In Praise of Books and Independence

When I was just out of college and still living at home trying to save my money for the big move to NYC, I used to travel to the Big A for daytrips.  Sometimes I would drive, sometimes I would take the train. I would do many, many things - sight see, shop, go to great restaurants - but I always ended my trip with a visit to the Scribner's & Brothers Bookshop on Fifth Avenue. This was the bookstore for the publisher who famously published Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Wolfe in the 1920s, among many others. I loved the fact that I was walking the floor and shopping from shelves where these writers had been. I never left the store without a bag of books. Part of the joy was getting titles I didn't often see in my own hometown but part of it was definitely shopping in Scribners. I still have one of their old paper shopping bags, reluctant to part with this relic of my passion. I love books.

If there is one thing I have never been able to deny myself it is the purchase of a book. It doesn't matter where I buy it - in a store, at a garage sale, on the street as it lays on some homeless guy's carpet - if the book interests me (and so many do) I will plunk down the change for that object. I can often remember where I purchased a particular book, as if the time and place were included in the reading. My edition of John Richardson's Picasso biography, volume 1, I bought from a street vendor in front of the Fale's Library at NYU on 4th street. My first edition copies of We Love Glenda So Much and Change of Light by Julio Cortazar that I bought at Griffin's Rare and Used Books at 81st and Broadway in New York (is it still there? I hope so but don't think it is).  So often the book is tied to me to a time and a place, to smells and sounds, to the very fabric of my life's history.

Larry McMurtry has a memoir simply entitled books which deals with this passion. I haven't read it yet but plan to. I saw it in my favorite bookstore in Washington, DC - Bridge Street Books. This tiny but amazing bookstore is a gem for bibliophiles. The selection of titles is astonishing and makes me feel as if the buyers for this store had somehow found their way into the hardwire of my brain and found the titles that would make me browse for hours, lost in the joy, desire and temptation to buy every title.  I have never walked in that I didn't buy a book. I could easily buy three or four. Recently I came out with Miyazawa Kenji: Selections, a book from the Poets for the Millennium series, Snow Part by Paul Celan, and The Chieko Poems by Takamura Kotaro.  If you get the chance stop by this shop located so nicely on M street right next to the bridge as you enter Georgetown.  Click the link on the store name to see their website. I've also included their blog on my bloglist.

For myself I have always found bookstores to be the cathedrals of my soul.  I enter them with the same reverence one usually leaves for the church. Nothing offends me more than a bookstore that hasn't made of its space a place that acknowledges the importance of books and gives a sense of worship about books. Right around the corner from Bridge Street Books is a used bookstore that has always had this feel - Bartelby's Books. Bartelby's current location is nice but I loved the location they had on M street several years earlier, when they were above the hair salon. I remember seeing a first edition of Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch that I still wish I had bought at the time (drat!).  Their current location is still quite lovely and the place continues to have that great feeling of people who love books. Bartelby's was once used in an episode of The West Wing, the Christmas episode where Jed Bartlett goes bookshopping. 

Another great place is Idle Time Books on 18th Street in Adams Morgan. A very nice selection of used books on two floors. The place is comfortable and makes you feel like sitting down, on the stairs or in one of  the many chairs located on either floor, to read for hours. 


When I lived in New York City there were many wonderful shops - Coliseum Books (this great store closed in 2007, so sad), Books & Co., Burlington Books, Endicott Books, Scribners Bookstore, Shakespeare and Co., The Gotham Book Mart, the Strand, Astor Place Books, St. Mark's Bookshop, Spring Street Books and so many used places. So few of them are left - I think only St. Mark's, Shakespeare, the Strand and Gotham - that NY can seem like a ghost-town for me.  There are, of course, the Borders and the Barnes and Nobles. But honestly, these places are without soul, the books are put on the shelves like so much canned goods, the employees hardly seem to ever look beyond the title.

If you are ever near West Chester, Pennsylvania, on route 100, there is the most unique bookstore of all. Baldwin's BookBarn has been selling books since 1946 when the owners moved their books and collectibles business into the 1822 barn. It is huge and each of the five floors are filled with books. They specialize in American History but everything, and I do mean everything can be found there. It is very easy to walk into the store at 10 in the morning and not leave until they close at 6.  It is definitely worth a road trip. Use whatever excuse you need.


These are, of course, indpendent bookstores and in my mind that is really the only kind there is. The idea of homogenization of a place for books seems anathema to what books, and the stores that sell them, should be about - the challenge of the mind to think and see the world from many perspectives. There are many independent stores, as well, that I have not mentioned. These stores get more than their fair share of the indepenent bookseller spotlight. I wanted to talk about smaller, rarer gems.