📚 What I finished this week.
📚 What I finished this week.
From the mid-teens.
Right now: popcorn, Bourbon Renewals, Wayne Shorter, and a stack of books. Later: a homemade dinner and a movie marathon, or maybe binge-watching some old, friendly TV shows.
Not exactly the birthday weekend I imagined, but here we are.
Okay, Green Apple, Black Oak, then City Lights. (I was sorry, therefore, to discover that Black Oak has closed…)
Love this place. A little house, with nooks and rooms devoted to different genres. In the SFF room, some authors are collected in milkcrates. Heinlein’s crate. McCaffrey’s. The fiction is alphabetical, but only by first letter. Perfect for endless browsing and serendipity.
I remember really liking Prairie Lights, but I’ve only been there once, passing through on a roadtrip — twenty years ago today, in fact.
This Borders replaced Odegards, which had held on a little longer than the St Paul store. It’s Kitchen Window now.
Calhoun Square gets its name from the nearby lake, which until recently bore the name of pro-slavery shitbird and all-round “very fine person,” John Calhoun.
Fantastic shop in the heart of Uptown. Everything The Strand wishes it were.
This will always be the real Amazon Bookstore. Imagine the alternate universe where the venerable feminist cooperative prevails and the shabby little internet start-up has to change its name.
Another Sunday, another Powells. From around 2011 or ’12, I think. The period has vanished from the end of sell us your books, presumably to strengthen the symmetry between the two sides.
📚 What I finished this week.
Hungry Saturday.
Odegards at Victoria Crossing closed in ’96. (And was replaced by I wanna say an Aveda?) A few years later, an inoffensive book store going after the Borders/B&N crowd opened up kitty corner. Looking at the locations, the owners clearly had the snowbird thing down.
The erstwhile Biography, now known as Bookbook. Not sure whether I love or hate the new name. Either way, bold look.
No bookmark, just a business card from Biography. It was driven out by the Marc Jacobs infestation of the Village. I remember seeing this sign in many windows: Less Marc Jacobs, more Jane Jacobs.
Biography would rise again under a new name and with a very kick-ass bookmark.
I picked this up when we visited the USSR exhibit at Expo 86. The USSR may be gone but the Peoples’ Co-op is still struggling on like the rest of us, just trying to make it through 2020…
Almost perfect book store. Large enough to feel like you probably missed something, small enough not to be overwhelming. (I haven’t been to its successor, Next Chapter, but I’ve ordered from them online a few times this spring.)
Powells again. This is from around 2010 or so.
It’s Saturday, which means it’s time once again for a Hungry Mind bookmark. Another tiny one from the late 90s.
Soundtrack for the weekend.
The CD came in the mail today — almost three weeks early. Two songs are already available online, including a whimsical yet surprisingly moving video for I Contain Multitudes.
Rounding out this NYC week is the Strand. I wish I could say why, but I’ve always merely liked rather than loved the Strand, despite it seeming, on paper, to be my ideal book store.
(I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but they removed the bag check after this cell phone symphony.)
Now this is how you do a used book store. (I thought I also had a bookmark from when it was Gryphon, but it hasn’t turned up.)
Maybe it was in its decrepit twilight, but I found Gotham forbiddingly hostile and risibly pompous. Despite a rich inventory, I spent as little money as possible on my sole visit and vowed never to return. I shed no tear on learning of its humiliating and predictable demise.
Sorry, everyone: yet another dead book store. I found this inside an older book I received from a friend.
The other day, as we were talking about something else, I made a reference to the “Co-op Wars” of the ’70s. I got a skeptical side-eye. Yes, it really was A Thing.