Text by Andrew Travers
Images by Trevor Triano
With a patrician pedigree and a ski-bum intellectual’s bearing, Katharine Thalberg welcomed readers into Explore Booksellers as the shop’s devoted owner for more than 30 years, inviting others to share in the joy of, as she once described it, “the heady thrill of opening a new, virginal book and plunging into its story, following wherever the author might lead, a willing captive, as stowaway.” Today, people are still making the pilgrimage from across town and around the world to Explore Booksellers because of the trust and adoration earned by its late founder.
General manager Jason Jefferies, who took the helm in June 2022, has heard from countless locals about the extraordinary vision, values, and commitment to community that Thalberg infused into the bookstore. “It’s an important part of what we do, fulfilling a community’s trust in someone to recommend books to them,” says Jefferies, who came to Aspen from Raleigh, North Carolina, where he managed an independent bookstore and ran the North Carolina Book Festival. “It’s this amazing technology where you can stare at a piece of paper and it puts you in the mind of someone you never knew or experiences you might never have. I think that’s a magical thing, and spreading that enthusiasm benefits everyone in the long term.”
Thalberg, daughter of Hollywood legend Irving Thalberg, founded Explore in 1975, and soon set up shop in a Victorian-era home on Main Street. “There were at least five bookstores here back then,” recalls bookseller Susan Barbour, a longtime customer who frequented the shop in its early days as a burgeoning intellectual hub of the community. Explore hosted book talks with literary lions and local authors as it also evolved into a moral beacon and political incubator under the influence of Thalberg and her husband, Bill Stirling, who was elected mayor of Aspen in 1983. Animal rights activists, the couple opened the town’s first vegetarian restaurant on the second floor of the shop and led efforts to ban the local sale of animal fur.
But even in a literary place like Aspen, where bookish interests are met with the same reverence as on-mountain pursuits, local bookstores thinned over the decades, shuttering one by one in the Amazon era until Explore was the last one standing in 2009. Thalberg had continued to manage the shop until her death in 2006; in 2007, her family sold it to part-time Aspen residents Sam and Cheryl Wyly, billionaires who sought to preserve Thalberg’s legacy but gave it up in the wake of a federal tax fraud prosecution brought upon Sam and his brother, Charles Wyly, in 2010. When the Wylys put the space on the market in 2014, it appeared Aspen would lose its beloved—and last remaining—bookstore. Then, early the following year, the nonprofit Public Interest Network stepped in and bought it for $4.6 million.
Headquartered in Denver, the Public Interest Network supports and operates a national network of organizations that work for social and environmental action in all 50 states. For decades, it has hosted an annual staff ski trip to Aspen, during which time its team fell in love with Explore and with Thalberg’s mission.
Since taking up the baton of sustaining her invaluable contribution, the nonprofit has stoically weathered the hurdles of the pandemic—selling books by phone order for more than a year while its doors were closed—and are now looking to revive the shop’s identity as a thriving gathering place for readers and thinkers in the Aspen community.
The Explore events team, led by Director of Programming Jeff Bernstein, a retired Public Interest Network attorney who joined Explore in October 2021, is aiming to use the second floor—vacated by Pyramid Bistro in fall 2022—to host a full calendar of high-profile and local-interest book signings and talks. “We want people to think of Explore as a place where things happen,” Bernstein says.
He started with local authors, and this summer hosted book signings with Aspen memoirists like bartender-turned-preacher Jerry Herships. “The number of authors between here and Grand Junction is stupendous,” says Bernstein, who has continued the bookshop’s longstanding book-selling partnership with the Aspen Institute and has hosted in-store talks with bestselling authors such as Anne-Marie Slaughter and Congressman Adam Schiff. Meanwhile, Jefferies keeps a finger on the pulse of the literary world through his podcast, Bookin’, which he has hosted independently since 2018 and now produces in collaboration with Explore.
Among the first locals to come into Explore and welcome Jefferies to town were authors Daniel Joseph Watkins and Mary Dominick-Coomer, whose titles are among Explore’s ever-evolving collection of local and regional books. Explore’s best seller since late summer has been a magisterially illustrated new edition of Aspen Times columnist Peggy Clifford’s indispensable 1980 classic, To Aspen and Back, revived this year by Watkins’ independent publishing house, Meat Possum Press. Long out of print, the book tracks the history of Aspen from its pre-ski town days through its countercultural heyday in the 1970s, ending on an ominously bitter note about the materialism that gripped Aspen—and America—at the dawn of the 1980s. “I’m making sure that’s a staple,” says Barbour, who has been recommending it to the wave of recently minted Aspenites arriving to town as part of the pandemic’s urban exodus. “With all the new people that moved in, it’s really nice to give them this as our history.”
The local-interest section includes a nearly complete collection of the works of legendary gonzo journalist and Woody Creek resident Hunter S. Thompson. Jefferies recommends Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone, the magazine’s collection of Thompson’s seminal writing, including his famed 1970 article, “The Battle of Aspen,” which chronicles Thompson’s flamboyant run for Pitkin County sheriff. (Also on the shelves is Watkins’ Freak Power: Hunter S. Thompson’s Campaign for Sheriff, a deep-dive into that period in Aspen.)
You can also delve into the works of novelist James Salter, who lived in Aspen’s West End for more than four decades until his death in 2015. Best known for the sensual novel A Sport and a Pastime, Salter’s posthumous 2017 nonfiction collection, Don’t Save Anything, includes some of the most beautiful depictions of Aspen ever committed to print, and his recipe-based memoir, Life is Meals, co-written with his wife, Kay Salter, boasts colorful anecdotes from the Salters’ legendary Aspen dinner parties.
Other favorites from the team at Explore include Sally Barlow-Perez’s A History of Aspen (“The funny thing is, she didn’t live here that long, but she got it,” Barbour says), Mary Eshbaugh Hayes’ anthology The Story of Aspen, and Paul Andersen’s Aspen: Body, Mind & Spirit: In Celebration of the Aspen Idea.
The store even stocks a number of self-published gems, including Sanctuaries in the Snow, the late David Wood’s guide to the makeshift shrines hidden in the forested ski areas of Aspen and Snowmass, and The Infamous vs. the Notorious, Susan McCoy’s vivid chronicle of the wild and radical period spanning the 1970s and 1980s in Aspen. These titles sit comfortably on Explore’s shelves next to damning and discomfiting academic books such as Jenny Stuber’s 2021 economic inequality study, Aspen and the American Dream.
A recent addition to the Aspen canon is bluegrass artist Sandy Munro’s 2022 memoir, Aspen Unstrung, which colorfully recounts the author’s experience building a home with his wife, Mary Lynn, as well as their decades running The Great Divide music shop on Monarch Street, a like-minded hub of local culture that operated just around the corner from Explore. “Our timing was more than fortuitous,” Munro writes. “We got to live in the best of times in the best of places, and we have nothing to complain about.”