May 2022 – Benjamin L. Clark, writer

Yellowed Pages — Lincoln, NE

‘Mug, Book, Smoking Materials and Crackers’ by John Frederick Peto, Dayton Art Institute (public domain)

When my family first moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1986, we lived at the edge of a section of town known as University Place. UniPlace is a small district nestled between Nebraska Wesleyan University and the East campus of the University of Nebraska. Besides the mixed residential neighborhoods of droopy old houses converted into apartment buildings, there’s an old commercial district a few blocks long with two and three-story brick buildings from the turn of the 20th Century. To my young eyes, the architecture was old and interesting. However, there were not many places on that commercial strip on 48th Street a young family would go. There was an old-time barbershop on a corner where my Mom or Dad would take me for a fresh buzz cut every couple of months, but other than that, it was bars and pawn shops. Except for Yellowed Pages.

Yellowed Pages felt yellowed and crumbly inside. The owner smoked, so everything in the store smelled of tobacco smoke. And that was long before the building next door, an HVAC and plumbing supply shop, burned to the ground around 2002. As a young man, I lived in the neighborhood again, just a couple of blocks away from the bookshop, and my apartment had soot coming out of the ductwork. The bookshop closed later, around 2014.

I went back to the old bookshop in those last months it was open. It had changed a lot from my childhood memories of the late-1980s. It wasn’t smoky; the books were nice. But, the neighborhood had changed too. The city tore down something on the mini-downtown stretch, and a police station was put in. A more prominent police presence didn’t keep people from rifling through my car a few times. Someone stole my girlfriend’s stereo and some other stuff from her car. They took the radio out of my truck, plugged it back in, and left it on the floor, wires strung out of the dash. I know they unplugged it and plugged it back in since all the radio pre-sets had been wiped. Maybe they realized it was junk no one would buy, or maybe they felt bad for me. But, the wig shop was gone, the bars were gone, pawnshops were relocated or cleaned up, and the old barbershop was long gone. Boutiques were in, and the used bookshop had to go—a sign of the times in a gentrifying neighborhood. I moved away too.

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

A Novel Idea – Lincoln, NE

A Novel Idea opened in the early 1990s downtown, closer to the University of Nebraska’s campus than most of the other used bookstores in town. Downtown Lincoln was changing. It was becoming a destination for people who had moved to the suburbs a generation earlier. It was gentrifying. However, this area closest to the university has long been filled with various commercial enterprises. Bars thrived, of course, but now other smaller shops were opening. Even little shops you could generously describe as boutiques. A Novel Idea seems to have been established when increased pedestrian traffic began to grow, and not just on Nebraska football game days.

The shop featured at least one cat that I recall, except that it existed. I don’t remember the cat’s name. The workers were friendly, and I don’t know if I ever met the owners, but maybe those friendly smiles were from them. I didn’t go there often. It seemed more like a “standard used bookstore,” if that makes sense. Where you could find a book that is still in print, just cheaper than the original cover price. A good place to find a classic, not so much the strange and unexpected, for the book you could not conceive of existing. It was a good place to check if you had a specific book you were looking for. They did not seem to specialize in anything in particular. They did not keep a large stock of old books.

The clientele also skewed younger than the other downtown shops, probably due to its proximity to the University of Nebraska’s main campus. So, it was a better place to find pretty, smart hippy girls who wore tank tops without bras and sometimes didn’t shave their armpits. If you were looking for such people in the ‘90s.

One of the other things I recall was that the older books were kept in the very low-ceilinged basement, and I can remember bumping my head pretty hard down there once. I may have even done it more than once. Also, the basement’s cement floor must be one of the waviest ever poured. I had worked on some paving crews around then and never could quite figure out what would make it like that.

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

Month: May 2022

Bookshop Memories — Yellowed Pages, Lincoln, Nebraska

Bookshop Memories: A Novel Idea – Lincoln, Nebraska