It’s a wiltingly hot evening in Missoula’s Westside neighborhood, yet Audra Loyal reclines in the cool of her bookshop, The Vespiary, on the second floor of the Warehouse Mall, near Draught Works Brewery and Hunter Bay Coffee.
It’s a brand-new location, lined with art and pottery of Loyal’s own creation, but every aspect of the shop has its history.
First, there’s the host site, the Warehouse Mall—once a furniture storage space for the old Missoula Mercantile, now a collection of small shops, artists’ studios, and nonprofit and professional offices.
Second, there’s the literature—Loyal sells only carefully cultivated used books, which range from current bestsellers to collector’s items, and handmade books, which she binds herself with centuries-old equipment.
Third, there’s the business itself—Loyal has worked as a book preserver, on and off, for four decades, and operated The Vespiary in a half dozen different forms, including a home workshop, online store, VW-camper-based pop-up shop, and a 10-year stint at The Buttercup Market (now Tandem Bakery).
Covid closed that last storefront, but, four years later, Loyal believes that Missoulians are ready and eager to browse again in person.
“The media is full of rumors that the book is dying, but my experience is that people still love books, so I want this space to express that love,” she says.
That it’s blocks from downtown or other commercial centers makes the shopping experience even more of a discovery.
“This building is a little bit of a blank spot for many Missoulians,” Loyal says. “I want people to be filled with curiosity when they come here.”
The wasps’ nest
Loyal, 50, first learned her trade as a college freshman at UC Davis.
“I needed to have a student job to make ends meet, and I started off as a bookshelver,” she says.
The new recruit was sent to the university library’s fourth floor preservation department, so she knew where to bring any damaged or deteriorating books.
Loyal crossed a narrow, nondescript hallway and then opened the door to an unexpected paradise.
“Beautiful California light,” she remembers, poured through south-facing windows, illuminating shelves of distressed tomes and tables of massive cast-iron equipment to repair them.
It was like when Dorothy goes from black-and-white to color in The Wizard of Oz, Loyal says.
“I love making things with my hands, and I love being around books, so preservation—basically book surgery—seemed like a blend of two passions.”
Loyal begged for a job in the department and stayed four years on the fourth floor.
She finally left for a graduate program in scientific illustration, followed by stints teaching English and pottery, but returned to book preservation at the University of Montana, where she worked eight years at the Mansfield Library.
That, finally, led to private practice.
“We often got calls to the department from members of the public—‘Can you please help us repair our book?’—but we had our hands full with the million books in the Mansfield,” Loyal says.
Since she was only working part-time, she decided to start a side business.
Behind her house was a small, 100-year-old shack she and her then-partner converted into her own book repair workshop.
That the shack happened to be infested with wasps they took not as discouragement, but inspiration.
“They were paper wasps—‘I work with paper, and they work with paper,’” Loyal reasoned.
Voila, The Vespiary, which means “wasps’ nest,” was born.
‘Eclectic but selective’
On the book restoration side of the business, Loyal’s most frequent client is someone with a family bible.
“Those big, chunky turn-of-the-century bibles are impressive looking, but they were really cheaply made,” she says. “People have used them heavily, passed them down from generation to generation, and often keep them in the basement or in the attic, which are the worst places to keep books, so they come to me in pretty rough shape.”
Other popular restoration requests are cherished cookbooks, children’s books, and books received as gifts or tied to a unique experience.
“There’s often handwritten notes in them, or a sentimental attachment,” Loyal says. “Even if you bought that identical book, it’s not the book that you grew up with, or that your friend gave to you, or that you took with you when you were trekking.”
She restores about 100 books annually, and makes at least that many more blank books, on a gamut from simply stitched notebooks to leatherbound luxuries.
Both restoration and creation employ special, Willy-Wonka-worthy tools, including a job backer (“a big standing vise that has a wheel in it like a captain’s wheel of a ship”), a board shearer (“imagine your standard paper cutter you might find in school, but as a big as your dinner table”), a bone folder (“a piece of bone that’s been rounded off on one end and pointy at the other end, for folding and creasing”), and a cobbler’s hammer (“for rounding spines”).
All these she keeps at an ever-expanding home workshop, while the 1,000 used books in the shop are the most recent addition to the business and the biggest physical presence in its new location.
Loyal calls her collection “eclectic but selective,” gesturing from histories to literary fiction, graphic novels to poetry, and art books to memoir.
Her only insistence?
“This is not a Danielle Steel dumping ground,” she says. “I’m not going to turn up my nose at books that are brand new, but I do have to be interested in them, and I want other people to be interested in them, too.”
The Vespiary had its grand opening on Friday, July 19, and is now open Thursdays and Fridays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., as well as by appointment.
The other weekdays Loyal works at home, binding and restoring books, as she has since she was a teenager.
Whatever one’s art or enterprise, being old-fashioned has its advantages.
“The great thing is you can get a lot done without having ‘proper’ equipment,” Loyal says. “You just have to be creative.”
