Bookseller Betty Anne Mac Leod, who died Jan. 26 at the age of 83, endeared herself to the children and adults she escorted to the thresholds of worlds created by Mildred Taylor, Dick King-Smith, Arnold Lobel, Kate DiCamillo, Holly Keller and other authors.
She demurred whenever pressed to list her all-time favorite books, but MacLeod harbored a special fondness for the unequaled essayist E.B. White. His affecting tale “Charlotte’s Web,” about a pig and spider’s friendship, so affected MacLeod that she eschewed pork and refused to kill spiders.
“A spider was always ‘one of Charlotte’s relatives,”‘ explained daughter Joni Noel.
MacLeod was an adult when she became enamored of books for young readers. In picture books and chapter books, she found the humor and solace that her parents relied upon in their faith.
Finding her calling
The daughter of two Congregational ministers, the Rev. Stephen C. Fooks and the Rev. Frances Ina Rust Fooks, she lived in small towns in Vermont, Wisconsin and Illinois before the family moved to Colorado in 1930. She graduated from Denver’s East High School and Missouri’s Lindenwood College.
She married another East High alum, Leon “Ace” Diner, with whom she had two daughters before the marriage was dissolved. Both remarried – she married another East High alumni, Ronald John MacLeod – but maintained a close friendship with her ex-husband.
After cycling through several jobs, she found her calling as a bookseller, first at the Denver Dry Goods book department, and then with Gordon’s, the University of Denver bookstore and a Cherry Creek bookshop called Pooh Corner.
MacLeod eventually bought Pooh Corner, returning it to its roots as a children’s bookstore, and ran it for a few years in the early 1980s. Repeated construction delays forced MacLeod to surrender her plans to relocate to the Cherry Creek mall, then under construction. After closing the shop, she joined the Tattered Cover’s staff, becoming its oldest employee.
Her younger colleagues embraced her as “a mother to everyone,” in the words of Tattered Cover owner Joyce Meskis, who enormously admired MacLeod.
Petite as a wren, with a pouf of silver hair, MacLeod never stopped moving. Her bright eyes watched for people who looked lost, for books out of place, new books ready to be shelved and titles to squirrel away for customers.
MacLeod knew the shelves and their contents so intimately that when a customer described a book, she could locate it and bring it back in the time it took other staffers to perform an in-house search on the computer.
Regular customers often asked MacLeod to set aside titles that she thought they’d like, or that their children might like. Consequently, the space near the children’s reference desks sprouted stacks of books, requiring agile footwork and forbearance from Tattered Cover colleagues.
Each stack often contained one or two books that Mac Leod felt the customer ought to read, the way a dietitian inserts vegetables into a dedicated carnivore’s meal plan.
“She slid in, for example, books about children of color for people who might not necessarily select them,” Noel said. “She slid in books about social issues and historical issues – immigration, particularly, and social justice – that she felt they should learn about. Then she’d smile and say, ‘Well, I don’t think he’ll read it himself, but perhaps he’ll give it to his niece.”‘
Top 10 lists, reviews
With her sweeping knowledge of books, MacLeod responded to customers’ celebrations and crises with a title. She made Top 10 lists for young readers, and wrote trenchant reviews.
For a death in the family, she offered Judith Viorst’s moving “The Tenth Best Thing About Barney.” She gave new parents a copy of Gyo Fujikawa’s “Babies,” along with Eric Hill’s “Spot,” Ezra Jack Keats’ “The Snowy Day” or Robert McCloskey’s “Make Way for Ducklings” for older siblings.
She taught adolescents civil rights with “The Watsons Go To Birmingham” by Christopher Paul Curtis, along with books by Mildred Pitts Walter and Mildred Taylor.
Along with her recommendations came a caveat.
“The Harry Potter books became kind of a joke, because she read the first one and didn’t think it was going to go anywhere,” said Tattered Cover colleague Judy Bulow. “Then after it got popular, she told people, ‘Now, you can’t trust my judgment, because I didn’t like Harry Potter’ whenever she suggested a book.”
At her memorial service, her daughters gave their mother a tribute they knew she would have appreciated, quoting two final lines from “Charlotte’s Web”: “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”
Survivors include daughters Joni Noel and Gretchen DeSciose, both of Denver; six grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Her husband died in 1978.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
