WEBonBooks

When Amazon first started, I bought books from the website.  It was convenient for me at the time; but how little I realized I was contributing to the eventual decimation of so many independent bookstores, my favorite haunts.

Before Amazon, I lived in New York City and visited Barnes & Noble, first at their flagship store on Fifth Avenue, then also the annex across the street.  They had so many new books I was often dazzled into paralysis by all the choices.  At the time, how little I knew I was contributing to the eventual vacuity of the bookstore landscape.  Books-A-Million anyone?

When living in N.Y.C., I shopped St. Marks Bookstore (A Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin), the New School Bookstore (The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra), and so many other countless and now nameless bookstores all across Manhattan.  They all had racks of magazines as well.  Many were small hovels crammed full of books in every conceivable nook.

From there I moved to Bremerton, Washington, one of the US Navy’s Home Bases.  Overlooking Puget Sound, a waterway to the world, there was a small independent bookstore where I bought two travel books, one about Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan “Marco Polo” of the Islamic world in the 1300s (The Travels of Ibn Battuta).  The other book was about Fa-Hsien, a Chinese “Ibn Battuta” of the Buddhist world in the 400s (A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms In India).

There was also Elliot Bay Bookstore (The Gift, by Lewis Hyde) on the waterfront in Seattle, along with the now-forgotten used book store in Pike Street Market.  Left Bank Books was there too, where I first read books on Eco Activism, Noam Chomsky, and first learned of academic-based LGBTQ studies.  Could that really have been 35 years ago?

I am very happy to be living here in the Ozarks now with at least one independent bookstore available for me to peruse in every town I live in or visit.  Some towns have two!

In my town of Eureka Springs, Arkansas is Gazebo Books (the series The Best American Writings on: Essays, Science Fiction, Food Writing, etc.), owned by two feisty women who make no compromises.  It is a truly unique store still in business after so many decades in a heavily-touristed town.  They won’t know about being mentioned in this review because they don’t use computers; customers can only pay with cash or checks.

My new favorite is Two Friends Bookstore (Heat, by Bill Buford), in nearby Bentonville, the home office of Walmart.  This refreshing nook of a store with wide ideas is in a town with a brand new library wherein there are four rows of shelves 16 feet long of Christian fiction and only one half-empty eight foot long shelf of science-themed books.

Two Friends has an incredible selection of books in a space that also includes a tiny café counter, a cozy children’s corner, and a separate small room for non-fiction.  Books are so well-curated I have to pinch myself from buying myself broke.  A recent main table display included selections on women’s reproductive rights in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe v. Wade.  Two Friends also has a good diversity of works by African-Americans and other authors of color, including books in Spanish.

Their curation reminds me of my favorite out-of-the-Ozarks bookstore, Literati in Ann Arbor (Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake and Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli).  They have the benefit of three stories and take full advantage of that fact.  A large section of non-fiction science-themed books complements their many other well-curated sections, including food writing and fiction. 

I happened upon Literati after spending time in Vault of Midnight (Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud), an entire bookstore devoted to graphic novels/comics!  OK, so most of them are Marvel  and DC Comics, but they have an impressive selection of adult-oriented graphics that almost matches the best selection I’ve seen, at my favorite public library, located in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Ann Arbor also has a number of used bookstores I’ve discovered.  The city had the first and perhaps the last Borders Bookstore as well, just off the University of Michigan’s campus.  It reminded me of the old Barnes & Noble, before they both went vacuously corporate; though the store in Ann Arbor always seemed like a place to relax and browse that just-right book.

A recent find for me is It’s A Mystery Bookstore in Berryville (Binti, by Nnedi Okonafor), going east and deeper into the conservative Ozarks.  I would have never guessed, when I first moved here 28 years ago, that a woman of color would own a used bookstore on the square in Berryville, but the times have gratefully changed.

That small narrow bookstore has an eclectic selection where you basically have to ‘hunt-and-peck’ to find your theme.  One wall of books is mostly fiction with other genres mixed in.  Plus, there’s an incredible selection of non-fiction that is a browser’s delight to explore. 

It’s A Mystery Bookstore is just this side of neat and clean, nothing like the disappointing Abraxas Books of Daytona Beach, Florida, which I visited last year.  How many used bookstores have we all seen with books piled up in stacks on the floor?  No problem there, but this seaside bookstore has a leak problem, so most all the books smell not of that delightful old book aroma, but of that old book mold.  What’s the point?  Show more respect to books or just shut down.

Pile the books high on the floor!  That used to be the theme of Dickson Street Bookshop (Journey Through the Ice Age, by Paul Bahn) in downtown Fayetteville, Arkansas, a used-books bookstore for the labyrinth walkers.  They’ve cleaned up the aisles; which they’ve done by simply cramming in additional rows of bookshelves so now—in some aisles—you have to turn sideways to maneuver your way down.  Forget about passing another person.  This is a book-lovers bookstore designed like a maze; you walk down aisles to dead ends, in circles, along cul-de-sacs, and up or down short steps deep into the back.

When I first walked into Dickson Street Bookshop, before they cleaned up the aisles, it reminded me of the Strand Bookstore in New York City (Concerning the Spiritual in Art, by Wassily Kandinsky) when I worked there back in the 1980s.  Do they still have stacks of books all over, or did they also clean up?  I worked the Strand’s kiosk one summer at Bryant Park behind the New York City Library.  I had to chase drug dealers away with the baseball bat we kept behind the kiosk’s door…what was I thinking!?

I remember the fella who drove us uptown to the park from the store each morning telling us his tales from the day before.  He was the lucky one who would drive the buyers from one estate sale to another throughout the city.  He would talk of apartments so crammed with books and periodicals that they had to walk on piles of newspapers between columns of books piled to the ceiling.  Books in the oven.  Books in the fridge.  Books in the shower stall.  Books on the bed.  I love books, but stop me before I get to that point, please.

Here in Arkansas, I worked at the University of Arkansas’ Bookstore in Fayetteville (Cultural Encounters in the Early South, by Jeannie Wayne) one summer before going to grad school.  Quite fun to see all those text books coming in from publishers, buying used texts from outgoing students, and looking for my own used copies that didn’t have any ugly yellow highlights or ball-point pen underlines.  That bookstore worked us worn-edged and paid us pittance.

Fayetteville now has a new new-book bookstore, Pearl’s Books, which has supplied me with some books that have made it into these reviews (The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr, and A Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson).  They have a wonderful selection of fiction, food writing, graphic novels, and books for children.  They, like so many local independent bookstores, also offer well-curated voices to the mostly unspoken.  Pearl’s always has a wide variety of LGBTQ-related literature. 

Another favorite place to peruse books is thrift stores.  Here in my own town that includes the Echo Clinic, where I found Ghengis Khan by Jack Weatherford, and the Good Shepard, where I found M.F.K. Fisher’s collection The Art of Eating. 

How many thrift stores and flea markets have I bought books at over the years?  Here in the Ozarks, in Washington State, on road trips, in New York City? 

But perhaps there is no place like India that can match the feel of thrift stores so pervasively.  Every street in every city or village I went to had little booths, sidewalk displays, small stores, and large stores, all crammed with books to match the symphony of languages spoken in that country. 

I bought a pocket edition of Melville’s Moby Dick from one street-side vendor; kept me busy for several weeks on my backpacking trip in the 1980s.  But the wild array of comics were an inspiration.  I learned so much about the cultural history of India by reading their serial comics of both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.  Ram Dass, Paramahansa Yogananda, and books in Telegu or Tamil, with which I tried to learn the languages.  India loved books back then.  I’m glad to say, after a recent trip there, they still love books; Jayam Book Centre has two stories of excellent selections (Early Indians by Tony Joseph and Birds of Tamil Nadu).

Are books still loved elsewhere?  In Europe, where I bought books in every city I lived during a year and half of travels?  In New York City, that once teemed with bookstores on every block and magazine booths on every street side?  In small-town America that always seemed to have at least one independent bookstore?  With Amazon making it too easy to be a consumer of books instead of being thrilled with books? 

I do know that in this Northwest corner of Arkansas, books are indeed still loved.  Every time I go into any of the bookstores mentioned above, they are busy with people browsing and buying books.

Wherever you live and wherever you travel in this world, a locally-curated selection of books is awaiting you. 

Saturday, April 29, 2023—Independent Bookstore Day—is one good time to visit and support your locally-owned bookstores.