Book Shop

I've passed by here many times.



But never got to visit, you see, until yesterday. A Wednesday! Go figure.

And it is without a doubt the best used bookstore in town. Oh, the others are musty and overflowing and there are dusty books stacked in leaning towers from the old wood floors. But those (downtown and near campus) are where the students sell their texts and assigned novels. The most impressive one is really full of crap, and by that I mean "what are they shoveling these days!"

They say the owner is smart because he can find any title in those heaps, but that's because nothing sells. He IS smart, and prices his treasures accordingly. So, they sit, either unrecognized or just too expensive.

I like history books that were written nearer the time of the event. Contemporaneous History, I guess you'd call it. Like, say, a history of the Civil War written in 1869. Or, say, a book in Sacco and Vanzetti's defense, written while they were still sitting in jail.

But there's none of that at the used bookstores near campus. In the history section what you get is what you get is today's sophomore diet:
Polemical books categorized as "Colonial Studies"; supposed auto-biographies of slaves, newly discovered and waiting to be exposed as fraudulent; revisionist "peoples'" histories; fantastic literary art of the third world (Nobel Prize stuff, you can't help but suspect is sub-par); fraudulents titles already exposed but "meh!", such as "The Education Of Little Tree" or "I, Rigoberta Menchu", by the Nobel Peace Prize winning, LIAR, still being taught . And then hey, anything by Doris Kearns Goodwin unless it's about baseball.

But not so at little Adams', which is owned by the Adams family and across town from campus.

Yesterday I didn't get passed the cluttered entry-way before I'd already spent my money. My pooka girlfriend too, (who by the way will read anything, so I dropped a ten cent copy of Tom Jones in her basket. And a fan-novel "Girls Of The Radio" from the 1920's.)

I bought a couple facsimilies of Sears Robuck catalogs (forward by Cleveland Amory...remember him? Used to be the TV Guides tv critic, I think.) (yes. And cat lover.) Also a nifty 1962 paperback about the 1950's. It had a cover I recognized from childhood, and yet I'm certain my parents didn't have it (a part of a series).

Also, for literary popcorn, "Gangs of New York", a social history of the pre-civil war days I gather. (Haven't seen the movie, except for a few clips.)

This is all ridiculous though, I don't read books anymore unless I'm in the hospital or rehab. For eight years on the web, I've been completely engrossed with current events and history unfolding. It's all too amazing (and gripping and frightening) to turn away.

And there is "comtemporaneous" history on the web. Galore, and I'm not just talking Lileks' Pop Ephemera site. For instance there is
this wonderful collection of old Popular Mechanics covers and articles, going back to its earliest editions. ("Projector Makes Living Movies (Aug, 1939)!" )

Escape from contemporary events is on the web also.

So when will I ever read another book??

Sitting in my car waiting for someone to come out from a dr.'s (or more likely , probation officer's) appointment.

During a power outage.

On a bus trip. (As-If, again.)

If somehow I wake one morning and remember myself.