Bookstores Blog
November 9, 2009
- Just like food, words are sources for both nutrition and delight. And just like food you can get them in various forms and qualities and in all kinds of places: you can get basic fast food at a snack bar or kiosk, buy mainstream staple food in plastic bags from a megastore and enjoy it at home or you can go to a restaurant and share your joy and delight with people you like in a pleasant and ...
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November 7, 2009
- I first came across Arthur Probsthain, Oriental & African bookseller, in 1986. I was in London to visit the British Museum for the first time, and I was sixteen years old. It was a rainy day - somehow London always seems more Londony when it rains - and my heart gave a little flutter when I first spotted the bookshop's hanging sign. I was obsessed with Japanese prints, but no local bookstores ...
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November 6, 2009
- There's a B&N not far from me that I like, but it doesn't have it. Borders never considered it. Seattle's University Books is a traditional college bookstore, a top one really, a place where you can still buy pencils with lead that doesn't break and peruse great bargain bins, but U-Books doesn't have it either. I'm talking about funk. Seattle used to be loaded with funky bookstores ...
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November 6, 2009
- A favorite bookstore? I don't know that I have a favorite bookstore. One favorite book, yes! In fact, I blogged about that about a month or so ago, but not a particular, favorite bookstore. I have found all sorts of bookstore to be treasures, and I love browsing them all. I suppose I could say that my favorite will be the one I hope to own someday. I hope it will be like the bookstore ...
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November 6, 2009
- I live in Philadelphia, a wonderful city, vibrant and diverse, with a downtown that thrives after dark and on weekends, with residential neighborhoods that are cosmopolitan here and provincial there. Arts and culture? We have museums to rival those in D.C. or New York. We have restaurants offering every imaginable cuisine. We have a wonderful symphony orchestra and a magnificent ...
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November 6, 2009
- I don’t know how I got up the nerve. I guess it was that Borderlands Books was so comfortable, three small rooms filled floor to ceiling with books. Fantasy and science fiction jammed the largest room. The sunny front room was crammed with horror. The entry room, which also housed the cash register, contained all the new hard covers the store had to offer, along with a wall lined with ...
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November 6, 2009
- Living in the Bay Area, it's pretty hard to not talk about City Lights. It was one of the first stores I visited in San Francisco. With the wide selection of fiction, poetry and unusual nonfiction titles, I don't think there's a book you can't find there. Plus, it's oozing with literary history as the home of the Beat writers and smack in the middle of North Beach, and right next to the coffee ...
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November 6, 2009
- National Bookstore Day, November 7, 2009, has to be one of the best ideas anybody has come up with to help celebrate and preserve literary culture in our digitally-revolutionized age in a very long time. It gives me a perfect excuse to scrape up a few bucks and splurge on books other than those needed for research. But now that I think about it a bit more, it also should have been a good excuse ...
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November 6, 2009
- When I was a little girl in Jamaica, my mother had a dear friend, Mrs. Powell, who had a bookshop in downtown Kingston that we visited weekly. While my mother and Miss Powell spoke and caught up on each other’s news, I would browse around, flipping through books, reading a few lines or several pages. When I got older, in my teens, I went to the store on my own, to visit with Mrs. Powell, ...
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November 6, 2009
- I’ve always loved independent bookstores, and Black Oak Books in Berkeley was a prime example. It had that perfect combination of classy and musty. New and used books. An academic flavor. Author photos on the wall. Readings. Coffee shops near by. Walking distance from my house. Black Oak was the first bookstore I discovered when we moved to Berkeley in 1997. I was ...
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