There’s a used bookstore near downtown, small, a little cramped, the kind of place where the science fiction section is shelved half alphabetically and half by whatever fit where when someone reorganized last, and I’ve never once managed to walk in for one specific book and walk out with just that book. Never. I’ve stopped even pretending to myself that this trip will be quick.
Part of it is the owner, who I’ve gotten to know a little over the years without ever learning much about him beyond his taste, which runs toward exactly the kind of dense mid-century science fiction I’m a sucker for. He’s the reason I found my copy of Solaris, actually, pulled it off a shelf and told me, unprompted, that the translation mattered and handed me a specific edition instead of whatever was closest. I didn’t ask. He was right anyway.
Part of it is just the physical experience of the place, which I don’t think I can fully explain to anyone who’s grown up mostly buying books online. There’s something about scanning spines you didn’t come looking for that surfaces things a search bar never would, an odd nonfiction title shelved next to something completely unrelated that catches your eye purely because of where it happened to land. Half my nonfiction shelf, the stuff that ends up in these reviews, honestly, came from exactly that kind of accidental find rather than any deliberate research.
I go in maybe twice a month, always tell myself I’m just checking if anything new came in, always leave having spent more than I meant to on books I hadn’t planned to buy an hour earlier. My kitchen instincts kick in there too, weirdly, the same impulse that makes me buy an extra thing at the market because it looked good even though it wasn’t on the list. I don’t think that’s a bad impulse in either context, honestly. Some of my best dishes started as an unplanned market find, and some of my favorite books started as an unplanned shelf find in a cramped store on Haywood that I still, three years in, haven’t fully mapped.