Browsing Books

I just finished a long long weekend in San Francisco. I stayed at a friend's place, and it didn't take too long for me to wander the 8 blocks from her building down to City Lights Bookstore. You may recall that City Lights played a significant role in American letters, particularly at the time of the Beats. While I admit that my thoughts were all Kerouacy and Ginsbergled and Ferlinghettiish, the history of the place was nothing compared to the sensation of walking in to it.

Sometimes I forget why I hate corporate bookstores or even why I should, but nosing around in City Lights brought it all back to me in no uncertain terms. There were no cardboard displays trumpeting the latest selection for Oprah's Book Club, no tables at the front of the store with ten copies of each of the week's new releases on it. There are just shelves everywhere, and on every shelf there are books, books on shelves that hardly seem to be shaped to hold books, built as they are into every angle and crevice of a building that, if it was built to be a store at all, was not built to be a bookstore, at least not in the sense that our strip malls and cookie-cutter suburban shopping plazas have conditioned us to expect. Browsing those shelves was an exhausting undertaking. Few titles had more than two copies on the shelf so each shelf was an explosion of titles, authors, spine art, fonts, colors. There was no respite for the scanning eye, no shelf of Danielle Steel or John Grisham or Clive Cussler to jump over. The authors were there, of course, but the shelves weren't arranged to spotlight the commercially successful. They were arranged to hold books. Alphabetically by author. Evey volume was democratically placed according to its author's name with the spine facing out so it was work to move down each shelf, reading titles, trying not to miss The One you didn't know you were looking for.

Only it wasn't like work; it was more akin to visiting old friends whom I see entirely too seldom. I bumped into Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It, and I reflexively picked it up to read those stunning final pages. When I came to that parting shot to the gut of "I am haunted by waters," the lump in my throat, the hair standing up on my neck, reminded me why my reflex to turn to certain passage is there.

City Lights is the kind of place where you can get lost for hours that feel like minutes because they carry you back and forth through years, one unassuming volume at a time. I would like to believe my basement would look like that if I ever managed to stay put for fifty years. Barnes and Noble can both go to hell. THAT is a bookstore, what a bookstore should be: a bookstore for people who love books.