2 hrs like heaven

I spent two hours entirely alone, except for the proprietor and two cats, in a used book shop in Philly, The Book Trader on Fairmount Ave, while my mother took the kids on a tour of the now-defunct penitentiary across the street. The two-story shop is crammed to the ceiling with hardbounds and paperbacks. The floors, too, have small stacks of books you have to push aside to see what’s on the bottom shelves. I spent about an hour in the poetry section, which was surprisingly good and varied, a whole wall overflowing with fat and skinny books, free and formal, collections and anthologies. I picked about eight books, especially glad to find one by S.J. Marks, whom I read in an anthology I bought at the same shop last year.

After assembling the poetry, I told the shop owner how I was having trouble getting into a book. Fiction can disappoint me much more than any non-fiction can. My expectations must be higher. He suggested the classics. I bought Kafka’s complete stories.

Living in a non-English-speaking country, of course I appreciate online bookstores. But the great thing about a real-life bookstore is having the book in your hand, being able to look at every page, compare it with other books, check the size and style of the print, the blurbs, read a passage or two, check out whether the spine is about to split. It’s also great to run into books that you weren’t looking for, or to be led through a short trip of triggers and associations. Even excluding price, I love used bookstores because of the random selection, the scribbled dedications inside the books, the smell, the all-the-time-in-the-world feeling. I found a book signed by poet Susan Stewart but ultimately put it back. I felt I could, because this has happened to me before.

I have been meaning, for example, to read Saul Bellow but can’t remember which book is considered his masterpiece. Having the books in hand, to be honest, didn’t help - there were all kinds of superlative blurbs on the back of each book. So from Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt and Henderson, I finally went with Augie March because of the picture on the cover, a 1933 photo of State Street in Chicago. I also remembered I aimed to read Russell Banks’ Continental Drift, and they had that, but they also had Cloudsplitter , which looked more promising.

I spent $82.37 on 11 books.