard. He looked like Dostoevsky might’ve looked had he spent his life running an independent bookstore in Arizona. The employee introduced us, saying, “Art just sold twenty-seven copies of his debut novel.”

The owner smiled, opened a desk drawer. “What do I owe you?”

The employee told him.

He removed a checkbook. “I never mind writing checks to writers,” he said.

This store and I will always be on the same side.

No doubt the path my writing career has taken affects how much I’m willing to let this new Changing Hands in. For each of my three novels, I’ve spent the last decade sending queries and manuscripts to agents and editors, to no avail. In the subtext of each rejection slip I heard, among other things, “You might want to adjust that dream about finding your novel on the shelves at Changing Hands.” The store did let me do readings to support both of my first two novels. Still, self-publishing felt like coming in through the back door. My unsold books were packed up and sent home with me soon after my events were over.

Most revelatory during my recent visit to Changing Hands were the discounted books, these on carts just outside the front entrance, no doubt wheeled there every morning, giving the area a sidewalk sale feel. There was a dusty air about them, and their spines had faded from contact with the sun. A system of dots indicated the price of each book—red dots, green dots, blue dots—but I didn’t bother to check to see which color corresponded to which price. Nothing out here costs much.

Of course, every bookstore has discounted books, and books that often spend time outdoors. What surprised me were the names on the spines, many of them by writers who only a few years earlier had been the hottest thing around: Rebecca Wells, Jennifer Weiner, Tom Perrotta. I think of these as very successful people in my field, but there was no room on the Changing Hands fiction shelves for their titles either, instead left to the elements or whatever spare change someone was willing to part with.

Funny, but in all this, Changing Hands and I seem to have suffered the same plight: not quite getting what we wanted, making hard decisions about our futures, retaining as much of the dream as possible. I guess that’s what it means to be independent.

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ABOUT ART EDWARDS: Badge, the third installment in Art Edwards’s ten-rock-novel series, was a finalist in the Pacific Northwest Writers Association’s Literary Contest for 2011. His second, Ghost Notes, released on Defunct Press in 2008, won the 2009 PODBRAM Award for best work of contemporary fiction. His first, Stuck Outside of Phoenix, was made into a feature film. His shorter work has appeared in The Writer and Salon, among many others.