Web and I got to New York Saturday around 3 and headed down to Union Square. We checked out the farmer's market then went to the Strand Bookstore - famous for having "18 miles of books".
And it felt like we walked through all the 18 miles! The first floor had a great selection of tables laid out with popular books and the Strand's customers' top 80 books. (Interestingly, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Wells, which I had never heard of but Jo recently recommended was among the top 80.) It was my first look at Eggers' Wild Things with its furry cover. Also on the first floor was a huge selection of cookbooks and fiction. I could have moved in there. The basement and third floor had non-fiction, including huge sections on art and design. Each major section had a table for the top books in that section, an option I really liked. They seemed to intersperse New and Used books in all the sections.
The top floor, only accessible by elevator, had been recommended to me by Kung...it had special editions and rare books. The first thing we both noticed getting off the elevator was the delightfully musty smell of old books. It was fun to see unedited galleys and very old editions. It was obvious that serious work went on there assessing and repairing books.
Of course we bought two books from downstairs: Seeing by Jose Saramago (the sequel to Blindness), and The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Web's lucky he got me to leave the store at all.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I'm glad you visited the top floor. There was this vault about 4 feet tall and 3-4 feet wide that had a glass door so the contents had that "no touching" feeling. There were these teeny tiny books in there. How the hell can you print it let alone read it? Maybe the idea came from old Cracker Jacks. Did you visit any of the famous pizza parlors downtown? Cheers.
Post a Comment