Southern Home and Book

Man oh man, do Julie and I ever want to be Richard and Lisa Howorth, owners of Square Books in Oxford, Miss., and hosts extraordinaire. Excerpt:

As the Howorths' 27-year-old daughter, Claire, explained it, her parents "basically run a B & B for writers," although there's no cost and the entertainment tends to be livelier than a traditional innkeeper might provide. Take, for instance, the time Ms. Howorth took the British novelist Graham Swift on a road trip through the Delta. Or the many nights when the couple piled into their car and drove a writer out to a juke joint in Chulahoma, Miss., owned by the bluesman Junior Kimbrough, who died in 1998. "It's 30 miles away," she said, "but what's 30 miles when you have a car and a bottle of bourbon?"

For authors engaged in the often dispiriting ritual known as the book tour, rolling into Oxford is a blessed respite.

"When you go to a bookstore, you think of it as a lonely outpost, but this is the opposite of a lonely outpost," said Mr. Blount, whose affection for the Howorths and their store is such that in the author photo for his most recent book, "Alphabet Juice," he's wearing a Square Books ball cap.

Gary Fisketjon, an editor at Knopf, has sent many writers to Oxford and himself stayed with the Howorths. "I love their house -- it's amazing how many people you can wad in that place," he said. Asked to describe a typical evening, Mr. Fisketjon said: "It's food, it's music, it's plenty of whiskey. They are people who know how to have a good time."

More:

If there were a publication called Southern Home and Book, the Howorth place would be the editorial template. There's a big wrap-around porch typical of antebellum manors, and the downstairs hall is given over to floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The décor exhibits the eccentricity and faded gentility Northerners associate with Southerners; in the parlor, which Ms. Howorth calls the "critter room" because of animal-related objects like an armadillo basket and a stuffed bobcat, stands a wobbly-sounding piano, topped by a toy talking monkey.

Here's a slideshow of their place.

The South. Books. A comfy, funkety-funk house full of food, music and people. What more could anyone possibly want? No kidding, if I won the lottery, I would do exactly what they're doing. That's my dream lifestyle. I'm curious, readers: if the Lotto Angel came to you and said you could win the jackpot, but you had to first say what kind of lifestyle you'd use it for, what would you say? I'm not asking you to say which charities would benefit from your largesse. I'm asking how you'd use the money to create a new lifestyle for yourself. I'd basically turn my life into a cover story for Southern Home and Book. I'd basically found Southern Home and Book magazine, and publish it out of the backshop of my sprawling, gumbo-scented house -- the one next to my bookstore. Which never has to make money, so I can run it like I wanna.