The Long View

“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?” Henry Ward Beecher famously asked (and reading Debby Applegate’s recent bio of the nineteenth-century celebrity preacher, The Most Famous Man in America, you learn that he knew something about the weakness of human nature).

My name is Tom, and I am a bookaholic.

“Hello, Tom.”

I came to acknowledge that I am powerless over books, bookstores, and discount book catalogs. (You can find my full tell-all, in PDF and podcast versions of a talk that I gave to a group of librarians, entitled “Confessions of a Promiscuous Reader,” at http://www.tncc.edu/rescuingreading .)

Beth J. Harpaz (Associated Press) has done us a service in a recent newspaper article, “Top Bookstores Lure Literate Tourists,” in which she features several bibliomane pilgrimage sites:

• Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables, FL
• City Lights Books, 261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco, CA (I’ve made this pilgrimage, for its heritage, its publishing arm, and its energy today.)
• Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St., Seattle, WA
• Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave, NW, Washington, DC (If you watch CSPAN’s BookTV you’ve been there. It has a broader selection than you might expect from its name. I bought a nice set of copper book darts there.)
• Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside, Portland, OR (I was introduced to Powell’s while attending the International Medieval Studies Congress at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, several years ago, and have frequently “visited” on line.)
• Prairie Lights, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA
• Tattered Cover Book Store, 1628 16th St. Denver, CO
• That Bookstore in Blytheville, 316 W. Main, Blytheville, AR
• The Strand, 12th and Broadway, Manhattan (A New York institution as only New York has institutions: big, dirty, jumbled, quirky. The place where remaindered books go to die.)

Let me add to Harpaz’s list:

• Lambda Rising Books, 1625 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC  (One of the longest enduring queer bookstore. I first shopped at its first location in the 1970s [around the corner in the first floor of a brownstone] when it was virtually indistinguishable from a hippie head shop.)
• The Oscar Wilde Bookshop, 15 Christopher St., Manhattan (A landmark [lays to claim to be the oldest queer bookstore] and quaint; a jewel box of a store.)
• Second Story Books, 2000 P St., NW, Washington, DC (Verlyn Flieger first brought me to Second Story Books in the early 1970s when it was farther uptown on Connecticut Ave. and literally on the second story [above a deli where we'd lunch and pore over the books we'd bought].)
• Prince Books, 109 E. Main St., Norfolk, VA (Back when our burg was an inner-city wasteland, this store was a brave urban settler.)
• Bibliophile Bookshop, 251 W. Bute St., Norfolk, VA (Started as Bibliopath by H.L. and Linda Wilson, now proprietors of Bibliobarn in South Kortright, NY, this used bookstore has both slightly used, worn, exhausted, and rare books.)

Tell me about your favorites, past or present.