http://the millions.com/2011/10/bad-bookshops-an-appreciation.html
My thoughts after reading the article above:
It never occurred to me that there might be such a thing as a bad bookstore – the whole notion strikes me as something that a Baptist minister, who also hates dancing and cigarettes and cheap wine, might say. Or perhaps a Republican who misses Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater. Certainly no true reader would entertain the preposterous idea that a retail shop filled with books might be a bad thing. To be sure, some bookstores are better than others, but I can’t fathom a bad one.
I used libraries exclusively until I was a teenager, at which point, thanks first to the bus system in Pueblo, Colorado, and then to the incredible anarchic freedom called a driver’s license, I was able to make the rounds of the bookstores (and the public library) on my own. “Freedom’s just another word / for running after books…” I think that’s what Janice sang.
Not that the selection of bookstores in Pueblo was awe-inspiring. In the mall, the now-defunct Waldenbooks, as tiny as it was, was as good as it got. I hated the mall, but I made a weekly visit once I got a job (first at a print shop downtown, then at the Arby’s on East 4th Street) to Waldenbooks, buying novels and philosophy books and more novels. I bought John Gardner’s Grendel, then his October Light. Actually, now that I think of it, my mom bought October Light for me when I was in St. Mary Corwin Hospital recovering from the rite of passage known as the removal of my appendix. The nurses wanted me to get out of bed and walk around, so I would take the book and walk down to the waiting area, where I could read and smoke cigarettes in peace. The hospital chaplain visited me in the waiting room once; he disapproved of cigarettes and Gardner (“I haven’t read him, but I’ve heard he’s not exactly a model citizen.”). I finished my “Gardner period” at Waldenbooks by reading The Wreckage of Agathon (Gardner finished himself in a motorcycle accident in 1982). On Abriendo Avenue (not far from the library), there was a used bookstore (I can’t remember its name) that sold sci-fi and romance novels. The guy behind the counter, who always looked sticky, ignored me as I walked in, but scrutinized me with suspicious eyes when I walked out, especially if I didn’t buy anything.
That’s about it. There wasn’t a Barnes and Noble in the “good old days,” which is why, as far as I’m concerned, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. Pueblo really wasn’t a book town, and I remember identifying with Paul Simon’s “My Little Town” when it played on KDZA early in the morning as I drove to the college.
In desperate self-defense, I also made the rounds of the “book sections” in King Soopers, Safeway, and K-Mart (Walmart didn’t have a store in Pueblo then). Novels, trashy or otherwise, sidled up to massive tomes of self-help and spirituality, and bibles jostled with coloring books – all of this a celebration, perhaps, of the democracy of razor-thin margins. The novels were regularly marked down to my price range, so I was fond of the corporate buyers who so routinely guessed wrong, and I visited their failures often. I might note that I wasn’t the only bottom feeder: Mrs. Hatfield, my English teacher at South High School, also hit the grocery stores and discount racks at K-Mart.
I longed for things that I intuited from my reading, but had never experienced in this sparse book universe: every book from everywhere at my fingertips. I did discover Chaim Potok, R.L. Delderfied, and James Michener, and after a year or two of “townie” book shopping, the college bookstore batted its eyelashes at me and I found a new place to spend money that I didn’t have. Still, I was truly sad when I read that Waldenbooks was going out of business, and I’m uncertain how I feel about “every book from everywhere” in its incarnation as Amazon.com, even though I long ago surrendered my self-respect to my compulsion to buy books at 2:00 AM.
I’ve since been to bookstores in many places around the world. A shop in Shenzhen, China had few books in English, but it had Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler, which helped me to understand why ancient China had vanished from a vibrant industrial city. I bought a biography of James Joyce in Dublin, which I began reading in the park where the Easter Rising came to its tragic end. I’ve traipsed through rare book shops in London where every item was priced far beyond the limited means available to my lusting heart, and I visited Heffers Booksellers in Cambridge every other day for six years.
So, I don’t believe in bad bookstores – but I do believe in good ones. The best bookstore of all, in my experience, is Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon. It has an intoxicating mixture of new and (especially) used books. When I first visited Powell’s, my collection of books on Milton scholarship expanded into something larger than the Grinch’s heart when he had his revelation on that cold mountaintop. I can enter the first floor of Powell’s and spend my rent money, food budget, and car payment, and still have four floors left to explore.
That’s a good bookstore!
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