Bookstore Tour, Part III

For the third and final leg of my independent bookstore tour I had a co-pilot! Shannon, dear friend and fellow bibliophile, was visiting from Washington, D.C., and she accompanied me to three great spots.

Loot

First, we stopped at The Strand near Union Square simply because Shannon had never been. Since the purpose of this project was to explore new places, I didn't include The Strand in my initial list and won't say too much about it here. But it's always fun to stop in this enormous store, which is always crowded no matter how late the hour or the how dire the news stories about the future of independent bookstores. Having checked The Strand off our list, we got to work and went to nearby Alabaster first.

Alabaster Bookshop (122 4th Ave.)
Purchased: The Works of Guy de Maupassant by (surprise) Guy de Maupassant, and Girl with Curious Hair and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace

When we arrived at Alabaster, I discovered, to my surprise, that I'd already been there. I wandered in once several years ago, enticed by the racks of discounted books in front of the store. Shannon and I started with these very racks and I discovered a very beautiful old collection of Guy de Maupassant's stories for only $2.

Like other used bookstores, things inside Alabaster had a semblance of order but only a very loose one. Shelves were labeled with handwritten signs, and spillover books were stacked on top of arrangements on the shelves or simply in piles on the floor. The fiction section had obviously grown beyond its original shelving and one had to make an abrupt left turn to find the end of the alphabet.

There were quite a lot of good options on the shelves, and Shannon and I got lost for a while. I cradled several possible purchases in my arms as I browsed, some of which were quite tempting. But all that went out the window when I happened to look to the highest shelf, whereupon I practically dropped all of the other contenders. There, just out of reach, were four books by David Foster Wallace.

I simply can't stop being astounded by the brilliance of David Foster Wallace's writing, and I don't think I'll ever really get used to it. "Genius" is just too mild a term. No one else's books sparkle with the kind of insight, wit, and creativity that overflow from his pages. And it must have come pretty easily to him, because in his too-short career he was incredibly prolific. I look for his books at nearly every used bookstore I visit but I never find any, and on the occasions that I've asked the proprietor I usually learn that any copies of his work that come in tend to go within a matter of days. But there were four here. One, Consider the Lobster, I had already read, so my decision was slightly easier to make than it might have been. In a heroic act of restraint, I chose just two of the remaining three. One, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, is a collection of essays, and the other, Girl with Curious Hair is a collection of short stories. (I have an audio version of him reading various pieces, and so had already heard several selections from the third book, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I could hardly believe my luck at finding them, and at having Shannon, who was tall enough to reach them for me, along for the ride. Feeling giddy, I navigated toward the last stop on our agenda.

East Village Books (99 St. Mark's Place)
Purchased: The Alienist by (I'd never heard of this, but Shannon said she enjoyed it and she and I have similar taste); Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma by Jane Austen, and The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

In googling East Village Books, I came across a great news story that convinced me I was going to like this store immensely. In 2011, a thief named Andrew Hansen had been checking out books from the public library, tearing off the stickers, and selling them to used bookstores. He chose things like graphic novels with high resale values and pocketed the cash left over after he'd paid his fines. The owner of EVB, Donald Davis, had apparently come across some of the ill-gotten books after Hansen had sold them to the store and taken off, and he was irate. Davis is a big fan of the library and was indignant that Hansen was stealing from it. He left the store to have dinner one night but made arrangements with the friend watching the shop, and when Hansen happened to come in with hot books to sell the friend called Davis and gave him the code phrase they'd agreed on. Davis rushed back to the shop and confronted Hansen, and when Hansen tried to leave Davis tackled him. Davis, as it turned out, is no wimpy book lover. He was a wrestler in high school. He was able to subdue Hansen until the police arrived to arrest him. I found this swashbuckling story rather thrilling and was quite excited to visit the store in person.

Shannon browses the outdoor selection

Alas, I liked East Village Books much less than I'd hoped to. Although they had a very large selection, I had trouble finding too much that interested me, for one. Also to he salesclerk was quite terse and unpleasant, which is a bit unusual for stores like this. Usually the staff is made up of fellow book aficionados who are thrilled that you intend to spend money with them instead of on Amazon. And, there was a massive air conditioning unit blowing positively frigid air right down the fiction aisle. This, of course, was the place I'd hoped to camp out, but I ended up having to make quick trips into the aisle for a minute or two at a time, then retreat about 20 feet away to warm up before charging in again. This kind of environment is fine for a corner store that you pop into for a quick quart of milk, but in a shop that demands browsing it was decidedly dismaying.

The store was not without its charms, though. There was a strange outdoor section covered by plastic and tarps in which high shelves sat on a layer of gravel. It was rather endearingly haphazard but just solid enough that I imagine it must remain in place even in the dead of winter. And someone in the store clearly had a sense of humor. We were tickled by some of the section labeling.

And I was a fan of their method of displaying more expensive older printings of small novels.

The store's credit card policy was also conveniently conducive to my tendency to lose all self-control in bookshops. We'd spent just about all our cash on lunch at a great noodle place and then cookies at Momofuku Milk Bar, and so I whipped out my credit card at the register. I was told, however, that my purchase of $12 was too small because there was a $30 credit card minimum. Shannon said she'd give me cash for her book if I paid for all of them, but we still needed to spend a few dollars. So I joyfully returned to the shelves where I selected a few Austen novels to make up the difference. Classics are always wonderfully cheap, and three novels later I'd racked up a big enough bill to allow the cranky clerk to swipe my card.

Now that my tour has concluded, I can safely say that Three Lives and Company is my favorite place to buy new books in New York City and the funky, friendly Mercer Street Books is my favorite used book store. As a matter of principle, it's nice to have settled on some go-to spots, but it's, admittedly, an irrelevant conclusion since I will be moving away from New York in a matter of days. Still, I hold out hope that these posts may be helpful to future book shoppers, and I look forward to scoping out book-buying options in Boulder.