Theaters, concert halls, museums and vaunted restaurants are the no-brainer destinations when most of us vacation in a new town, but there are two other stops I usually make an effort to seek out when I am exploring someplace for the first time – old cemeteries (Pére Lachaise in Paris’ 20th Arrondissement, yes!) and bookstores. Happily for me and the rest of you bibliophiles, Time Out magazine recently came out with a list of the 16 “best” independent bookstores in the country.
The list was compiled without much published info on what the criteria for selection were, but we certainly can’t argue with the first choice, where we got totally lost in its seemingly endless miles of stacks. Taking up a full city block and four stories in the Pearl District of Portland, Oregon, the 68,000-square-foot-plus Powell’s City of Books clocks in as the largest independent bookstore in the world, let alone the United States. But size isn’t everything, right? Powell’s has a vaunted rare book room that draws researchers from all over the world; runs a book-buying operation (possibly why it has more than 1 million volumes) on weekends; has a cafe that’s open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily; and attracts celebrated writers, artists and deep thinkers to its Basil Hallward gallery on a regular basis. And if you find it all a bit daunting—guess what? They offer tours! Find out by emailing tours@powells.com.
No. 2 on the list is The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles, across from the Pershing Square Metro station at Fifth and Spring streets (convenient because parking is sparse and expensive). At 22,000 square feet, the largest new and used bookstore in California houses a comic book store, a yarn shop, a legendary book “tunnel,” five art studios and old vaults from its days 100 years ago as a bank.
New York City claims the third spot with its famed The Strand, the 98-year-old fixture with three locations in Manhattan and an outlet at LaGuardia airport that still boasts “18 miles of books,” though it’s closer to 23 miles today. It sells a huge collection of wearable and gift items along with rare, used and new volumes, and offers a “Books by the Foot” service that will create your own personal library for you—or for the interior decorator you probably hire. It counts late playwright, author and actor Sam Shepard among its former employees.
Coming in fourth is Books & Books, with several locations in and near Miami, Florida, and a special room devoted to antiquarian rare books and another entirely to children’s works—plus a popular cafe that dishes out avocado toast, curried chicken salad, paninis, tuna melts and Cuban sandwiches. Kramers on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. Northwest, No. 5 on the list, also boasts a popular cafe and bar, and has a green-bedecked solarium and outdoor covered patio where you can enjoy breakfast all day.
We take (harrumph!) some exception to putting our own City Lights Booksellers & Publishers in San Francisco at No. 6 on the list. Cofounded in 1953 by the legendary Lawrence Ferlinghetti and birthplace and gathering spot for so much that was pivotal to the Beat Generation, its reputation as a refuge for the intelligentsia is well-deserved, cemented by the fact that it is a publishing house of some note.
The remaining 10 in descending order, are the cedar-shelved Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, Washington; Women & Children First in Chicago, Illinois, with its decided feminist outlook; Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City, Iowa, the first U.S. city to be designated a UNESCO City of Literature (buoyed as it is by the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop); the Rizzoli Bookstore in New York City’s NoMad (North of Madison Square Park) area, a visually stunning place with painted ceilings and cast-iron chandeliers; and Faulkner House Books in the New Orleans French Quarter, a Southern-themed purveyor of literature that honors its namesake William Faulkner, who lived and wrote in the townhouse there in the 1920s.
No. 12 is the felicitously named Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, an inviting spot that offers a cafe and handwritten recommendations from staff, and is justly revered for an old typewriter that invites visitors to supply notes or poems which are the published in a “Notes from a Public Typewriter” collection (a deft and free way to get your golden thoughts in print!) Next comes San Diego’s Verbatim Books, a genial place which deals in gently used secondhand tomes as well as new releases, features a books “rainbow” lined with little dinosaur sculptures and sports a huge bookshelf mural by Armando Elizarraras outside.
No. 14 is Philly Aids Thrift in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, founded as Giovanni’s Room in 1973 but bought and maintained by the thrift organization that is its namesake and functioning as a cultural hub for the LGBTQIA+ community.
More than a decade ago, Spanish civil engineering buddies Javier García del Moral and Paco Vique groused about wanting a place where they could hang together, drink booze and talk books. The result is 15th on the list: The Wild Detectives, which opened in February 2014 in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, Texas, is now a bar and venue where exactly that happens on a daily basis.
“Bel Canto” and “The Dutch House” author Ann Patchett brings her Parnassus Books store in at No. 16. Opening in 2011 in Nashville, Tennessee, it’s named for the mythical mount in Greece that harbored poetry, music, learning and literature. Patchett is a regular fixture at the store and heavily involved in its inventory and programming.
Acting out the “Annunciation:” Prizewinning Florida novelist Lauren Groff, author of “Fates and Furies,’ “The Matrix” and “The Vaster Wilds,” is the next fortunate artist to undergo the careful scrutiny of plucky San Francisco theater troupe Word for Word, which takes every syllable penned by the chosen writer— and not just the dialogue—and transforms it into action on the stage. Groff’s short story “Annunciation” will be so transformed by the Word for Word actors, in productions from June 18 to July 30 at Z Below at 470 Florida St. in San Francisco. The story concerns a young woman who, upon graduation from college on the East Coast, takes it upon herself to drive across the country to the West without a plan in her fair head about what awaits her. Tickets are $45-$70, available at www.zspace.org, and Groff will be present on the evening of July 13.
The best from abroad: “Heart Lamp” by Banu Mushtaq, a lawyer, activist and author from India who writes in the Kannada language with Deepa Bhasthi as her translator, is the winner of the International Booker Prize for her collection of 12 short stories depicting the lives of ordinary women and girls in southern India, filled as it is with vivid characters that engagingly display the author’s keen understanding of human nature. The prize splits the equivalent of about $67,5000 between Mushtaq and her translator, as well as, of course, a sure guarantee to a broader readership. ”Heart Lamp” is the first story collection in history to win the prize for best translated fiction.
Hooked on Books is a monthly column by Sue Gilmore on current literary buzz and can’t-miss upcoming book events. Look for it here every last Thursday of the month
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