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They were just shops, after all. Nothing indispensable in what they sold, nothing a body can’t survive without. Printed pages sewn together, glued to a spine, cloaked in a jacket, arranged a certain way on a shelf.

But in the city that gave the world O. Henry — and more than its share of major poets and novelists ever since — Greensboro’s independent bookstores are like departed friends.

They were old, foul-weather friends, and we say their names wistfully. Straughan’s. Atticus. Wills. The holdout, News & Novels, bit the dust in ’02, leaving superstore chains to sell cinnamon lattes by the ounce and Danielle Steel by the pound.

That will change Saturday, with the opening of the city’s first independent bookstore in six years, Glenwood Community Book Shop.

Owner Alan Brilliant, a veteran of the publishing business who trained under the legendary owner of New York City’s Gotham Book Mart and Gallery, had everything ready the other day at his small Grove Street storefront south of the coliseum.

“Everything but the case of champagne I ordered for the grand opening,” Brilliant said as he signed for a parcel, tearing it open to find a 2009 title by Gayatri Spivak, a noted feminist author. “This is what I love about the book business. Every day is Christmas.”

Still. Champagne on Grove Street? Gayatri Spivak? Absolutely. Two doors down from The Hive, the community center that celebrated its first birthday last week, Brilliant’s shop is the latest sprout in a spontaneous, ground-up renaissance for Glenwood, and the neglected blue-collar corridor that was Grove Street.

It might look sparse and iffy from the sidewalk, but serious readers judge a bookstore by its covers. These are discriminating, first-rate — two-thirds new titles on a 20 percent discount, one third used — full of surprises, but also the bare essentials, the books you might like to be buried with.

Just in case.

There is, it goes without saying, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, at last together again. But also the biography of Renoir, “My Father,” by his filmmaker son — used, because that’s the only way you can find it — and Lytton Strachey’s “Elizabeth and Essex,” long out of print.

And just to hold the roof over it all, like two load-bearing pillars, Brilliant stocks the complete Loeb Classical Library and — and — the I Tatti Renaissance Library, Latin on one page, English on the other. In terms of the whole Western shebang, all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.

“This is the only bookstore in the South,” Brilliant says, allowing himself to brag, “that carries both the Loeb and the I Tatti. In the Italian.”

So who is this Brilliant, anyway? Whiskered, 72, he wears a tan beret and commutes on a mountain bike — or the GTA, which inspired his popular, self-published “Bus Journal.”

Born in St. Louis, he’s the grandson of Viennese immigrants. His grandfather, a rabbi, would read to the grandchildren on his knee.

At age 4, Brilliant once dropped the rabbi’s holy book to the floor. His grandfather had him pick it up and kiss the book.

As a student at Columbia, he went to work at Gotham on West 47th Street, the heart of New York’s Diamond District. Later operating his own book shop and press, Brilliant became a connoisseur of a different kind of diamond — one he found in great supply after moving here in the 1970s.

Elizabeth Sewell, Randall Jarrell, Sarah Lindsay, Candace Flynt, Fred Chappell, Marianne Gingher, Lee Zacharias, naming only a few: Why, the bookseller once asked the poet Robert Watson of UNCG, did Greensboro have so many important writers?

“Bob said it’s because writers need two things — they need people and they need privacy,” Brilliant recalls. “Greensboro allows you to do your writing, and when you need people, you can go out and party. People treat the writers as workers here.”

The problem Brilliant sees for writers, here as elsewhere, is the death of the independent bookstore, and of publishing houses willing to print serious books. In other words, they want guaranteed blockbusters, not quality books that involve a risk.

Brilliant has an answer, but not one that many people like. It’s literary slow food.

“We should publish it ourselves. That way the money will remain in the community,” he says. “As it is, when you buy a $25 book, the writer only gets $2.50. My idea is, do it yourself.”

He knows how. Not only does Brilliant teach bookmaking and the history of books at UNCG, he has shown writers including Lindsay, the Greensboro poet, how to make them. He holds up a copy of his “Bus Journal,” published by his Unicorn Press and now used as a textbook in Communication Studies at UNCG.

“This book sells for $8,” he says. “It cost me 35 cents to make.”

Cinnamon latte or no, you won’t find it in stock at the superstore. Nor will you find Brilliant’s knowledge, his time, his joy in reading, not even in the how-to section.

And when the weather blows this foul, we don’t need to know who moved our cheese. We don’t need chicken soup for the soul.
We need a good book, and Alan Brilliant can recommend one or two.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com