Morley Horder remembers the exact moment he decided to buy Eagle Harbor Book Co.

“I was lying on my back downstairs in the basement and a friend on the phone asked if I knew that it was for sale. Instantly I knew it was something I wanted to do,” he said, sipping a cup of coffee at Blackbird Bakery.

“It feels like a treasure to me,” he said. “That I’m the caretaker of it until the next person comes along.”

The bookstore, which has been a community hub for the last 40 years, consistently brings in talented authors, but this month in particular, a constellation of remarkable voices converges in a literary trine.

There are, perhaps, four people left on the island who have not heard that Barbara Kingsolver is speaking at Bainbridge High School Friday night. On her heels is the Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist for “The New York Times” and author of “The Worst Hard Time,” Timothy Egan. Within days of that, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman swoops in on the “left coast” arm of her blue-state tour.

All three authors, in uniquely different styles, use their voice and their platform to express ideas about public treasures.

Kingsolver’s “The Lacuna,” set in Mexico and the U.S., pivots on “the unspeakable breach—the lacuna—between truth and public presumption,” says her publicist’s blurb.

“Lacuna,” an English word, means a gap, an unfilled spot, missing pages in a manuscript, or even an extended silence. It’s what’s not there, but should be.

For the first time in the 12 years Horder has owned the bookstore, the possibility that it could be Bainbridge’s lacuna, struck him.

He was reluctant to even broach the subject, something that until a week ago seemed inconceivable. As any independent bookseller will tell you, sales figures follow a fairly predictable wave, then begin their fourth-quarter peak beginning in the second week of November. But this year, where there should have been the long-awaited spike in sales, there was a disturbing drop.

Suddenly, the thought occurred to him, what if – and thankfully, that’s as far as he got. The rest is simply unthinkable.

Besides, there are a lot of things to celebrate right now: he recently married his childhood sweetheart and then there’s the literary feat of bringing three heavy-hitters to the neighborhood sandlot.

The situation underscores a disturbing trend however. Just last week, Wal-Mart and Amazon engaged in a price war over the holiday season’s hardcover bestsellers.

“There’s not many arguments you can make to get someone to buy a book for $26.99 that they can get for $9.99,” Horder said.

Horder won’t make them, but the independent booksellers’ organization Indiebound does.

According to its Web site, www.indiebound.org, for every $100 spent at a local bookstore $68 of it stays in the community. The alternative, which for Bainbridge is to shop off island or online, means not one thin dime will be reinvested here. Not even the sales tax, which obviously the city could use.

Then there’s the fact that local businesses create jobs, help bond the community and donate to local charities, none of which you get from Amazon.com.

But more importantly, independent bookstores protect the diversity of the voices that get published, and therefore heard.

It is this last reason that strikes Amy Goodman as vitally important.

“Individual bookstores are the sanctuaries of independent voices,” she said on the phone.

She champions those without voice in her book “Breaking the Sound Barrier.” Her TV/radio news program on Democracy Now! that she co-anchors with Juan Gonzalez “challenges the corporate-owned airwaves,” she said. “The airwaves are public property, one of America’s public treasures.

“For true democracy to work, people need easy access to independent, diverse sources of news and information.”

Horder agrees.

“I feel so strongly about this,” he said. “It’s not only an important piece of the community, it’s the bedrock, the foundation of freedom.”

What’s needed to replace the homogenized media, Goodman said, is to “build our own media” and she thinks the independent bookstore, where the book group can meet, where new voices can be heard, even if they aren’t commercially successful, is vital to that end.

“They are a part of the new media landscape,” she said.

Kingsolver is a longtime advocate of independent bookstores as well.

In fact, when you visit Eagle Harbor Book Co. to buy your copy of “The Lacuna,” you might want to read the newspaper clipping from 1998 in which Kingsolver talks about how a local Tucson bookstore “hand sold” her first book, “The Bean Trees” before she had made a name for herself.

“The Bean Trees,” published in 1988, and many of Kingsolver’s books, feature disenfranchised characters who must struggle against social injustice.

Today, “The New York Times” bestselling author supports other writers with the bienniel Bellwether Prize for works of fiction that tackle themes of social justice. The award offers $25,000, donated by Kingsolver, and a writing contract.

With “The Lacuna” caught in the crossfire of the recent price war, Kingsolver was quoted in “The New York Times” last month.

“If this price war is another way of using volume discounts to put independent booksellers out of business, then every thoughtful reader is going to lose in the long run.”

Jane Bowman, Eagle Harbor Book Co.’s events coordinator who lobbied to get Kingsolver here, said it is only the loyal customers who shop locally that allow the bookstore to bring in big-name authors.

West Sound Reads, a consortium of independently owned bookstores in the Kitsap area, is the official host of the Kingsolver event. Goodman and Egan’s visits were both arranged by Eagle Harbor exclusively.

Egan, a former Pacific Northwest correspondent and now a columnist/blogger for “The New York Times,” will be reading from his new book, “The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America,” another book about saving things before they’re lost. And one that depicts activists and conservationists wrestling a public treasure from the hands of big business.

All three books are for sale at , along with the works of 200 local authors, including Ed Viesturs, Carol Cassella, Kathleen Alcalá, David Guterson, Mary Guterson, Brian Herbert, Michael Lisagor, Suzanne Selfors, Rebecca Wells and Susan Wiggs.

Bainbridge residents are indeed fortunate to have such a treasure right in our midst.

Treasure hunt

Barbara Kingsolver will read from “The Lacuna” at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 20 at the Bainbridge High School gymnasium, 9330 High School Road. Free and open to the public, sponsored by West Sound Reads.

All three books are available at Eagle Harbor Book Co. They can be bought at the store or ordered from the store online at www.eagleharborbooks.com,/a>. For more info, call Eagle Harbor Book Co. at 842-5332.