More Bookstores I Have Known

by

Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

One of the great joys of travel—besides the luxury of room service and the chance to watch The Andy Griffith Show on cable TV—is discovering a new bookstore. Once I put up my luggage in the hotel room, I sit down in the easy chair and pull out the Yellow Pages, scanning the ads for local independent and used bookstores. If I have time, I’ll walk, take a subway, or drive the car to what promises to be the local Mecca of the printed word. Last year, after I had stashed my bags, I walked around Bad Soden, Germany, trying to stave off jet lag by staying awake all day. I strolled down the avenue for a cup of coffee and Danish, then I turned the corner into the little square to discover a newsstand where I could pick up the day’s papers. Across the street I spotted the local bookstore and spent a blissful hour leafing through Grass, Hesse, Herder, and a new book on Romanticism by Rüdiger Safranski. The store was not crowded, but when customers did come through the door, the owner greeted each by name and a lively conversation about books ensued. In this bookstore, books still mattered, the owner could still recommend a book for someone who liked a particular author and was looking for a new read, and reading was a sacred exchange of ideas.

Fortunately, there are still a few bookstores like this left in the US. In spite of the advent of online bookselling and the predominance of chain stores, you can still find that wonderful little store whose stock is not pre-selected by a wholesaler or a national buyer, whose charm and energy encourage you to sit a spell, put up your feet, and read slowly through a favorite, or new favorite, book, and whose owners and employees can put the right book in your hand, even if you can tell them only one word from the book’s title. Although some of these stores have now closed their doors, the memory of spending an afternoon in the aisles of these hallowed haunts lives on.

Last week, I revisited some of my favorite stores. This week, I want to add to the list of favorite stores and remember some of the bookstores whose loss I continue to mourn.

Litchfield Books—I was hoping to head down to Litchfield Beach, South Carolina, next week for a little vacation. It’s been almost ten years since I’ve been in this childhood haunt, and this year will be another without the ocean and this charming little bookstore. The last time I was there, Litchfield Books could be found in a strip mall on Highway 17, just down from the Harris Teeter grocery store. The great attraction of the store for me was its wealth of books on local lore. I picked up a copy of the history of Horry County—the county in which the store sits—and some collections of Low Country ghost tales, which brought back shivery memories from my own childhood in that section of South Carolina. One of these days I hope I’ll have another chance to live for a few moments among the shelves of Litchfield Books.

Westsider Books—One day, as I was ambling uptown to grab a cup of Joe at Zabar’s, I stumbled upon this little hole in the wall used bookstore. I turned in to find a shotgun style room with shelves as high as the ceiling—reached by ladders—stuffed full of books. I grabbed a hardcover first of Alfred Kazin’s Contemporaries on one of my first trips there. If you go, be sure to visit the second-floor, where you’ll find old postcards and rare books. Westsider Books also has an extensive selection of vinyl, with some of the records going for as little as $1.00. I found a copy of Alvin Lee’s and Mylon Lefevre’s On the Road to Freedom, for which I’d been looking for twenty-five years. I stop by at least once every time I’m in New York City—I live on the Upper West Side when I’m there, and the store is only eight blocks from my place—and last time I picked up a nice copy of Nikos Kazantzakis’ Symposium to add to my Kazantzakis collection.

Tattered Cover—Most every book lover has made or wants to make a trip to this fabled Denver store. I had a chance to visit a few years ago when I stayed in town an extra day following a conference. Two colleagues—also book lovers—and I spent an afternoon browsing the shelves, sitting in the cozy nooks and crannies and reading, and eating in the store’s restaurant once we had made our purchases. I have to admit that I don’t recall what books I bought that day; I only remember how impressed I was by the store itself, its helpful employees, and its wide selection of new and used books. Any book lover visiting Denver must pay a visit to this shrine of independent bookselling.

Seminary Co-Op—I can’t believe I have lived in the Chicago area for almost two years now and still haven’t made it back to this fabulous store. I used to try to get to the Co-Op whenever I was in Chicago for a meeting or a conference. The last time BEA—Book Expo America—met in Chicago, I made it a point to come in a day early to head down to this store (even though I knew I’d pick up one or two advanced reading copies at BEA).  I don’t know of any other store in the country with the vast selection of this one. Located in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, this bookstore contains a wide range of mostly new books from university presses in every subject. The fiction section is unbelievable; once you’ve visited it, you’ll never want to return to a Barnes and Noble or a Borders. You can find books here that you’ll not be able to find anywhere else because the Co-Op keeps books on the shelves long after any other store would have shipped them back to the publisher. When I am there, I shop for philosophy, literary criticism, and fiction, and I always find a treasure for which I’ve been searching. Last time, I bought a copy of Dieter Heinrich’s Between Kant and Hegel. You can also find some terrific bargains at 57th Street Books, just down the street from the Seminary Co-Op.

Loome Booksellers—I’d always heard about this store, mainly through their mailings. A few years ago, I was in a meeting in St. Paul, Minnesota and a friend and I decided to take the hour-long drive over to Stillwater, Minnesota, to visit this store. We had a hard time locating it at first, and we drove right by it at least twice in our search. Loome’s is in an old church, and every inch of that sacred space is now given over to the theological and biblical lights of the past. You can truly find just about anything you’re looking for in Loome’s; I’d been searching for Nathan A. Scott’s books for a long time (Scott founded the religion and literature movement in the U.S. and taught for most of his career at the University of Chicago), and I was able to find some of them there. A second store devoted to general books—where I picked a copy of F.R. Leavis’ essays on Anna Karenina—used to be on the town’s main street, but that shop is now closed and will soon be replaced by Chestnut Street Books, a few streets away, which will carry the same stock. Any readers interested in religion, theology, or biblical studies needs to make a trip at least once to Loome’s.

Literary Book Post—On a trip back up I-85 from Atlanta, I stopped in Salisbury, North Carolina, to buy some Cheerwine—the South’s most glorious nectar—in bottles (the original recipe), since it’s bottled there in Salisbury. Imagine my delight when I discovered this store on the town’s main drag. I didn’t have high expectations when I approached the store; this was, after all, a small North Carolina town known mainly for its famous soft drink and its pain-relieving powder, Stan-Back. Imagine my surprise when I entered the store to find a wealth of Southern literature and thoughtful collection of fiction and nonfiction. The owner knew his stock like the back of his hand, and bookishness emanated from his very being. I left there with a clutch of back issues of Southern Culture, a journal about life and literature in the South.

The Book Exchange—Smack dab in downtown Durham, North Carolina, this old warehouse has to be the most complete used bookstore I’ve ever seen. You can spend an entire day in this huge store and never really see everything. All books—except the course books on the first floor—are arranged by publisher. So, walk up to the mezzanine to find miles and miles of Penguin Classics. You’ll find several copies of individual titles, priced according to the age and condition of the book. I’ve never left here without an armload of books and spent most of my seminary years keeping the road between Wake Forest, North Carolina, and Durham, hot as I traveled to and from this store.

Kenyon College Bookstore—Unlike many college bookstores, which today are run by Barnes and Noble, this store remains independent and is a cultural anchor in the Gambier, Ohio, community. It’s open 365 days a year, and I used to visit it at least once a month to plunder its shelves for great bargains on used books, as well as then hard to find books by former Kenyon professors Randall Jarrell and John Crowe Ransom. It’s a cozy place where you can sit for hours nursing cups of coffee and reading copies of The Kenyon Review.

There are a number of stores whose passing I continue to mourn, even though it’s been many years since they have closed their doors. In Atlanta, the Ardmore Book End, literally a corner, or end, store in a strip mall in suburban Sandy Springs. They had all the Vintage classics, and I bought my first copies of Camus, Faulkner, Thomas Mann, and a set of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage here. Oxford Books in Atlanta was one of the South’s great independents, and I built my collection of literary criticism from its shelves. In Princeton, New Jersey, Micawber Books (now Labyrinth Books) had both a used and new book section. They had a complete set of the Loeb Classical Library, and I picked up much of my collection there; they also had a very complete Penguin Classics, and I found editions there that I could not find anywhere else. I bought a used copy of W.D. Davies’—a former author of mine—well-known book, The Sermon on the Mount, that had been owned by Ursula Niebuhr, the wife of the renowned theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, famous for his “Serenity Prayer.” Most everybody mourned when the Gotham Book Mart in New York City shut its doors. Above its entrance hung the sign, “Wise Men Fish Here,” and you were always wiser when you left the store. Their fiction, poetry, theater, film, and music sections were unbeatable. I spent many blissful days in Calliope Bookshop in Washington, DC, just a short walk from the National Zoo. It was a Daedalus bookstore, which is to say that it was one of the few physical outlets where you could buy books also found in the mail order Daedalus Books catalog. Whatever literary criticism and fiction I didn’t buy at Oxford Books, I bought here.

Bookstores are magic places that can whisk you away to another world, and I hope you have your favorites that you continue to visit either in spirit or in the flesh.


Henry Carrigan dreamed of being a rock ‘n roll star with a life of coast-to-coast tours and wild parties with Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell among others. But books intervened, and instead he went to Emory University to major in Religion and Literature. Later, teaching humanities in college, he took up writing about books—this time to avoid reading students’ papers. Henry soon became Library Journal's religion columnist, then religion book editor for Publishers Weekly. While working as editor-in-chief for Northwestern University Press and editing classic books for Paraclete Press, he still continues to write for LJ and PW, as well as the Washington Post Book World, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Charlotte Observer, ForeWord magazine—and now, BiblioBuffet. And he still enjoys playing his guitar. Contact Henry.