Since books are such a huge part of my life, it should come as no surprise that I love bookstores. Like Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's, going to a bookstore, even if I have no money, cheers me up when I've got the blues or the mean reds. But I'm a bit peculiar when it comes to bookstores. I prefer small used bookstores to the mega-stores like Barnes and Noble. I like other people's books because they sometimes have notes; I also feel like I'm rescuing books that were unloved and thus sold to a bookstore. This is not to say that I dislike big stores; they have their own special feeling, but it's different than the little places like, say, Reader's Corner back home. I suppose the small places also feed into my slightly hipster pretensions ;)
At big stores, I always look first at the bargain books because I feel like they're just a little less loved; clearly, somebody decided that the books should get a sticker proclaiming that, more or less, the store just wants to get rid of those volumes (Perhaps I'm projecting a bit? Probably just a tad). Sometimes the bargain racks and bins have real treasures, like the $7 copy of Yeats' Irish Fairy Tales that I picked up the other night with the gift card my sweet sister-to-be gave me for my birthday; sometimes books are in the bargain bin for a reason, like the $7 biography of Grace O'Malley, the Irish pirate queen, that I bought several months ago--it's full of shoddy scholarship and rampant misspellings, despite being in its second edition (and yes, I'm a little bitter about that purchase).
I also have a hard time buying magazines at bookstores. It somehow seems like a cop-out, to go to a building full of glorious (and not-so) volumes, in hardback and paperback, with pictures in black and white and color, without pictures, large and small: to take in all those options and decide instead to purchase a publication that the publisher knows will end up in next month's recycling just seems wrong. For the record, I like magazines too, but I prefer to buy them at the drugstore or where have you, not a bookstore. Back to bookstores.
Just for giggles, I'll walk you through a typical trip to a bookstore, whether large or small. When I walk through the doors of a bookstore, it's as if I've entered a trance. I scan the room, trying to decide where to start. Once I pick a row to start with, I slowly make my way up one side and down the other, picking one up, scanning the covers, then placing it back on the shelf where it goes (I can't stand people who don't follow alphabetical order when reshelving books. That's just rude). Sometimes I back up because I think I've missed something good. It literally takes me forever to get through the fiction section until I get to the horror/Western/romance shelves. Those I breeze through, since none of those topics interest me. I skip certain sections in non-fiction as well, but that depends on my mood; the sports section is the only one I shun consistently. Very rarely do I pick a book on my first trip around the store. I need to absorb the selection, to see what I'm in the mood for, and then make my choice. As you can imagine, bookstore visits are long, involved rituals that I can't perform too often, because I don't have time and for which rarely have the money, though looks, thankfully, are always free.
(the above post inspired by Tuesday night's trip to Barnes and Noble, where I bought Yeats while [inadvertently] dressed like Olive Oyl from Popeye. True story)
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