“This is my passion project,” Jeff Martin said, smiling like a shy maître d’ as he held open the door to Magic City Books, a nonprofit bookstore on a gritty corner in Tulsa’s small but vibrant arts district.
Booksellers love to joke about the many unpaid aspects of their jobs, including after-hours reading. But Martin, 45, a lanky mash-up of Jimmy Stewart and the Man with the Yellow Hat, wasn’t exaggerating about the volunteer nature of his work or the zeal he brings to it.
Magic City — named for Tulsa’s oil boomtown heyday and not to be confused with the Atlanta strip club of the same name — is set up like a museum, with a board of directors and tax exempt status. Martin, a co-founder and the president of its board, has never earned a dime off the place, which hosts six reading groups and more than 100 author events per year, often with him as emcee.
For the past 17 years, Martin has also held a day job at the nearby Philbrook Museum where, as director of communications, he’s injected an air of levity into potentially stodgy environs. (“Stuffy Old Museum,” reads a sign pointing to the 72-room Italian Renaissance villa that houses a world class art collection.) But on March 6, in an email to bookstore staff, Martin announced that he has accepted a new position at the Seattle Art Museum. He’s moving this spring.
“It’s exciting to stand at an open door and try something new,” Martin said in an interview. “But I don’t think I’ll ever do anything quite as impactful as what I’ve done here.”
Martin’s hobby-turned-side hustle has helped transform his midsize city into a dynamic cultural hub.
“I think of Jeff as the literary king of Tulsa,” David Sedaris said in an interview. He has gotten to know Martin over the course of more than two dozen book tours and serves on Magic City’s advisory board.
In the past two decades, Martin has steadily, and without much fanfare — except in 2019, when he was named Tulsan of the Year by TulsaPeople magazine — established his hometown as a magnet for best-selling authors. When Matthew McConaughey announced on a five-city tour for “Poems & Prayers,” one of those stops was in Tulsa. When Rachel Maddow came to town to promote “Blowout,” she spoke to a crowd of more than 4,000. Other notable guests have included Ann Patchett, George Saunders, Margaret Atwood, Stacey Abrams and Tom Hanks. Martin booked them all.
The night before our interview, 600 readers flocked to Tulsa’s Congregation B’nai Emunah to hear Martin speak with Jon Meacham about his new book, “American Struggle.” It was a Sunday evening, a fractious day in the Middle East, but the audience was exuberant, sighing sympathetically when Martin announced in his opening remarks that his father had died a few weeks earlier and clapping when Meacham took a few measured jabs at President Trump.
There are two types of interviewers who appear alongside authors: those who share the spotlight — occasionally hogging it — and those who, over the course of an evening, turn up the brightness on their subject as if with a dimmer switch. Martin falls into the latter category, establishing himself as a presence but never stealing the show.
“You can tell pretty quickly who’s going to be an engaging and surprising interlocutor, and I could tell from the top he was going to be both those things,” Meacham said in an interview.
Sedaris put it more succinctly. “Jeff does something that’s sort of unheard-of lately,” he said. “He actually reads the book.”
During a visit in Magic City’s Algonquin Room, which triples as event space, meeting place and shelving for coffee table books, Martin admitted that he’d planned to leave Oklahoma decades ago. Like many a bored, bookish teenager in the 1990s, he dreamed of becoming the next Jack Kerouac or Quentin Tarantino. And he felt that his job at Blockbuster Video in suburban Bixby, Okla., was the perfect proving ground.
“On Friday nights, it was the center of culture,” Martin said. “All my friends would come in. I loved that. I was always more interested in Gertrude Stein than Ernest Hemingway, in the sense of how she gathered people.”
Martin spent a year in South Texas, where he planned to establish residency so he could attend the University of Texas. But, having “neither the grades nor the funds,” he boomeranged back to Tulsa. He got a job at Barnes & Noble, where he met his wife, Molly. By the time he was 23, he was the events coordinator — a proudly scrappy one.
“You weren’t supposed to ask authors to come. You had to go through the author relations department,” Martin said. “I didn’t do that. I would approach people, email them, ask them. I got very much into the ‘better to ask for forgiveness than permission’ mind-set.”
Miwa Messer, who was an events manager then and now oversees Barnes & Noble’s author events and social media teams and its Poured Over podcast, said in an interview, “Jeff always had a clear point of view. He understood the intersection of the literary arts and community..”
As his reputation as a gatherer of readers grew, Martin was recruited to work at Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kan. He visited and even toured some apartments. On the way home, though, driving through a thunderstorm, Martin had an epiphany: “I wanted to carve something out that was my own thing, and didn’t want to be on someone else’s coattails.”
He decided to stay in Tulsa.
In January 2009, Martin was laid off from Barnes & Noble and started organizing book events on his own. First he started Book Pub, a series of book club-style gatherings at McNellie’s, a local watering hole. (Its slogan: “Your Other Living Room.”) Then he founded Booksmart Tulsa, an event series, with the goal of hosting one author per month.
“I knew all the publishers, I knew all the publicists,” Martin said. “But once I was detached from the machine, I had to figure out, How am I going to get people here?”
He sought donations from hotels, restaurants and events spaces. Occasionally he ponied up gas money for an author, but for the first few years, he mostly relied on local business owners for help, figuring the worst he could hear was “no.”
Booksmart hosted around 200 authors in its first five years, including Elizabeth Gilbert, Anthony Bourdain and Jonathan Lethem. For Chuck Palahniuk’s event — an adult pajama party — Martin asked administrators at a soon-to-be-renovated library to allow graffiti artists to tag the walls; they agreed. He also brought in food trucks and a local band.
“When I started, I had this idea of the theory of double exposure,” Martin said. “Fifty percent of the reason I would bring someone to Tulsa would be to expose people who live here to their ideas, books and philosophies. But the other half was to expose that person to this place.”
He went on: “Peoples’ opinion of this city and this state was either a negative one or there just wasn’t one. It was kind of like, bring your low expectations. We can really show you something.”
Like his longtime friend Sterlin Harjo, co-creator of “Reservation Dogs” and creator of “The Lowdown,” which was filmed around Tulsa and features Magic City in its first episode, Martin saw the creative potential in his town.
“It felt like a place I could make an impact,” Harjo said in an interview. “Those other places” — he mentioned Austin, Texas; New York City; and Portland, Ore. — “didn’t need me, you know? They inspired me, but they didn’t need me.”
Martin said the same. He preferred to be where he was needed, and to share Tulsa whenever he had the chance. He has hiked local trails with Sedaris; dined with Tom Colicchio at Noche, a buzzy downtown restaurant known for its agave cocktails; played ping pong with Stephen King in the green room behind Cain’s Ballroom; and had so much fun at dinner with Jennifer Egan that they missed the minor league baseball game they’d planned to attend. (Go Drillers!)
“When people say, ‘You don’t get paid for it,’ I say, ‘But I have all these memories of time with these people,’” Martin said.
His driving tour with this lesser-known Egan (no relation) was informative and comprehensive, including a stop for a roast beef sandwich at Felini’s Cookies & Deli. At the Philbrook, Martin showed off an illuminated dance floor in a downstairs gallery and encouraged me to run my fingers through a cloud of silver cones in Marie Watt’s Heart in the Sky exhibit.
“Pretty cool, right?” he asked more than once.
In 2013, following the closure of Steve’s Sundry, then Tulsa’s last standing independent outlet for new books, Martin and his friend Cindy Hulsey founded the Tulsa Literary Coalition, which opened Magic City. For the first few years, they stored hardcovers and paperbacks in Hulsey’s garage and drove them to book events.
Then, in November 2017, after a yearlong construction delay, Martin and Hulsey opened their brick-and-mortar store around the corner from the Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan Centers and a few blocks from Antoinette Bakery & Cafe, which is co-owned by Molly Martin.
“The whole street was packed with people,” Jeff Martin said of opening day. He pulled up pictures on his phone of the ribbon cutting, the mayor and throngs of smiling readers.
Seven months later, Hulsey was diagnosed with brain cancer. She died in September 2018. The store maintains a shelf of her favorite books, including “The Hours” by Michael Cunningham.
“It was a gut punch,” Martin said, visibly moved as he looked at Hulsey’s picture.
He also spoke about the deaths of his father, his father-in-law and his mother-in-law over the past four years. Those losses made him and Molly want to be closer to her family in the Pacific Northwest.
Then the job in Seattle materialized, through a former colleague at the Philbrook.
“It went from a lark to a serious thing pretty quickly,” Martin said. “My main priority is the bookstore and wanting it to be strong and still have the solid footing that it’s on right now.”
Chalk it up to midlife wanderlust; blame it on a mural Martin drives by regularly, painted on the side of the Woody Guthrie Center, proclaiming, “This Land is Your Land.” Why not explore?
“We’ve lived a small little life,” Martin said. “We never had kids. We had a bakery and a bookstore. Those were kind of our kids.”
At the Seattle Art Museum, Martin will be the chief of creative strategy and storytelling. He plans to stay on as president of Magic City, which has become a model for other nonprofit bookstores across the country. He will return to Tulsa six to eight times a year, participating in programming and events.
Kelly Brown, Magic City’s manager, who has worked there from the beginning, said, “Jeff has always been this steady presence, the undercurrent of who we are and what we’re doing. That’s not going to change.”
This spring, Jeff and Molly Martin will leave Oklahoma behind, driving with their Goldendoodles, Franny and Annie, to West Seattle, where their new house is five minutes from the ocean and backs up to Fauntleroy Park. But Martin is glad he stayed in Tulsa for as long as he did.
“The place felt like a black hole when I was a teenager, and at some point, it became a blank canvas,” he said. “Tulsa will survive without me just fine. But it feels nice knowing I made a difference.”
Elisabeth Egan is a writer and editor at the Times Book Review. She has worked in the world of publishing for 30 years.
The post Meet the ‘Literary King of Tulsa’ (Before He Moves to Seattle) appeared first on New York Times.
