by Mike Smith
Daily Lobo
The word acequia is Spanish for irrigation ditch.
Bookstore owner Gary Wilkie said that is one of the reasons he named his store Acequia Booksellers.
"I was looking for something that started with an A," Wilkie said. "Then I started thinking, 'Hey, an acequia is just like a bookstore - where the knowledge flows.'"
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Wilkie has been in the bookselling business for more than 30 years. He said he has made a habit of starting his bookstores' names with an A so that they will always be first in the phone book. Wilkie has owned stores in San Francisco, Seattle, upstate New York and Corrales. Now, he and his wife, artist-writer Marilyn Stablein, have opened a store in Albuquerque at 4019 Fourth St.
Acequia Booksellers may not be Albuquerque's largest bookstore, Wilkie said, but he is still proud of - and eager to talk about - his store's sections of Southwest history, the Beat Generation, architecture, poetry, music, art, literature, Native Americana and rare books.
His rare book section includes hundreds of first editions - many of them signed - including a $2,688 first edition of Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, a 1731 edition of Isaac Newton's A Treatise of the System of the World and multiple historic maps.
"What I do is each section I build like I'm trying to build a sculpture," Wilkie said. "Every book is handpicked."
The many sections Wilkie has put together include a bookcase of $1 paperbacks that bulges with classics such as In Cold Blood, Catch-22 and books by Ray Bradbury and Mark Twain.
"I can't believe I found this book. I didn't even know Leonard Cohen wrote a book - a novel, for a buck," customer Djako Odilon said. "If it had been $10, I would have said, 'All right.'"
At Wilkie's first bookstore in San Francisco in the early 1970s, he said his customers included writer-activist Daniel Ellsberg, punk-rock pioneer Richard Hell and filmmaker Jim Jarmusch.
Wilkie said the store he owned in Corrales until about a month ago was too isolated to draw much of a crowd. He said with his new store's close proximity to UNM, sizeable room for writing groups to meet, and space for literary readings to begin this fall, it should become a hot spot for Albuquerque's writers, artists and serious readers.
"I've always found that if you have books you love, the customers are going to be great," Wilkie said. "We want this to be a center - good music, good books, good people."
UNM students are eligible for a 15 percent discount.
Wilkie said the store buys and trades books as well, and is always looking for different artists' work to exhibit on its walls. Acequia Booksellers' Web site is Acequiabooksellers.com.
"There's no place else to get this stuff," Odilon said.
