Barnstorm Editors' Picks: Best Bookstores
Here's a Friday treat! The editors of Barnstorm weigh in on their favorite indie bookstores. Also, big ups to hometown spots RiverRun and Sheafe Street Books in Portsmouth, NH, which are always first in our hearts.
Caro ClarkDowntown Books & News, Asheville, NC
My first choice was Mom & Pop's books, a mainstay in my hometown back in Rhode Island, but a fire in the next door laundromat sent that locale to bookstore heaven. Since then I've been cared for by a number of foster booksellers interested in giving me great books on the cheap. Thus, a visit to Asheville, NC has me thinking of Downtown Books and News with the fondness sparked by any young kid hoping their new mom and dad will love them as much as their real children. I have to say Downtown Books & News really did make me feel warm and fuzzy. At the very least, their books were cheap and their selection was amazing. They price according to half off the original sticker, staying fair to that rule regardless of the book's age and edition. A little bit like how we choose to love our children, isn't it?Kathleen Cobb, Poetry EditorMyopic Books, Chicago, ILFor the brief period of time that I lived in Wicker Park, Chicago — which was before it became gentrified — my poetry home was Myopic Books. They've got more than 80,000 used book titles, floors that creak, a poetry series, a live experimental music series, and a fair share of anarchist reading material and the attitude that goes withit. Some of their “what we do not buy,” includes Romance, Diet Cooking, Encyclopedia Sets. Luckily, Myopic is surviving the changes of the neighborhood. Take a coffee, an empty bag, start digging.Jennifer Latson, Nonfiction Co-EditorCrescent City Books, New Orleans, LAWhen you're tired of chugging Hurricanes in the French Quarter, do what I do: duck into Crescent City Books on Chartres Street. It's like visiting your grandma's house: cool and musty, an acrid note of cat pee in the air, with comfortable chairs and shelves full of feminist literature. The two-story shop is packed with obscure used books (along with mass-market paperbacks), and they don't mind if you just sit and read and leave without buying anything. Also the shop cat is fat and fluffy—the best combination! He's not real interested in visitors, but if you run up and squeeze him, he's not going to scratch you. I checked.Dustin Martin, Editor-In-ChiefSherman's Books and Stationary, Bar Harbor, MEWhen I was eight or nine and still knew in my heart of hearts that I was someday going to be either an artist, an ornithologist, or a private detective, I remember Sherman's one impossibly small book room — piled with volumes, it seemed, to the ceiling — being the highlight of summer trips to Mount Desert Island. I remember getting “dropped off” here by my parents while they went into the stores that sold the breakable things”¦. At Sherman's, I bought my first comic book (Green Lantern), countless paperbacks, travel guides, animal encyclopedias, poetry anthologies, and that set of calligraphy pens I never did learn to use. If you're ever Down East, take a turn down Sherman's narrow, crowded aisles. Before you leave, don't forget to drift idly through one of the store's other non-book rooms, stocked to bursting with displays of blueberry sodas, saltwater taffy, Moose Drool Beer Bread mix (what's with that stuff anyway?), everything lobster, buoy, and/or lighthouse, and all that other kitschy Maine crap you couldn't get enough of as a kid.Kayleigh Merritt, Public RelationsDerby Square Bookstore, Salem, MAYou can find just about anything in Derby Square Bookstore, for something like 50% off retail. If you can't find something, ask the owner; he'll probably have read it and know just where to find it in his stacks, and if he doesn't have it, he'll order it—and it'll still be 20% off. I refer to it as the Harry Potter bookstore, not because it's full of cheap HP merchandise (it's not), but because from the moment you walk in, you are faced with large towers of books, towers built so haphazardly that they can't conceivably stay put the way they do without a little magic. The aisles are narrow, with books leaning and reaching from the floor to the ceiling. The signs for each section are hand-written. Everything smells like old paper and new paper and wood. There is a tiny gap of light between two stacks near the door where you pay. I've brought men in there—big, strong men—who were overwhelmed by the labyrinth of books. They're pansies. It's amazing.Erin Somers, Blog EditorTim's Books, Provincetown, MAMy favorite bookstore is Tim's Books in Provincetown. The smell in there! Perfect combo of beachy and musty. And a great selection of exactly the kind of old school wasp lit you feel like reading on the Cape. Watch your order of operations though, or you'll end up dragging 40 lbs of John O'Hara hardbacks across two miles of prehistoric marsh to get to the beach. Your friends will be like, "We hate you. Leave Butterfield 8 behind." And you'll be like, "I can't! It's an early edition! Save yourselves!"Michael Thompson, Fiction Editorhalf.com, Oh Yes I Did, USAListen people I have kids, and I don't have all day to dilly-dally around some antiquated book purveyor looking for just the right tome to fit my collection. I get my books where I think everyone should get them: half.com. If you like your books cheap with backs made of paper and someone else's finger juices on the pages, this is the place to get them. Plus, my mailman is afraid of people so he doesn't even ring my doorbell. He just leaves them on the front stoop in a plastic grocery bag (usually a Market Basket bag, in case you were wonderin'). Which works out great for me because I don't want to talk to him either! Double score!