botanizing

Old West Books, Tombstone

Under normal circumstances I would drive through a place like Tombstone, Arizona, while trying as much as possible to ignore it; however, I don’t do that today.  Why the special day? I happened to notice a bookstore, and I’m always reluctant to pass a bookstore without stopping.

In Tombstone’s Old West Books, each volume sits on a shelf with its covering facing outward.  The presentation emphasizes every book.  It also limits the inventory. 

There may be as many as 100 books in the store—the fewest books I’ve ever seen in a bookstore.  There are more cowboy hats than books.  The hats perch atop the bookcases and on counters.   The book inventory consists of western lore and history, mysteries, suspense, and some contemporary nonfiction of the sort that I don’t read.  It’s the first bookstore I’ve visited in which the hats were more interesting than the books.

The Book Shoppe, Grangeville

BING BONG!  The electronic syllables of a surveillance system sound my transgression.  I enter The Book Shoppe in Grangeville, Idaho.  Hair and shoulders up, ruffed by the warning I’ve tripped, I look for watchers watching me.  No one is here.

The electronic chords make me think about the pleasures of entering bookstores.  I like to enter quietly.  The proprietor behind the counter might nod or quietly say hello when I come in.  I like bookshops that are quiet enough to hear jazz or Bach playing quietly, unobtrusively in the background.  I like the delight in seeing a broad table arrayed with books just beyond the door.  The BING BONG! throws me off. 

Bells fit a bookshop.  If the proprietor wants to have time in the back room between customers, then a few bells on the door seem appropriate for a bookshop.  Why even a string strung from the door along the ceiling, hung here and there with a few bells, to reach into the back room where more bells could jingle, signaling the arrival of a browser or even a customer, would be a welcoming sound in a book store.  These would be light tinging dinging tinkling bells, nothing even approaching a clangorous cow bell would be reasonable.

The proprietress, a smiling woman who has fair hair, comes from the back.  “May I help you?” she asks.

“I’m just looking,” I say.

The Book Shoppe is bright, and there are not too many books.  The balance that a small town bookshop must achieve is surely difficult.  Investment in inventory must be limited by the low number of customers, and the selection must cater to local tastes, while also offering nuggets that lure exploratory readers.  The small town in Iowa in which I grew-up had no bookshop, and a place like Grangeville’s Book Shoppe would have been a wonderful opportunity to me as a child.  The few books, probably no more than 100 at one time, in my hometown's drugstore were held on a turning metal rack that stood in the front window.  I began building my personal library from that metal rack’s selection.  The selection in The Book Shoppe far exceeds 100 books, and someone has clearly given good attention to the titles.

The Book Shoppe has books on side shelves and two middle rows, a typical arrangement for a long store.  I walk to the shelves on the right, where I find memoirs and biographies.  Books of poetry are stacked on top of the shelves, as if set aside after-thoughts.  I pick up an illustrated volume of Keats and flip through the pages.  This would be a fun book to have, but I put it back on the shelf.  A paperback copy of James Wright’s Above the River:   The Collected Poems, its cover a little faded and worn from sliding against book after book for many years, gets my attention.  I take it from the stack on the top of the bookcase.  The Wright may have been on a shelf here nearly since its publication.  A square white sticker on the cover reads “PP 6/94 $15.00.”  I have another, slimmer edition of Wright’s collected poems, but I keep Above the River in my hand as I look at other books. 

BING BONG!  An older gentleman comes in and goes to the counter to ask the proprietress a question.

After looking through the fiction selection, I walk to the opposite side of the store, where there are books of regional history and guides.  The regional history interests me, and, if I were in a serious buying mood, I would probably take a handful.  A guide to hot springs in the Pacific Northwest tempts me.  I thumb through it twice.  Check the contents to see the locations.  I begin to daydream about hot springs.  I know a woman who likes hot springs.  I must stop this. 

My professional and book-hunter sides return when I see two copies of Ray Davis’s Idaho flora.  The flora is long out-of-print, and the taxonomic nomenclature is out-of-date, but it could be a fun volume to have.  The price penciled in each copy is $135.00, which is more than ten times their worth—such money would be better spent on hot springs fantasies.

I take the copy of Wright’s collected poems to the till.  “Thank you,” I say to the proprietress after the transaction.

BING BONG!

Watermark Book Co.

The two booksellers in Watermark Book Co. were discussing a display of books on mythology when I walked into the store over the weekend.  I suggested they include The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso’s lovely and elegant retelling of Greek and Roman myths.  The woman worker who was discussing her thoughts about the display recalled Calasso’s book but wasn’t very familiar with it.  I mentioned that another of Calasso’s books, Ka, was a retelling of Hindu myths, and that I also think of The Ruins of Kasch, which is set around the French Revolution, as a look at myths of ‘the modern’ that have played an important role in America’s conception of itself.  The woman headed for her computer to look for Calasso and her co-worker mentioned that they had something by him in stock.  She brought me their copy of K, Calasso’s book on Kafka that was published a few years ago.

I like this small store in Anacortes, Washington, which has high wooden shelves along the walls and a thoughtful selection of good literature.  I’ve browsed here only once before, when I bought a handful of new things.  The new nonfiction in stock has an eclectic feel.

A large dog stretched on the floor crunched on a dog biscuit.  A customer who came in asked the booksellers if the dog was a writer.  He then asked for books written by dogs, and the booksellers were back to their computers.  I suggested that I thought that a dog of one of the Bush presidents had putatively written a book (although personally I’m doubtful about books by any of the dogs in either Bush White House).  I also mentioned that Virginia Woolf, during a tense period in her creative life, had written Flush, a book supposedly written from the perspective of Elizabeth Barrett Brown’s spaniel.  The spaniel offered thoughts on Barrett Brown’s exotic life.  Woolf came to loathe the book.

Watermark has a human scale—it’s only a few paces wide but long enough for one to weave among the two central rows of low shelves.  From any corner of the store one can engage in the conversations that occur at the counter.  If only Watermark had a large, comfortable armchair or two poised in the middle of the store to encourage more lingering conversations, then perfection would be near.

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Watermark is the second accession in my virtual collection of bookstores.  Why collect just books, when you can also [virtually] collect bookstores?

Eclipse

In the late afternoon, I visited Eclipse Bookstore, which is in the Fairhaven district of Bellingham, Washington.  This box of a store is well lit with a spread of large windows across its front and an equal spread of windows across the back.  The back windows provide a broad view of Bellingham Bay.  This afternoon both sailboats and yellow crinkles of reflected light stood on the water. 

A woman flipped through a box of one dollar books that sat outside the store.  Inside, old dub reggae played, setting a languorous mood for book-looking.  The few shoppers moved slowly along the shelves.  A man sat reading in an armchair aimed at the bay and the afternoon light.

I like a bookstore in which one can comfortably maneuver.  The high shelves in Eclipse were well spaced, and I could easily bend or squat to see the volumes on the lowest shelves without bumping a shelf behind me or knocking over a pile of books.  And there were piles of books.  What respectable used bookstore wouldn’t have piles of books?  The piles in Eclipse seemed steadier than those I’ve seen in some places.  I thought about Eclipse’s book piles as architectural elements, like columns along a stoa, rather than disheveled backlog long waiting to be shelved.  In the art section, I rifled piles, finding the first volume of Hilary Spurling’s biography of Matisse (which I bought) and a biography of Whistler, which I decided not to buy.

Eclipse had clean, well kept books.  It had an excellent selection of modern and contemporary novelists. Eclipse is neither a place of dusty old volumes nor antiquarian jewels.  The jewels in Eclipse were mostly made recently.  Among the older volumes I examined was a hardbound copy of William O. Douglas’s My Wilderness, which I was tempted to purchase but didn’t.

I would like to have purchased several things.  I leafed through books that have been on my mental list of possible buys, but most I replaced on the shelf, tempering my acquisitiveness.  I had only a short stack when I went out the door of this lovely store.

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[I’ve begun to collect bookstores (at least in a series of snapshots), and this post initiates my catalogue of the collection.]