Shelf Life: Bookstores I’ve Loved

I haunted bookstores, libraries, and urban and rural forests as a child. Here I review some of the bookstores.

One of my favorite Boston University professors—and a British national treasure—is Sir Christopher Ricks. Though he graduated from Cambridge University, this beloved nonagenarian now calls Cambridge, Massachusetts home. W.H. Auden once called Ricks “the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding,” and after four classes with him, I wholeheartedly agree.

In a T.S. Eliot seminar I took in 1988, Professor Ricks remarked, “I value cities according to the quality of their used bookstores.” That comment stuck with me. I had recently returned to Boston after a year in London (where I met my wife, Kate), and I had also just read the epistolary novel 84 Charing Cross Road about an American author’s relationship with the staff at a famous bookstore. I was already primed to believe that a good bookstore could define a city.

Studying abroad in London, I spent countless hours in the antiquarian bookstores along Booksellers’ Row, especially the stretch of Charing Cross Road between Leicester Square and Tottenham Court Road. At Foyles—once the largest bookstore in the world—I read through the entire Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas over a matter of weeks. I recall that most of those letters involved him asking friends or literary celebrities for money.

As much as I loved London booksellers, I have spent much more of my youthful pre-graduate school years in American bookstores, especially these five:

1. Olsson’s Books and Records at 1239 Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown. Because my mom was a librarian, most of the books I read as a child belonged to the D.C. Public Library system, but when I spent my allowance on books, it would be at Olsson’s, a long nearly 5000 square foot haven for books that was always a stop on any trip to Georgetown (about a 30 minute walk from my childhood home). At Olsson’s Books, I learned that books are treasures. Later I bought my first 45 RPM records there, including “Lay Down Sally” by Eric Clapton and “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas.

2. Second Story Books at 2000 P Street (Dupont Circle) in Washington DC. In high school, I caught the D2 bus to return to Glover Park from Dupont Circle where The Field School was back then. Sometimes I would miss my bus because of all the time I spent at Second Story Books which sold exclusively used books, including the hundreds of science fiction novels that I bought there in the early 1980s. Sometimes I would encounter the esteemed writing professor and book-lover Marcia Clemmitt here. I was pleased to discover today that this bookstore (unlike most of the ones on this list) is still in business!

3. Crown Books (3040 M Street) in Georgetown. I worked at this bookstore (selling new and discounted books) during the summer before college, gaining an understanding of the book industry from the point of view of a salesman who had to find, categorize, and answer questions about books. At Crown Books, I enjoyed making friends with the sort of people (smokers and parolees) that I typically avoided in high school. I think these folks influenced my behavior, for during my break from work I would usually jog across M Street to our favorite pizza and gyro place, once receiving two jaywalking tickets in quick succession (one there, and one back) from the same female police officer who told me, the second time, “we have to stop meeting like this.”

4. The Harvard Bookstore (1256 Massachusetts Avenue) in Cambridge, across the street from Harvard University. As I did in DC and London, I spent much of my available time and pocket money at favorite bookstores, especially this one. The poetry books were in the basement, and I was so familiar with the shelves that when I visited this store on weekends, I could usually identify books that had arrived during the previous week.

I continue to be grateful to Frederick Danker who sold SO many poetry books back to the Harvard Bookstore and which are now found in my collections, still stamped with “From the Library of Fred Danker.” I learned today that Danker was an English professor at U. Mass Boston.

5. Black Oak Books (1491 Shattuck Avenue) in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto neighborhood. When I moved to California in 1989, I landed in a basement apartment in a beautiful home on San Mateo Road, just a few doors down from the famous Indian Rock, just a 20-minute walk from our local bookstore, Black Oak Books.

On the walls of this bookstore, one saw large photographs of the giants of 20^th century literature who gave readings at Black Oak, including Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Alice Walker, Gore Vidal, Isabel Allende, Carlos Fuentes, Czesław Miłosz, Edna O’Brien, Edward Said, Tom Wolfe, Barry Lopez, Robert Pinsky (a former professor of mine), and Alice Waters. During the year that I lived in Berkeley, I saw readings by Milosz, Robert Hass, Anne Lamott, Russell Banks, Maxine Hong Kingston (where a bald woman sat at Kingston’s feet), T.C. Boyle and Julian Barnes.

Inspired by this Black Oak reading series, I resolved to create my own poetry series after graduate school, something I did starting in 2006 and which continues now as the Poetry Night Reading Series at the John Natsoulas Gallery in Davis.

These were my youthful favorites, meaning that I am excluding bookstores that I would haunt in Sacramento, San Francisco, and Davis, especially Bogey’s and The Avid Reader.

I remember feeling jealous when a friend told me about encountering John Updike in a Boylston Street (Boston) bookstore. I’m so grateful for the many meccas of book culture where I spent so much of my time as a student, as well as of the books of John Updike, who once said that “Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.”

I am curious to know if you have any bookstore stories. Please share!

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Best,

Dr. Andy

P.S. Three questions from last week:

1. Canada. The easternmost province joined the confederation of Canada in 1949. Name it.

2. Science. Starting with the letter E, what do we call animals that can maintain their internal body temperature regardless of the environmental temperature?

3. Books and Authors. Which poet teaches us that “April is the cruelest month”?

P.P.S. Our next Poetry Night on April 17 will feature fan favorite Julia Levine! Plan to join us at the Natsoulas Gallery!