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.
Ah yes, I've made the trip to Bluestem many a time. Neve popped into Francie and Finch, though; I will most certainly have to visit that one next time I'm in Lincoln—thanks for the tip!
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.
Aria, you brave soul! I’m delighted to hear about your shop. I sometimes get up to Cleveland but otherwise have left most of Ohio unexplored. Between your shop and Paragraphs, you’re giving me reason to change that!
Ohio has this reputation of being "the most boring state" or something like that, but honestly it has a magic all its own, and I love it here. Come check it out, you might be surprised how cool Ohio is! Also I've never been up to Cleveland myself, but I highly recommend Cincinnati; one of my favorite cities, and there are TONS of bookstores there as well.
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.
You’re right about eccentricity. The best stores are the ones with the idiosyncratic selection that veers a little off the path. How else do you discover new and interesting stuff? The small shops have the capability of delivering on that promise more than some might think.
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.
Paperback racks are, alas, a thing of the past. As you point out, you can still find those small displays in grocery and drugstores, or spinners in other specialty retail, but it’s not the same. The whole ecosystem for book merchandizing and purchase has radically changed—mostly shifting online.
I dimly recall seeing television ads for the paperback release of William Goldman's Marathon Man -- not the movie, the paperback well before the movie was made. Been a long time since I've seen a commercial for a book. Maybe a couple of Stephen Kings. Cut the cable quite a while back so don't know if the publishers bother trying to advertise that way now for any books at all.
The shrinkage of mass market display space means that fewer books will be displayed outside bookstores for anyone to see. Here I was, a 13-year-old bookworm, and while I was using allowances and scrounged up pop bottle deposit money to buy paperback science fiction, I knew names like Malamud, Singer, Powell, Shaw, and Nabokov because of the neighborhood racks. Names of writers not currently on those racks may not be noticed by casual readers unless they're assigned for classes (iffy), and as libraries weed more older books to make room for multiple copies of current titles and computer stations, it's easier for them to be missed altogether. Bookstore scroungers will always find a lot of good stuff, new and old, but the casual mass-market rack browser is probably missing out.
My dad liked visiting the used bookstores up near Diversey Avenue; I think there were at least two on Clybourn and then Powell's on Lincoln. Then there was also Borders, and Crown books in that stretch too. (Barnes & Noble was on Diversey over there as well, but I don't ever remember going there as a kid.) If I remember correctly, for awhile there at least, there was a children's bookstore which was on two levels, the ground floor and basement. They had a pet rabbit in the basement and sometimes let it loose, and there were books whose covers had suffered for it! It wasn't always fun, especially when my sister and I were little, but it's sad to think that (as far as I know) every single one of those bookstores is gone. I do also remember the occasional trip to Krochs & Brentanos, but we usually didn't venture downtown - parking was hard enough in Lincoln Park!. I think the last time I was there was in early September 1995; I think they must have announced their closing within weeks of that visit.
Late '95 sounds about right, and they'd been having problems for quite a while before that. I left Chicago late '85. Pretty much all the places I liked to go are long gone (restaurants and theaters too). There are others up there now, but I don't think as many and not in areas that I'd have occasion to visit when I'm in town. There are some nice used bookshops in Joplin (The Book Guy, Always Buying Books, and Changing Hands) where I can usually find something, but they're nowhere near what the Aspidistra (north 26th on Clark) was. But then, I'm not buying as much in hard copy as I used to.
Wikipedia says July of '95, but I could have sworn that I still saw the flagship store open doing some book shopping (and goofing off) with friends round about the first week of September. Whether I'm misremembering and it was already closed, or if they had tried to keep the flagship store open a little longer, I just don't remember anymore.
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.
Those sound awesome! I have a hard time imagining a used bookstore in an airport, but my view of the world just improved a few notches upon hearing the news. Here’s hoping I get there some day!
It's about 15 min from where I live! Unfortunately(?), I don't make it out to the airport just to shop there. *L* If you're ever coming through, give me a holler! The funny thing is, the airport location was always kept quite neat and orderly, as opposed to their former downtown location. From what I've heard, they've opened a second location in a mall west of Milwaukee in the last year or so.
Renaissance Books is legendary - not only are they one of the only used bookstores in the country, their old flagship store in downtown Milwaukee probably had more than a million books in it. I was there in 2010 or 2011 and I was in awe not just from the sheer number of books but the fact that the building hadn't been condemned yet... It was an amazing but also scary place!
I always wanted to visit the one in downtown. And I heard the stories of snow drifiting in through cracked windows, having to turn on the lights. sounds like the experience!
The bookstore was humongous - two 3-story buildings next to each other where it seemed they had just knocked out a couple of walls to combine the two. The floors were uneven, the roof obviously leaked, and the one side had these huge windows that looked over the river - I didn't want to get anywhere near them because it looked so precarious. The lower level had bookcases that were probably 9 feet tall, absolutely packed, and upstairs, just mazes of shelves and stacks and boxes of books like you couldn't imagine. And two or three little passages to get to the checkout counters. As amazing as being there was, I've never been in a place where I've wondered why the building hadn't been condemned yet, and seeing the "lanes" to get out, I was just shaking my head thinking, "If there's a fire, no one's getting out of here alive." The city of Milwaukee did condemn the places in 2012, iirc, and the buildings were demolished in 2014 or so. There was an effort to rescue some of the books, but thousands upon thousands were just trashed. However, in going through the books, they did find a couple of historically significant ones.
A couple of videos - I didn't find anything from when they were still open, but this first one here is probably 2-3 years after they were closed, and you can see that there's still a tremendous number of books sitting there. When the store was open, just about all those spaces were filled with books. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiqNzszK9cI
Yes, but I’ve never visited. I hope to remedy that some day. Closest I’ve been is to a conference or two where they ran the book tables. Those were the most impressive conference book tables I’d ever seen.
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?! 🤣
Yes, Phil, all 3 places you referenced are amazing. I live less than 45 minutes from all 3 and no matter what time of the year I visit they are always busy. There is also The Hidden Lantern bookstore in Rosemary Beach.
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.
That’s what I’m talking about!
oh my goodness, I'm from Lincoln (not currently living in NE) but I'm sad I've missed out on this one - I don't recall ever finding/being in this one.
FWIW - Francie & Finch is my favorite Lincoln bookstore, along with Bluestem Books and A Novel Idea for my two favorite used ones (all 3 downtown).
Ah yes, I've made the trip to Bluestem many a time. Neve popped into Francie and Finch, though; I will most certainly have to visit that one next time I'm in Lincoln—thanks for the tip!
Excellent!
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.
Aria, you brave soul! I’m delighted to hear about your shop. I sometimes get up to Cleveland but otherwise have left most of Ohio unexplored. Between your shop and Paragraphs, you’re giving me reason to change that!
Ohio has this reputation of being "the most boring state" or something like that, but honestly it has a magic all its own, and I love it here. Come check it out, you might be surprised how cool Ohio is! Also I've never been up to Cleveland myself, but I highly recommend Cincinnati; one of my favorite cities, and there are TONS of bookstores there as well.
I’ve driven through Cincinnati plenty and even stayed overnight once but haven’t explored it, sadly.
Well if you ever get the opportunity to explore, know it comes with my recommendation (for whatever that's worth 😂 )
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.
You’re right about eccentricity. The best stores are the ones with the idiosyncratic selection that veers a little off the path. How else do you discover new and interesting stuff? The small shops have the capability of delivering on that promise more than some might think.
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.
Paperback racks are, alas, a thing of the past. As you point out, you can still find those small displays in grocery and drugstores, or spinners in other specialty retail, but it’s not the same. The whole ecosystem for book merchandizing and purchase has radically changed—mostly shifting online.
I dimly recall seeing television ads for the paperback release of William Goldman's Marathon Man -- not the movie, the paperback well before the movie was made. Been a long time since I've seen a commercial for a book. Maybe a couple of Stephen Kings. Cut the cable quite a while back so don't know if the publishers bother trying to advertise that way now for any books at all.
The shrinkage of mass market display space means that fewer books will be displayed outside bookstores for anyone to see. Here I was, a 13-year-old bookworm, and while I was using allowances and scrounged up pop bottle deposit money to buy paperback science fiction, I knew names like Malamud, Singer, Powell, Shaw, and Nabokov because of the neighborhood racks. Names of writers not currently on those racks may not be noticed by casual readers unless they're assigned for classes (iffy), and as libraries weed more older books to make room for multiple copies of current titles and computer stations, it's easier for them to be missed altogether. Bookstore scroungers will always find a lot of good stuff, new and old, but the casual mass-market rack browser is probably missing out.
My dad liked visiting the used bookstores up near Diversey Avenue; I think there were at least two on Clybourn and then Powell's on Lincoln. Then there was also Borders, and Crown books in that stretch too. (Barnes & Noble was on Diversey over there as well, but I don't ever remember going there as a kid.) If I remember correctly, for awhile there at least, there was a children's bookstore which was on two levels, the ground floor and basement. They had a pet rabbit in the basement and sometimes let it loose, and there were books whose covers had suffered for it! It wasn't always fun, especially when my sister and I were little, but it's sad to think that (as far as I know) every single one of those bookstores is gone. I do also remember the occasional trip to Krochs & Brentanos, but we usually didn't venture downtown - parking was hard enough in Lincoln Park!. I think the last time I was there was in early September 1995; I think they must have announced their closing within weeks of that visit.
Late '95 sounds about right, and they'd been having problems for quite a while before that. I left Chicago late '85. Pretty much all the places I liked to go are long gone (restaurants and theaters too). There are others up there now, but I don't think as many and not in areas that I'd have occasion to visit when I'm in town. There are some nice used bookshops in Joplin (The Book Guy, Always Buying Books, and Changing Hands) where I can usually find something, but they're nowhere near what the Aspidistra (north 26th on Clark) was. But then, I'm not buying as much in hard copy as I used to.
Wikipedia says July of '95, but I could have sworn that I still saw the flagship store open doing some book shopping (and goofing off) with friends round about the first week of September. Whether I'm misremembering and it was already closed, or if they had tried to keep the flagship store open a little longer, I just don't remember anymore.
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.
Lester Young’s ears are perking up from the Beyond.
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
Those sound awesome! I have a hard time imagining a used bookstore in an airport, but my view of the world just improved a few notches upon hearing the news. Here’s hoping I get there some day!
It's about 15 min from where I live! Unfortunately(?), I don't make it out to the airport just to shop there. *L* If you're ever coming through, give me a holler! The funny thing is, the airport location was always kept quite neat and orderly, as opposed to their former downtown location. From what I've heard, they've opened a second location in a mall west of Milwaukee in the last year or so.
Renaissance Books is legendary - not only are they one of the only used bookstores in the country, their old flagship store in downtown Milwaukee probably had more than a million books in it. I was there in 2010 or 2011 and I was in awe not just from the sheer number of books but the fact that the building hadn't been condemned yet... It was an amazing but also scary place!
I always wanted to visit the one in downtown. And I heard the stories of snow drifiting in through cracked windows, having to turn on the lights. sounds like the experience!
The bookstore was humongous - two 3-story buildings next to each other where it seemed they had just knocked out a couple of walls to combine the two. The floors were uneven, the roof obviously leaked, and the one side had these huge windows that looked over the river - I didn't want to get anywhere near them because it looked so precarious. The lower level had bookcases that were probably 9 feet tall, absolutely packed, and upstairs, just mazes of shelves and stacks and boxes of books like you couldn't imagine. And two or three little passages to get to the checkout counters. As amazing as being there was, I've never been in a place where I've wondered why the building hadn't been condemned yet, and seeing the "lanes" to get out, I was just shaking my head thinking, "If there's a fire, no one's getting out of here alive." The city of Milwaukee did condemn the places in 2012, iirc, and the buildings were demolished in 2014 or so. There was an effort to rescue some of the books, but thousands upon thousands were just trashed. However, in going through the books, they did find a couple of historically significant ones.
What a crazy story!
Whoa, what an experience. Thanks for sharing.
A couple of videos - I didn't find anything from when they were still open, but this first one here is probably 2-3 years after they were closed, and you can see that there's still a tremendous number of books sitting there. When the store was open, just about all those spaces were filled with books. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiqNzszK9cI
The second video here is about a couple of the noteworthy books found in the trash: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8MTTJqeXk8
Truly fascinating, thanks for sharing.
I'm sure you already know about them, but Eighth Day Books in Wichita is amazing!
Yes, but I’ve never visited. I hope to remedy that some day. Closest I’ve been is to a conference or two where they ran the book tables. Those were the most impressive conference book tables I’d ever seen.
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.
I bet you’re right retail. With commercial real estate up in the air post-Covid there are probably all sorts of opportunities.
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.
Thanks!!
I’m hoping to visit some day!
There are few things better than a great bookshop attached to a coffee shop. It’s the platonic ideal of both. They complete each other.
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.
Thanks for the recommendations!
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?! 🤣
“You can’t get any further away before you start coming back.”
Fiji! We’re moving to Fiji!
Yes, Phil, all 3 places you referenced are amazing. I live less than 45 minutes from all 3 and no matter what time of the year I visit they are always busy. There is also The Hidden Lantern bookstore in Rosemary Beach.
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’ve never actually been but need to. I think I’ve got a San Francisco trip coming. I’m noodling on an itinerary now.
City Lights in San Fracncisco and The Book Loft in Columbus, Ohio are two favorites.
City Lights was Lawrence Ferlinghetti‘s store! He founded it in the 1950s, as part of the beat movement.
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/
Those sound great!
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.
How wonderful. Thanks for sharing!
New Orleans does get cold! Missing beignets, but hanging on by enjoying king cake, one bite at a time.
The only other time I’d been it was blazing hot. I expected pretty mild temps, but it was freezing!