If you or any of your readers ever visit Omaha, I will gladly organize an expedition to Jackson Street Booksellers—it's huge, messy, and has just about everything (if you can find your way around in there)! Truly, I think they built the store over some kind of spatio-temporal anomaly where time flows much slower than outside; it is so easy to run through the hours browsing their selection.
Bookstore owner here! As someone who's "living the dream" of opening a bookstore, it's not all its cracked up to be... but we're trying to make it work, and it is often very fun and can be just as cozy as you might imagine. If you're ever in the central Ohio area, come visit my shop Griffeys' Book Emporium in Delaware, Ohio. :) I also recommend stopping by Paragraphs in Mount Vernon, relatively near us; such a lovely town and a lovely little bookstore.
My cousin's first "tell" that he is a sociopath came in response to a note of mine many years ago. He was online, I knew, and I wasn't, yet: medical "problems" ( euphemism alert ) of long duration had knocked me out of the workforce. In my note, I asked him to check out a bit of information for me. Instead of doing that, he wrote me a one page letter filled with hatred of such intensity that it read like Mein Kampf. I suppose he'd had some unexpected financial reverse in what I now understand to have been for him not a marriage but a successful fortune hunt.
( He lives down close to you, in Franklin, by the way. )
In his letter, he told me that if I wanted my question answered, I should go to the library. He spent the rest of the letter raving away against library systems, because they infringed upon his ( father - in - law's ) money in taxing the modest amount which they do. He hates libraries.
Well, of course he does. Libraries are filled with minds who have declared themselves in a myriad of ways in the books they've written. Why wouldn't a sociopath, who at best has no regard for others and more often hates them, not hate libraries?
In a less griefsome vein, it occurs to me that one thing which almost guarantees that a bookstore will fail is spaciousness and anything which contributes to or suggests spaciousness, such as good lighting. Good ceiling lighting is terrible, skylighting tricky at best. Lamplight is best.
An attractive bookstore will be cramped, though it should have a small salon with plush chairs in which potential customers can sit in comfort. Metal shelves are an abomination, always. At the same time, the book dealer should do his best to avoid a deliberately retro look. This takes fineness of taste, but why would you want to patronize a book dealer who didn't have it?
Bookstore shoppers are drawn to eccentricity. If I had a bookstore, I'd have a dog or two roaming the place, and maybe a very small automat, which would undercharge for its offerings. I'd have a section which not only stocked the world's best books about stage magic, but wares and implements which aspirants could buy to try to get started with. And I'd have a small section with stringed instruments, all of high quality, none for sale. It would be up to the customers if they wished to have a go at them, knowing, as musicians do, when they are definitely not going over.
Spent 9 years working at Kroch’s & Brentano’s main store in Chicago (now gone), and a lot of time browsing in shops like The Aspidistra (now gone), Hanley’s Book Shop (now gone), the Morse Avenue Bookshop (now gone). These days I live in a town without a bookshop and would long since have succumbed to withdrawal without Amazon’s Kindle store. There are a few shops in Joplin where I can usually count on finding something to my taste on the occasions I get there.
I do miss having bookshops close by.
But what I REALLY miss is the variety you used to find in the mass market racks.
When I started buying paperbacks in 7th and 8th grade, there were four places within a couple of blocks from my home in Chicago Lawn that had paperback racks. A Rexall pharmacy (now gone). A tobacco and cigar shop (now gone). A Walgreen’s (that particular store now gone). And Penner’s Drug Store (now gone). Farther away was the Cameo Bar & Grill (now gone), which had paperback racks as well. Penner’s was my main go-to place. Bought my first Heinleins and Asimovs and Bradburys there.
But on Penner’s mass market paperback racks in the mid-60s, I could also find: Nabokov, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anthony Powell, John Updike, Shirley Jackson, George Orwell, Philip Roth, Robert Ruark, John D. MacDonald, William Goldman, Shakespeare, Anthony Burgess, Henry James, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Aldous Huxley, Pierre Boulle, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Irwin Shaw, George Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham, John O’Hara, Salinger…
There were a lot more writers there – the ones I mentioned are just some of the ones I noticed during five or six years of living in a not particularly special Chicago neighborhood, and not in a bookshop but in a drug store.
These days to find an assortment like that in one place you have to go to an actual bookshop. The drug store or supermarket or WalMart paperback racks? Fuhgeddaboudit.
Hmm – a little off-topic. Sorry about that. Getting senile, you know. End of rant.
Take a trip to North Beach, while you’re there. I also recommend a visit to the nearby Goorin Brothers hat store. Get yourself a nice pork pie bowler. You never know when the attitude will strike for a good hat.
Favorite bookstore in an airport: Renaissance books in the Milwaukee airport. A truly fine used and out of print bookstore in or out of an airport.
Favorite bookstore in Knoxville, TN: any of John Coleman’s incarnations of his used and rare bookstores, The Book Eddy. Currently in an antique store on Chapman highway. And also in a couple of rooms in an old house up on Broadway (open only on Friday and Saturday).
Speaking of Faulkner: Square Books in Oxford, MS. Never pass up a chance, although one typically can’t get there from anywhere.
Favorite bookstore no longer in business: Captain’s Bookshelf in Asheville, NC. One of the finest rare bookstores in the country.
Oh!! I know the New Yorker says it’s a difficult time to open a bookstore, but I wonder how true that is.
I work at a used bookstore and it is hoppin’. So busy every day with people bringing in books to trade, and people buying books, that we can hardly catch our breath. Not gonna say where in order to guard my flimsy anonymity.
If your town needs a used bookstore, and IF you can find good/cheap retail space, and IF you have the resources of money and energy, now might be a good time. People are turning back to print. And a generation of book lovers is dying off, and their books need somewhere to go where they can get into new hands.
Goldberry Books in Concord, NC - right outside Charlotte. Great selection of new and used books in a fairly small space, including a delightfully curated children's room. Bonus points - attached to a fantastic coffee shop called Press & Porter.
I’m in the Dallas area. We have surprisingly few independent bookstores for a city our size. Interabang Books is my go to. There is also Wild Detectives, but I have not visited. I’m actually in a suburban county north that has zero independents, sadly!
Since you like petite stores you should check out Storyhouse Bookpub if you’re ever in Des Moines, IA.
My favorite independent bookstore of all is Book People in Austin, Brookline Booksmith and Beacon Hill Books in Boston, MA are close seconds.
Love this, thanks. Been to one or two of those New Orleans shops. ... Sundog is sublime (as is the record store upstairs, and of course Modica Market almost next door. Ah, Seaside. In case I don’t see ya: good afternoon, good evening, and good night.) Also: What in the wide world of Blazing Saddles references?! 🤣
The only Ferlenghetti books I’ve purchased have been from that store. There’s something very special to know that you’re reading a book in the same place that the Beats and Bob Dylan stood and sat, doing the same.
I actually work at one of my favorite independent bookstores, but it's very niche: classical education. It's name is, fittingly, Classical Education Books, and it's located in Abbotsford, British Columbia (about an hour + a bit's drive on the hwy from Vancouver). We cater to primarily classical schools and homeschoolers, but anyone with a taste for the classics would love the books we've sourced that are being republished after many decades of going out of print.
My other favorite local bookstore is a used + new bookstore called The Creative Bookworm. Excellent customer service, knowledgeable about authors, and always willing to trade or buy my books in a heartbeat, they are in Langley, British Columbia. Find their specifics here: https://thecreativebookworm.com/
Bookstores, new or used, and libraries are my go-to places in every city I visit. Some of my most peaceful moments have been spent in a cosy bookstore from Bath, England to Seattle. I now have my own digital community library platform - https://www.kindeeds.com/ - where you can give and get a book for free. Every book deserves a loving reader, try it!
If you or any of your readers ever visit Omaha, I will gladly organize an expedition to Jackson Street Booksellers—it's huge, messy, and has just about everything (if you can find your way around in there)! Truly, I think they built the store over some kind of spatio-temporal anomaly where time flows much slower than outside; it is so easy to run through the hours browsing their selection.
Bookstore owner here! As someone who's "living the dream" of opening a bookstore, it's not all its cracked up to be... but we're trying to make it work, and it is often very fun and can be just as cozy as you might imagine. If you're ever in the central Ohio area, come visit my shop Griffeys' Book Emporium in Delaware, Ohio. :) I also recommend stopping by Paragraphs in Mount Vernon, relatively near us; such a lovely town and a lovely little bookstore.
My cousin's first "tell" that he is a sociopath came in response to a note of mine many years ago. He was online, I knew, and I wasn't, yet: medical "problems" ( euphemism alert ) of long duration had knocked me out of the workforce. In my note, I asked him to check out a bit of information for me. Instead of doing that, he wrote me a one page letter filled with hatred of such intensity that it read like Mein Kampf. I suppose he'd had some unexpected financial reverse in what I now understand to have been for him not a marriage but a successful fortune hunt.
( He lives down close to you, in Franklin, by the way. )
In his letter, he told me that if I wanted my question answered, I should go to the library. He spent the rest of the letter raving away against library systems, because they infringed upon his ( father - in - law's ) money in taxing the modest amount which they do. He hates libraries.
Well, of course he does. Libraries are filled with minds who have declared themselves in a myriad of ways in the books they've written. Why wouldn't a sociopath, who at best has no regard for others and more often hates them, not hate libraries?
In a less griefsome vein, it occurs to me that one thing which almost guarantees that a bookstore will fail is spaciousness and anything which contributes to or suggests spaciousness, such as good lighting. Good ceiling lighting is terrible, skylighting tricky at best. Lamplight is best.
An attractive bookstore will be cramped, though it should have a small salon with plush chairs in which potential customers can sit in comfort. Metal shelves are an abomination, always. At the same time, the book dealer should do his best to avoid a deliberately retro look. This takes fineness of taste, but why would you want to patronize a book dealer who didn't have it?
Bookstore shoppers are drawn to eccentricity. If I had a bookstore, I'd have a dog or two roaming the place, and maybe a very small automat, which would undercharge for its offerings. I'd have a section which not only stocked the world's best books about stage magic, but wares and implements which aspirants could buy to try to get started with. And I'd have a small section with stringed instruments, all of high quality, none for sale. It would be up to the customers if they wished to have a go at them, knowing, as musicians do, when they are definitely not going over.
Spent 9 years working at Kroch’s & Brentano’s main store in Chicago (now gone), and a lot of time browsing in shops like The Aspidistra (now gone), Hanley’s Book Shop (now gone), the Morse Avenue Bookshop (now gone). These days I live in a town without a bookshop and would long since have succumbed to withdrawal without Amazon’s Kindle store. There are a few shops in Joplin where I can usually count on finding something to my taste on the occasions I get there.
I do miss having bookshops close by.
But what I REALLY miss is the variety you used to find in the mass market racks.
When I started buying paperbacks in 7th and 8th grade, there were four places within a couple of blocks from my home in Chicago Lawn that had paperback racks. A Rexall pharmacy (now gone). A tobacco and cigar shop (now gone). A Walgreen’s (that particular store now gone). And Penner’s Drug Store (now gone). Farther away was the Cameo Bar & Grill (now gone), which had paperback racks as well. Penner’s was my main go-to place. Bought my first Heinleins and Asimovs and Bradburys there.
But on Penner’s mass market paperback racks in the mid-60s, I could also find: Nabokov, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anthony Powell, John Updike, Shirley Jackson, George Orwell, Philip Roth, Robert Ruark, John D. MacDonald, William Goldman, Shakespeare, Anthony Burgess, Henry James, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Aldous Huxley, Pierre Boulle, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Irwin Shaw, George Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham, John O’Hara, Salinger…
There were a lot more writers there – the ones I mentioned are just some of the ones I noticed during five or six years of living in a not particularly special Chicago neighborhood, and not in a bookshop but in a drug store.
These days to find an assortment like that in one place you have to go to an actual bookshop. The drug store or supermarket or WalMart paperback racks? Fuhgeddaboudit.
Hmm – a little off-topic. Sorry about that. Getting senile, you know. End of rant.
Take a trip to North Beach, while you’re there. I also recommend a visit to the nearby Goorin Brothers hat store. Get yourself a nice pork pie bowler. You never know when the attitude will strike for a good hat.
Joel,
You speakin’ my language.
Favorite bookstore in an airport: Renaissance books in the Milwaukee airport. A truly fine used and out of print bookstore in or out of an airport.
Favorite bookstore in Knoxville, TN: any of John Coleman’s incarnations of his used and rare bookstores, The Book Eddy. Currently in an antique store on Chapman highway. And also in a couple of rooms in an old house up on Broadway (open only on Friday and Saturday).
Speaking of Faulkner: Square Books in Oxford, MS. Never pass up a chance, although one typically can’t get there from anywhere.
Favorite bookstore no longer in business: Captain’s Bookshelf in Asheville, NC. One of the finest rare bookstores in the country.
Finally, I’ll throw in this link to favorite bookstores from around the US. It is from the Front Porch Republic. It has a lot to cherish and debate in the list. And I enjoyed checking many of them out in my travels. https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2019/02/the-american-bookstore-a-list/
Thanks again, Joel, for such an engaging substack,
Brian
I'm sure you already know about them, but Eighth Day Books in Wichita is amazing!
Oh!! I know the New Yorker says it’s a difficult time to open a bookstore, but I wonder how true that is.
I work at a used bookstore and it is hoppin’. So busy every day with people bringing in books to trade, and people buying books, that we can hardly catch our breath. Not gonna say where in order to guard my flimsy anonymity.
If your town needs a used bookstore, and IF you can find good/cheap retail space, and IF you have the resources of money and energy, now might be a good time. People are turning back to print. And a generation of book lovers is dying off, and their books need somewhere to go where they can get into new hands.
Goldberry Books in Concord, NC - right outside Charlotte. Great selection of new and used books in a fairly small space, including a delightfully curated children's room. Bonus points - attached to a fantastic coffee shop called Press & Porter.
I’m in the Dallas area. We have surprisingly few independent bookstores for a city our size. Interabang Books is my go to. There is also Wild Detectives, but I have not visited. I’m actually in a suburban county north that has zero independents, sadly!
Since you like petite stores you should check out Storyhouse Bookpub if you’re ever in Des Moines, IA.
My favorite independent bookstore of all is Book People in Austin, Brookline Booksmith and Beacon Hill Books in Boston, MA are close seconds.
Love this, thanks. Been to one or two of those New Orleans shops. ... Sundog is sublime (as is the record store upstairs, and of course Modica Market almost next door. Ah, Seaside. In case I don’t see ya: good afternoon, good evening, and good night.) Also: What in the wide world of Blazing Saddles references?! 🤣
The only Ferlenghetti books I’ve purchased have been from that store. There’s something very special to know that you’re reading a book in the same place that the Beats and Bob Dylan stood and sat, doing the same.
City Lights in San Fracncisco and The Book Loft in Columbus, Ohio are two favorites.
I actually work at one of my favorite independent bookstores, but it's very niche: classical education. It's name is, fittingly, Classical Education Books, and it's located in Abbotsford, British Columbia (about an hour + a bit's drive on the hwy from Vancouver). We cater to primarily classical schools and homeschoolers, but anyone with a taste for the classics would love the books we've sourced that are being republished after many decades of going out of print.
You can find specifics on our website: https://classicaleducationbooks.ca/
My other favorite local bookstore is a used + new bookstore called The Creative Bookworm. Excellent customer service, knowledgeable about authors, and always willing to trade or buy my books in a heartbeat, they are in Langley, British Columbia. Find their specifics here: https://thecreativebookworm.com/
Bookstores, new or used, and libraries are my go-to places in every city I visit. Some of my most peaceful moments have been spent in a cosy bookstore from Bath, England to Seattle. I now have my own digital community library platform - https://www.kindeeds.com/ - where you can give and get a book for free. Every book deserves a loving reader, try it!
Thanks for a wonderful walk down memory lane.
New Orleans does get cold! Missing beignets, but hanging on by enjoying king cake, one bite at a time.