Tag Archives: bookstores

The Flexibility Factor: The Art of Browsing

I’m grateful – very grateful – to be well after an illness, but I have lost the ability to do “the crouch-and-spring” pose at bookshops. This combination of yoga and bad ballet, practiced by Frank Sinatra and Trevor Howard in the trenches in old war movies, is excellent for examining the books on the bottom shelves.

On a recent tour of bookshops, I rode my bike for the first time in a month. It was a challenge.  There was smashed glass on the bridge. I was too fatigued to carry the bike over the glass.  There is always glass on bridges. Why bridges?

But I did not get a flat tire, fortunately. I went to Barnes and Noble and the independent bookshops, where the display tables glittered with new books. I lowered myself slowly to the floor to squint at the titles on the bottom shelves. There was no question of dignity. There was no squatting like a frog. I rose slowly, trying not to lean on the bookcase.

And I was too fatigued to hang out and buy a drink at the cafe. This damned virus…

But I found some excellent books. 

Here’s what I’ve been reading.

Cesar Aira’s The Famous Magician, reissued by New Directions in the ND Storybook series, is a combination of magic realism and literary criticism.  A magician who does real magic approaches the narrator-writer: he will teach him magic if the writer gives up writing. The narrator needs time to think. Is magic more important than writing? There is musing, there is humor, and there is tension. The writer-narrator agonizes over the question.  Don’t jump, we say.  A brilliant, entertaining novella.

Ford Madox Ford’s clumsy first novel, The Shifting of the Fire, published in 1892, is an uneven tale of star-crossed lovers. The plot is melodramatic, though not without humor.  Edith Ryland’s rich parents refuse to let her marry Clem Hollebone after his business fails.  Absurdly, she marries an 80-year-old man for his money, thinking she will inherit and be able to support Clem. I’m on a break from this book, because the second half is even worse than the first, but Ford was only 18 when he wrote it.  Recommended only for hardcore Ford fans.

I recently wrote that librarians were the perfect spies, then deleted the post because it was over the top. But who knew? I was right, sort of. Elyse Graham’s new book, Book and Dagger:  How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II,  describes the recruiting of English professors, librarians, historians, and other academics to work as undercover spies by the agency that morphed into the CIA.  This book might be fun, but it is poorly-written, so I will not attempt it.

What have you been reading or not reading?

The Quasi-Luddite Reader

I am a quasi-Luddite.  That, I think, is what my physical therapist admired about me.  “Love the quasi,” she said as she urged me to contort my limbs. I disapprove of cell phones; hence I am a quasi-Luddite. 

The “quasi” is difficult for bibliophiles now, but there were difficult times in the twentieth century, too. During the 1990s, when independent bookstores were crashing like dominoes, booksellers claimed that it was the fall of the book, period.  Borders, the extraordinary bookstore that changed the face of bookselling, was bigger, and I am sorry to say, better than most of the  indies.  Borders closed in 2011, and that was almost the end of bookstores where I live.

But bookstores and book events have long been difficult to navigate.  Here are examples of a typical 20th-century experience.

The 1980s.  The man behind the desk refuses to sell me a copy of Midnight’s Children.  He says I WILL NOT LIKE IT.  Perhaps he thought I was too white-bread.  I bought it at a friendly bookstore, where I shopped loyally for the rest of the decade. 

The  1990s.  At a literary festival, a writer who was beautiful as the dawn gossiped about a writer who sounded very nasty. Since I am a straight talker, too, I was amused and actually relieved that someone else said whatever was on her mind. ALL of us bought her book.

The 2000s. The pandemic ruined many bookstores, because most bibliophiles were terrified or locked down, or both. But do read Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an ex-con bookseller who works in Louise’s own bookstore during the Covid area.

Of course we need physical bookstores, but I became quasi-quasi during the pandemic. I miss those quasi-Luddite days! Still, there are small bookstores all over the midwest, if you like to drive.

Last Trip to London: Spoiled by Extraordinary Bookstores

Daunt Books

If I lived in London, I could pop into fabulous bookstores every day.

It was (possibly) my last trip to London. Mission: to explore extraordinary bookstores and stock up on a year’s books. These glamorous spaces are as beautiful as art galleries, stocked with new and backlisted titles I seldom find in the U.S.

Although many great secondhand bookstores have closed since the pandemic, notably at Cecil Court, an alley of shops near Trafalgar Square, there are still many exciting shops.

We did not go to London only for the bookstores, of course. We did the proper tourist things, traipsing through art galleries and gawking at cathedral domes, occasionally glancing down at a guidebook in emulation of our favorite traveling heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, in Forster’s A Room with a View. (Lucy had a Baedeker, I think.)

And yet one always ends up in a bookshop after one has posed for the obligatory selfie in front of Whistler’s portrait of Joanna HIffernan, “The Woman in White.” (I love Wilkie Collins’s book, though Whistler claimed it had nothing to do with his painting.)

HERE ARE FOUR OF MY FAVORITE LONDON BOOKSTORES.

Daunt Books, an Edwardian bookshop, located in the chic Mayfair area, is surely one of the most beautiful bookshops in the world. The wood paneling, skylights, oak galleries, and dome impart a hushed, cathedral-like ambiance. Originally a travel book store, Daunt Books still showcases a creative travel section stocked not only with travel guides, but with each country’s classics, fiction, histories, and travel books.

Hatchards, London’s oldest bookstore, founded in 1797, is located in Piccadilly near the Royal Academy of Arts. Almost as elegant as Daunt Books, it has beautiful displays of books on tables, a winding wooden staircase to keep eclectic readers fit, a rather elderly carpet with a comfy pattern, and a strong selection of books of all genres, from ancient history to science fiction to offbeat reissued memoirs.

Waterstones

Waterstones. This huge, stunning chain bookstore, located in Piccadilly, has seductive displays of paperbacks on the ground floor, and the fiction section devotes several shelves to Penguins, Oxford World Classics, and Persephones. Over the years, I have discovered unusual books by the likes of Vita Sackville-West as well as authors new to me. As I staggered to the cash register clutching several paperbacks, a passer-by commented, “That’s a lot of books.” Can’t say this observer was wrong. This is my favorite bookstore in London.

Foyles

Foyles. This enormous, gorgeous bookstore, located on Charing Cross Road, has a distinctive, varied selection or books that is competitive with its rival Waterstones. To quote from their website: “Built around a central, skylit atrium, with winding stairs and three accessible lifts, this book lover’s paradise flows down across eight mezzanine plates and offers over 200,000 different books across a range of specialist departments, from Fiction to Children’s to Art to Military History to Education, all run by friendly, expert booksellers.”

WANT AD

OBSESSIVE READER LOOKING FOR A LIVE-IN BOOKSTORE GIG. WILL DO A BIT OF DUSTING, TIDYING, CHATTING, AND WRITING OF “BOOK-TALKERS.”

Uh-huh, do you think I’ll get the job?

What are your favorite bookstores in London, or
elsewhere?

The Courtesy of Booksellers, Barnes and Noble Redux, Books about Bookstores, and a Documentary about a Bookstore

Foyles in London

In which I visit Foyles in London and recommend articles about Barnes and Noble, a review of a documentary about a bookshop, and reviews of books about books.

You can read the post here at Thornfield Hall Redux.

https://thornfieldhallredux.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-courtesy-of-booksellers-barnes-and.html

A Novel about a Bookstore: Robert Hellenga’s “Love, Death & Rare Books”

“We’re fine,” I say on the landline. (I’m keeping it real.) Of course things are not fine. They are far from fine. At least we have enough books.  Should we start a bookstore in our living room?

What I miss is browsing in bookstores. Sounds trivial, doesn’t it?   I miss the dusty stacks where you discover South American novels you’ve never heard of, and  bright displays of new books with crisp pages.

A few bookstores are open again.  I stood in a socially-distanced line and noticed a copy of Robert Hellenga’s new novel, Love, Death, & Rare Books.  I had not read any reviews of this, but I bought it.

And it is everything I need in a novel right now: it is a book about books! I am racing through this fictitious history of a family-owned antiquarian bookstore in Chicago, Chas. Johnson & Sons, from 1970 to 2011.

Gabe, the narrator, grows up at the store, and eventually works side-by-side with his father and grandfather. As you can imagine, he inhales books, beginning with The Hardy Boys, and The Catcher in the Rye, and moving on to Ovid, Homer, Wordsworth, Walter Mosley, and Salman Rushdie (the store is bombed when they display The Satanic Verses in the window). As Gabe gets older, he is drawn to Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. And he is a melancholy guy himself, reserved, introspective, and rejected by the woman he loves.

We see how the business changes over the years, and I am fascinated by the details about the valuation of rare books, the bookseller’s deep knowledge of a book’s provenance, a trip to assess 100,00 books in a library at a bankrupt Jesuit college, book sales at Christie’s, and antiquarian book fairs.

Although Gabe is immersed in bookselling, his personal life is somewhat messy.  In his twenties he falls in love with Lydia, an independent, beautiful young woman writing a thesis on Keats (she works in the bookstore and recites “The Eve of St. Agnes” at the dinner table). Alas, she is too focused on romantic poetry to marry him: she goes to graduate school at Yale to learn to deconstruct Keats.  When she returns pregnant by her married English professor, Gabe remains her friend, and is with her in the delivery room. She still refuses to marry him.  He does not compare to the professor.

Why, why doesn’t she marry Gabe, we moan.  Truth to tell: I found Lydia irritating. She is so strong-minded and personable (though caustic) that she has more romantic choices than Gabe does. “I’m not a nun,” she says at one point.

I haven’t finished this well-written book yet, but if you want to read about the book business,  Hellenga’s enthusiastic description provides a good balance to actual bookstore owner Shaun Bythell’s more caustic view in Diary of a Bookseller.

Reading Marge Piercy’s “Vida” and Notes on Bookstore Closings

Yes, we must all turn to Jane Austen and novels of manners during troubled times.  But must we? 

It doesn’t suit me right now.  And so I recently reread Marge Piercy’s Vida, a fast-paced, vibrant, intense novel about a woman in her thirties who has lived underground for almost ten years after participating in a violent antiwar action.  

Published in 1979, this is one of the best novels I have read about the politics of the ’60s and ’70s. (I also recommend Piercy’s novel Small Changes.) There are political issues at the center of many of Piercy’s books, and the plots are so well-constructed that even the apolitical get hooked.  In case you’re worried about “cultural appropriation,” Piercy has credentials. The 1979 book jacket says: “Ms. Piercy has been a political activist for years–Civil Rights, antiwar groups, SDS and the women’s movement.”

In a way, Piercy is an American Doris Lessing; her heroine Vida Asch is an American Jewish Martha Quest.  This intricate novel goes back and forth between the “present” (the late ’70s) and the ’60s and early ’70s when Vida was an  antiwar activist in SAW (Students Against the War). 

Piercy gives you a look behind-the-scenes at a radical group hectically planning antiwar actions and writing propaganda.   Vida works  by day  as a secretary and by night as a strategist in the SAW office in New York.  Piercy minutely describes a long night at SAW.  Vida, of course, as a woman in the Movement, does everything from opening mail to plotting demonstration tactics and writing pamphlets.  

Tuesday night she bought Chinese takeout on the way to the SAW office from work.  Though the meeting was not till seven-thirty, she had a lot to get done.  Heaped on her desk were requests for antiwar literature, requests for speakers, letters from chapters with problems who wanted a regional representative to visit, donations, clippings, a a threat from Minute Man marked with cross hairs of a rifle sight, a love note from Pelican, and an obscene hate note addressed to Vida Ass and a notice to vacate their loft from the landlord….  The hate mail she shredded by hand and discarded….  She never spoke of how sick it made her feel; not even to Leigh; not even to Lohania, with whom she shared most of her wishes and fears.

The novel opens in the present, with Vida, who is based in L.A.,  on a cross-country trip to a board meeting of a radical group known as the Network.  Although it is dangerous to stop along the way in New York, she is still in love with her husband Leigh, host of a radical news show in New York, and she also longs to see her sister, Natalie, a women’s movement activist.   Arranging the meetings involves elaborate phone calls placed from phone booths, warily spending the night at the apartments of sympathetic liberals who don’t understand the necessity for secrecy, out-of-the way trips on the subway so as not be followed, and clandestine meetings. 

But it is worth it to Vida, who would give almost anything to have her regular life back. Still, she is devastated when she learns that Leigh plans to marry again. 

Piercy’s descriptions of the open relationships of the ’60s and ’70s are accurate, occasionally sensual, but often painful.   Women in the Movement share their men, have sex with their housemates, and sometimes are coerced to have sex with men in the Movement they dislike.  Vida is gorgeous and smart and confident, so she can handle the strain, but she is almost raped at gunpoint by a crazed lover.  Yet she despises the Women’s Movement as bourgeois. Piercy reminds us that the ’60s and ’70s were hardly the Woodstock people are nostalgic for.

Piercy’s heroines tend to be earthy, warm, and sensual, and Vida is no exception.  She cares about her friends, warts and all.  This is one of Piercy’s best, and she is always a vivid writer.  

ARE BOOKSTORES ESSENTIAL BUSINESSES?

The truth is there is more to lockdown than wiping down carts at the grocery store.  There’s washing hands!  Most stores have beeen closed for a couple of weeks.  

At least Barnes and Noble was open.

Two weeks into the lockdown, I would love to go to a bookstore.  I almost agree with James Daunt, the CEO of Barnes and Noble, who, according to Publishers Weekly, has said that books and bookstores should be considered essential businesses right now. Daunt, who, in addition to being CEO of B&N, is  the founder of Daunt Books in the UK and the CEO of Waterstones in the UK (a bookstore I love!), is thinking in terms of business, but as a consumer/book lover, I believe that books are good for the soul and spirit. And examining the books themselves, feeling the heft and seeing the design, is an important part of book-buying.

Mind you, we have plenty of books.   But when I learned that  all the bookstores will be closed  by 10 tonight for an indefinite period, I wished I could rush out and buy one more book. 

The end of an era?

A Bookish Trip to London: Pack Your Suitcase with Literary Associations!

Recently I spent a few days in London. I climbed countless stairs at countless museums, scrutinized Angela Carter’s manuscript of The Bloody Chamber, and rested in a pew in a small lovely 18th-century church.

London is a literary city.  We anglophiles can’t stop thinking about books.  When we pass the British Museum, we think of Barbara Pym’s Less Than Angels, in which the practical, astute Catherine Oliphant, a writer of women’s magazine stories who lives near the British Museum, takes a break to watch the eccentric anthropologists across the street swarming to their new anthropological research centre.  (Catherine’s boyfriend is an anthropologist.)

Naturally, we bookish types aren’t always thinking about books,  but we visit as many bookstores as possible.

I bought fewer books than last time and was relatively frugal.

At Any Amount of Books, a used bookstore on Charing Cross Road, I was thrilled to find Angus Wilson’s weirdly absorbing 1961 novel, The Old Men at the Zoo, which takes us from bickering zoo administrators to an apocalypse in Europe.  The narrator, Simon Carter, the new secretary of the London Zoo,  tries to mitigate the quarrels behind the scenes as chaos descends.   The zoologists’ scuffles  parallel the politicians’ clumsy maneuvers as the world moves closer to a war.  Can the animals survive when every zoologist has a different scheme or theory (open park or nostalgic Victorian?)? And can  humans survive the politicians’ inability to communicate or negotiate?

Wilson writes this brief note in the beginning:

The events described here in 1970-3 are utterly improbable. Our future is probably brighter, probably much more gloomy.  All references to the London Zoo and to its staff are entirely imaginary.

I also visited The London Review Bookstore, an attractive shop in Bloomsbury which is owned by The London Review of Books.  (The LRB also has a cake shop next door.)

I browsed in the  poetry section and, since poetry books  make good gifts, I purchased Gyles Brandreth’s Dancing by the Light of the Moon, an  anthology of more than 250 of Brandreth’s favorite poems which he urges us “to read, to enjoy, and to learn by heart.”  Although you may have read many of the poems, I loved rereading Edward Lear, Donne, and some of Shakespeare’s famous speeches.  And I enjoy Brandreth’s tips for memorizing poems–not that I intend to do so.  Still, just two lines a day, he says. We can do it!  It will improve our memory and concentrations.

I also bought The Poems of Dorothy Molloy, an Irish poet unknown to me. I admire her wit and disturbing take on domesticity and love.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PACK THE EXTRA BOOKS?  Although packing books is challenging,  you will be surprised what a determined person can fit in a suitcase.  (Hardcovers on the bottom, paperbacks in the pouches.)   And wheeling the heavy suitcase develops upper-arm strength.  If we worked in bookstores, we wouldn’t need to work out at the gym.

What are your favorite London bookstores?  And do you visit bookstores in other cities?

Acceptable Condition: Some Used Books Are Not

A paperback in barely acceptable condition.

The used Penguin copy of Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds has chocolate stains on the pages.  I think they’re chocolate stains. 

And that is not the only book in disgraceful condition.  Three pages of The Grapes of Wrath are dotted with holes, apparently from a paperpunch. Then there is a slightly foxed paperback of Hesiod’s Theogony, with a confused family tree of the creation myth scribbled in purple ink on the back page.

Ecce, as they say in Latin. Lo!  These all came from the same decaying store.  It reeks of mustiness and dirt, like a basement rec room or a rag shop in Dickens.  The name is The Bookstore, or perhaps Books, Books, Books!   We suggest it be changed to Acceptable Condition, which of course means the opposite.

“The problem with M’s store,” said a friend, “is he/she will buy any book in any condition to have a conversation.”

There are some lonely-heart bookstore owners, but I have observed mostly crusty anti-social types.  My impression is they are sick of humanity and just want to read the books. 

I was pondering this the other day while considering my long history and complex relationship with used bookstores.

In graduate school, we occasionally sold  books. I sold them so I could afford  tampons for too-frequent periods. My husband also sometimes sold books.  A cockroach once crawled out of a copy of Derrida’s Of Grammatology  he was trying to sell.  (It wasn’t his fault:  the cockroach was a southern thing.) As you can imagine, the store owner found it unacceptable.  

There are some extraordinary used bookstores.  I had good luck in a chilly (now defunct) bookshop called Linda’s, located in a dilapidated concrete building in Dubuque. In this quasi-garage, I found a Penguin of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers, a Barbara Pym I didn’t have, even a pristine set of Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet, published by University of Chicago.

There used to be countless good-to-great used bookstores and there are still some:   Jackson Street Booksellers in Omaha, Paperbacks and Pieces in Winona, and Magers and Quinn in Minneapolis.  I would also love to visit The Frugal Muse in Wisconsin, because of the name.

What are your favorite used bookstores?  And have you found anything untoward in the less good ones?   Bacon as bookmarks?

Why I Don’t Work in a Bookstore

Meg Ryan as a bookstore owner in “You’ve Got Mail.”

I don’t work in a bookstore. It is probably what I was meant to do.

“You’re a natural teacher,” my mother said.  Then why was I so tired?

Teachers were all tired.  As the only Latin teacher I had three preparations (most had two)  and taught five classes a day (most taught four). I went home and took a nap, or zoomed off to aerobics class to work out the tension.  And then I prepared. And then I got up at 5 a.m.to grade homework and quizzes.

Here I am teaching Ovid in the “Big Glasses” era.

According to Scholastic and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a study  in 2012 called Primary Sources: America’s Teachers on the Teaching Profession found that the average teacher works 53 hours a week.   That sounds about right.

Eventually I found a more creative job with flex-time.  I enjoyed it more, but I admit I worked  on my wedding day.  “I just have to finish this up…”

Why didn’t I work in a bookstore?  Wouldn’t the hours have been more reasonable?

I love books.  I sold them without meaning to.  I would go to a bookstore, chat about books, and sometimes a bookseller would come over beaming to say I’d sold a book.

I also amused myself by doing the “first sentence test.” I read a lot of first sentences.  The first sentence test isn’t too bad, really.  And other people started reading first sentences… and I sold books that way, too.

I did work at a bookstore briefly in Iowa City when I took a year off from college.  The men got to work on the floor with the books; we women had to be cashiers.   Hard to believe it was so sexist back then, but it was.  And we women all loved books:  there was one college graduate among us, one student, another woman on a gap year, and a smart head cashier.

My copy of The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence

The good thing about working in the bookstore was that we got to borrow books. The bad thing  was that I used to buy the books.  Madness! Here is my copy of The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence. It cost $12.50. I made $1.60 an hour.  I put my money back into the store!  And so I had to leave.

If I had been allowed to work with the books,  I would have stayed and had a different fate!