When I was permitted, starting at age eleven, to ride the CTS bus into downtown Cleveland and spend the day as I wished, with money earned from a paper route and an erratically dispensed allowance, it was always a bookish outing. The bus let me off on Public Square near Schroeder’s, which sold books though its bigger draw was the largest selection of magazines and newspapers in the city. It closed after seventy-one years in 1979 and was replaced in the eighties by the 45-story BP Tower.
On to the main Cleveland Public Library on Superior Avenue,
home to the largest collection of chess books in the world. (As an obsession, chess
would soon disappear with the arrival of puberty.) Then south to Prospect
Avenue and Kay’s Books, where a few years later I would work as a clerk. That
strip of Prospect had a raffish allure for a white kid from the suburbs. Next
door was the Domino Lounge. Down the block was the Savoy. June Bug had a shoeshine stand across the street.
East again to Publix Books on Prospect and later on Huron. The
owners, Anne and Robert Levine, were always gracious, unlike Rachel Kowan, my
future boss at Kay’s. I haven’t mentioned the department stores – Higbee’s,
Halle’s, the May Co. – which also had book departments. These downtown visits, limited
only by the amount of cash in my pocket, were my real education, supplemented
later by almost twenty-five years as a newspaper reporter. Anyone can be an
autodidact. Only snobbery or laziness get in the way.
Laments for bookshops in the digital age are a recognized
genre, variously whiny or elegiac. Joseph Epstein makes his contribution to the latter category with
“The
Old Curiosity Bookshop” in the November issue of Commentary:
“Acquiring a book online is a transaction. Buying one in a
bookshop, a serious bookshop, is an experience. A big difference—and one, I
fervently believe, that favors the bookshop.”
I’m not stiff-necked enough to disdain Amazon, Alibris and Abe
Books. What they have going for them is convenience. What they’re missing is
the physical bookshop’s principal virtue, providing a setting for serendipity.
I usually carry a book list with me, whether mental or scrawled, when I visit a
bookstore, but it’s never binding. When I find an unexpected volume by chance on
the shelves, the sensation is like observing a rare or exotic bird in the
woods. Hunters likely know the feeling. Epstein closes his essay like this:
“Edward Shils noted that there are four chief means of
education: that available in the classroom, that in serious magazines and
newspapers, that in the conversation of intelligent friends, and that to be
found in new and used bookshops. Bookshops, serious bookshops, have for me been
such a means, a superior graduate school, one I had hoped all my days to
attend. Now, alas, I am not so sure.”
9 comments:
as a child growing up in the 90's, I learned so much from randomly found books in used bookstores and thrift shops and in the great libraries of my childhood. One of the more interesting things I learned is how fickle is man, so many books by experts that I saw that predicated many things that never happened, things like mass starvation or others global catastrophe, or books about the robust soviet economy or the happiness of the Chinese under mao , or bestsellers that nobody would touch today,
There was no feeling like finding a book that you had been searching for for years on an out of the way shelf in an out of the way bookstore. That particular pleasure is gone now that you can instantly find anything you want. There's an upside to the way things are now, but I can't help missing the pleasures of the hunt.
We have similar memories of journeys to downtown Cleveland, although mysterious trips were from the east suburbs rather than the west. Among the attractions on Prospect Avenue were the army surplus stores, along with the record store where you could pull an LP off the rack and take it to a listening booth for a preview (a privilege my friends and I abused to the point of getting kicked out). Aside from the bookstores, burlesque theater, joke shops, etc., no trip downtown was complete without a pause to gape at the magnificent art deco mural in the main waiting room of the Terminal Tower.
I’m astonished at the idea, reported in Epstein’s essay, that the current iteration of the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago is in any fashion a friendly place to browse. I attended U of C back in the late 60s, and bought a share in SCB because it was such a great place to hunt books. (My other favorite was Powell’s - still there, still great.) The new SBC strikes me as having been designed by Mies van Der Rohe - stark, unfriendly, anti-human. (I had the misfortune to work for a couple of decades in the Chicago federal buildings he designed.)
I did, in fact, find a book to buy, but it was by dint of one of my stratagems, where I go to the section selling books to the students for classes, thereby getting a selection of books some prof has made for his course. Found one on manga art, and bought Showa b1926-1939, by Shigeru Mizuki.
And then I left, feeling repelled by the place.
Fortunately, back on 57th Street, there’s an affiliated bookstore which is much more browser friendly. The kind of place where you hit these nodes of good books, and sit down with a stack of them trying to pare them down to a less unreasonable number.
Bookstores, new & used, are disappearing here in Chicago. There’s one good bookstore for new books near me which seems to be doing well. I make it a point to buy a new book (or two) (or three) each month, whether I need to or not. But it’s small. Lost a few good used book stores near me in the last few years. There are still some left, but they also seem to be small & I have to drive or take the bus to get to them. (No sane person rides the L these crime-ridden days.) I’m sometimes reduced to stumbling on books in resale shops. It seems to me that the best resale shops for discovering books are ones where there’s a gay or Jewish population in the neighborhood.
The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles is a great bookstore, and every time I visit I wind up leaving with a full box of finds. It's fifty miles away from where I live, though, so I only get down there a couple of times a year.
On finding books: last December, I was in a used bookshop in North Hollywood, where I found volumes 4, 5, and 6 of the letters of Henry Adams. I groused about why, when people sell or give books to bookshops, they can't give them full sets. But, I bought those volumes and hoped I'd find the first 3. Now, 10 months later, I was in another favorite bookshop in Orange (40 miles from North Hollywood), where I just happened to look up at a shelf as I was walking down an isle and, low and behold, there they were - volumes 1, 2, and 3 (and not the others!). Naturally, I snapped them up.
That's easily the weirdest way I've ever acquired a set of books!
For Thomas Parker: I've only been there once, and the parking situation is. . .not good. You're right, though. It's a wonderful place. I just hope the name is not prophetic!
Richard, you're right about the parking. I usually wind up parking in a pay lot blocks away, which isn't such a big deal - until I leave with a heavy box of books that I have to lug all the way back to the car!
Mr. Kurp & others, it is a pleasure to read your accounts of bookstore prowls. I have known that pleasure well in past years. Now my wife and I live happily in rural North Dakota, so that the last time I was in a bookstore was while on an out of state trip in 2017.
The result is that I *dream* about bookstores more often than I visit them. It quickly becomes tedious to read other people's accounts of their dreams; nevertheless herewith a couple of mine.
First, the most recent, from 18 Oct. 2023. I dreamed I was with several (unspecified) friends who were driving through a rundown part of a city (maybe felt to be Racine?). I asked them to stop so I could take a picture with my iPad of a tall, long, rundown brick-walled building about which I was excited because I had dreamed of it – and on waking I thought I *had* dreamed of it. It’s on a sloping street. But I couldn’t get my iPad to work properly. Perhaps someone helped me. Then I was inside the similar building that had been behind me as I looked down the street at the remembered (abandoned?) building.
I saw a worn copy of an oversize paperback called Tales to Be Told at Night – edited by Basil Davenport, no doubt. After I went back outside, I realized that I had not been in simply a shabby private residence with old books but a used book store. I talked with a young man who worked there through a window in the side of the building. I could see inside shelves of books including the Pinnacle paperback of Vol. 2 of Arthur Machen’s stories. That was published about 50 years ago.
After waking I thought about the dream and that, for a certain personality type, if one saw in the yellow pages of a phone directory that a store was called Tenement Used Books, this would be an attraction.
26 Jan. 2016: I go into a bookstore and there is a shelf of used old-style Penguin Classics (mostly black covers) – I think one was called Early Medieval Love Letters, and there are Classical works. I’m accumulating a stack of these interesting books, perhaps half a dozen, to buy. I’m wondering about the prices but have hopes that they might be only 50c each (?). A young man is going to buy a paperback of Portnoy’s Complaint (I have never read it or any of P. Roth’s book, btw). I think textbooks might also have been on sale.
It's interesting to me when, on waking, I can remember the titles of books observed in the dream, perhaps especially if they are plausible, but nonexistent, books -- Tales to Be Told at Night, Early Medieval Love Letters.
I look forward to my next oneirohodic bookstore experience.
Dale Nelson
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