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Bookshop Memories — Aladdin Book Shoppe, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Aladdin Book Shoppe – Oklahoma City, OK

Aladdin Book Shoppe in March 2009, (c) Photo by Benjamin L. Clark

One of the oldest used bookshops in Oklahoma, and since closed, Aladdin had the air of an old bookshop, though I guess it had not been in that final location for several decades. Yet, it had been there for a while when I started shopping there in early 2005, not long after moving to Oklahoma City. 

I was fortunately hired at the Oklahoma Historical Society after graduate school to work at the newly opened Oklahoma History Center near the capitol building. Living on what was then the northwestern outskirts of Oklahoma City, I was excited to be decently employed, and have the means to occasionally buy books. Even collect books. I had been collecting for a few years by then, but now I could do so a little more seriously. I bought more bookshelves, and fortunately had space for them in my rented house (practically the intersection of 150th and Council Road).

Aladdin Books was a shop that took books seriously. Some used bookshops don’t take books all that seriously as objects. They are merely the commodity being sold. There may be a little romance tied up in them, but that just makes them more saleable. But at Aladdin, books were still special and a little magic. The staff were welcoming, had a good selection, and did not like me browsing into what I thought was just a section of Books About Books, but was their booksellers reference shelf. It wasn’t very clear where the store’s stock ended, and the reference shelf began, except it was near-ish the register, but not exactly blocked from public access and browsing. I do recall finding the first pirated Modern Library books I’ve ever seen in person. They were the big Decline And Fall of the Roman Empire two volume set by Gibbon. I never bought them, but I’d visit them from time to time. I think I let the Modern Library collectors list-serv know about them in case anyone wanted them, but there were no takers. 

I eventually found Aladdin’s back room, which felt off-limits but wasn’t. Unlike the front of the store, which was full but tidy, it felt more like things were being processed in this back space. There were piles of boxes filled with books and sometimes other ephemera. Old issues of AB Bookman and other old bookseller catalogs were fun to browse. They also had shelves of the really old and battered things I like to look at. A shelf of Tom Swift and his imitators in fraying covers, ripped spine Bobbsey Twin runs, chart-topping fiction of the 1920s now completely forgotten, that sort of thing. They also had bound newspapers and other periodicals with red leather spines rotting away to dust, ready to stain your clothes if you got too close. This back room was my favorite part of the shop and a wonderful place to have a little space in the oppressive quiet, which was the norm here. 

At the very front of the store was another smaller room. This was their “Rare Book Room” which had things that Kyle Hollingshead at Book Alley in Lubbock talked about — books that booksellers thought were rare for a long time, and then as more and, more of them moved online, discovered that a lot of them just weren’t that rare at all. I can’t remember looking in there much, or any specific things they had, but the glass cases were nice. I can vaguely recall some nice-to-look-at old children’s books.

I can’t recall any specific books that I bought from Aladdin, though I know I went there regularly in my time living in OKC. Their stock just didn’t move much, so I was less inclined to go very frequently. 

Toward the end of my time in Oklahoma, Half-Price Books opened a shop a short drive north along the same arterial street that Aladdin was essentially on. The arrival of the discount used book behemoth no doubt signaled the beginning of the end for Aladdin. 

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

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Bookshop Memories – Disabled American Veterans Thrift Store, Lubbock, Texas

The Disabled American Veterans Thrift Store – Lubbock, TX

Photo by usdanrcstexas

Not a bookshop, but the book room of this thrift store was easily the most magical book place in Lubbock in the early 2000s. And, the prices were good too. I don’t recall exactly how what they were, but it could have been as cheap as a dime for paperbacks, a quarter for hardbacks. Maybe a quarter for paperbacks and fifty cents for hardbacks. All in all, very cheap, even back then.

This thrift store was on the tougher side of town in what had once been a service garage of some kind. They knocked a hole through one of the brick walls into another room and stacked it high with shelves, hung some big old dining room lights that a generous person would call chandeliers, and wired in some music. Usually, the local classical music/ jazz station played. Random art and posters were hung on any blank spots of the walls and rotated through regularly since they were priced cheaply. There was still crumbly brick in the doorway. It wasn’t finished or polished in any way. They always had interesting, strange things. One example that I still remember was a vintage diploma (or license, maybe?) for a Texas undertaker that I bought for under $1, surely, that sold well on ebay. 

I loved browsing there for books for my own shelves and buying books for resale online. They had a steady stream of old copies of Modern Library books, which I collected. They always had far older stuff than the other thrift stores, and always had a lot to sift through. It was also here that I built the bulk of my collection of bookseller labels and bookbinder tickets. The older books that had these little treasures were often in such bad shape they could barely be called books still. 

I was a regular, but I didn’t get to know any of the people working there beyond nodding acquaintance. No one seemed to work there very long. They didn’t care much about the books. The books were never sorted, and only rarely tidied up. A door to the outside was at one end of the book room, allowing outside air, and lots of dust, to come in through the rusty security gate that was always locked shut. I found some real treasures there, including a book I sold to a history of computing archive that paid my rent that month. They also kept very nice ephemera. I found some wonderful old travel booklets there from the later 1940s and early 1950s with early airlines and bygone passenger train photos. 

My greatest find there however was probably the three or four years’ worth of back issues of a magazine called Firsts. If you’re not already familiar, Firsts started in the early 1990s and has survived the waves of change in the magazine publishing industry and is still published today. Their focus is entirely on collecting, and sharing detailed articles about collectible books. It’s essential reading and reference for collectors of modern fiction. This stack of knowledge was incredibly helpful to me, and I’m grateful instead of tossing them as pointless niche magazines, someone at the thrift store put them out because, “hey, you never know.” To my regret, I was very hard up and sold a few issues that I didn’t think would be as helpful. Back issues were already commanding premiums then. 

There was another thrift store nearby that I always stopped in but almost never had anything good. They had good furniture, which I would occasionally flip or buy for myself, but for books — nearly nothing. I think someone sorted them in a rusty barrel with a rake, judging by condition. Freshly torn covers, a crazy high percentage with loose spines, and torn pages. I think I did score a big stack of the huge Walter Foster art instructions books there once, but that was it. Big lots of those used to sell on ebay, but you had to offer a lot of them.

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

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Bookshop Memories — The Book Inn, Lubbock, Texas

The Book Inn – Lubbock, TX

John Vachon, 1940, U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information [public domain]

The Book Inn was run and owned by Kyle Hollingshead, known perhaps to Western pulp collectors as the author of a handful of ACE paperbacks back in the day. I never knew that until writing this essay and searching online to see if The Book Inn was still open. I doubted it since when I was going there regularly in the very early 2000s, Mr. Hollingshead was talking about retiring. It closed a few years ago. 

The Book Inn was nice and as the name implies, homier, despite being located in one of Lubbock’s ubiquitous, soulless commercial strips. Inside, the shelves were double-stacked in every section, often with books stacked on top in each shelf as well. Books were piled on the floor, in the window, and on about any flat surface. It’s one of the “fullest” bookshops I’ve ever seen. Once you got into it, you walked delicately. “You’ll never know what you’ll find,” he’d say with genuine wonder in his voice.

It was almost always completely silent inside The Book Inn, minus the buzz of the fluorescent lights and the sound of traffic outside. The windows rattled when semi-trucks trundled down the street.

Of the general used book shops in Lubbock in the early 2000s, The Book Inn had the most serious theology-religion section, just inside the front door. Of course, Lubbock, Texas, is very Evangelical Christian. However, it was not a religious bookshop, nor did the owner come off as particularly religious. I think those were the books to be found, and those were the books to be sold. If he was religious, he never made me feel weird about it, which was nice. Lubbock is a hyper-evangelical community, so the general vibe can be off-putting.  

Hollingshead could be a little more prickly than some of the other owners, but once he warmed to you, he was very nice. It wasn’t too long until I confessed I was selling some of the books I bought there online. He started to give me the “trade” discount booksellers give to one another. He would refer to me as a book scout or “runner,” which I wore as a badge of honor. He had noticed I came pretty regularly and there seemed to be no real pattern to what I bought, so instead of playing coy, I admitted what I was doing: taking things he had underpriced and selling them online for a profit. I didn’t phrase it that way, exactly, but that was what I was largely doing, once I’d found things I could afford to add to my own collection. It was very generous of him.

I occasionally bring him bags of books from scouting endeavors where I had to buy a giant lot of books to get the handful I wanted to sell online. It just wasn’t worth the effort, or storage space for things that would sell online for under $10, but it was great inventory for him. He liked that I brought him good stuff to sell, helping me learn what I was already experiencing as an online seller at the time: it wasn’t hard to sell books; it was much harder to buy good books that sell with enough room in your costs to make a buck. His clientele was all in person, in his shop, and all of mine were online, so I guess he figured we weren’t really competing with one another. 

He kept an index card file for customers, I think to track stuff they were looking for, but mostly for those of us who brought in books and got in-store credit. That’s always what I did. He’d sometimes offer cash, usually about half of what he’d offer in credit. I think I had to take him up on it a few times, but not often. He’d let you use credit for up to half the purchase price, so there was usually something I could find to make it worth my while, but after the first few months, it was tough. He certainly knew his books, though he’d often say, “You can’t know everything.”

He tried selling online but only out of dire necessity. He hated it. I remember him saying that the brick-and-mortar rare book business was dying because of internet sales. How could he compete with booksellers with even lower overhead than he had, owning the building his shop was in and living a semi-retired life? This seemed to be the big lesson as a general used bookseller through the end of the mail-order era, and the beginning of online selling: hard-to-find books were no longer hard to find, and rare books weren’t that rare after all.  

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

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Bookshop Memories — Book Alley, Lubbock, Texas

Book Alley – Lubbock, TX

“Punch, Judy and their Child” by George Cruikshank, 1832 [public domain]

Only a few blocks down from Hester Books was Book Alley. The guy that ran this shop was an odd duck. If you frequent the places old books are heaped together and sold, you encounter some weirdos along the way, so it’s unsurprising. I don’t know how else to describe him. He didn’t want to talk to anyone, except to promote his Punch and Judy puppet shows for children’s parties. He seemed to have almost no interest at all in books, though to his credit, the shop was always very tidy. A single sheet poster at the front of the otherwise nicely appointed shop advertised his availability for puppet shows. A sickly sweet, off-putting smell often lingered in the shop. I think I eventually attributed the odor to a neighboring business in the commercial strip where this shop was located, but it could be powerful. The posted hours of business were also unreliable, perhaps due to his puppet show commitments. I never learned his name.

What I gathered second and third-hand was his father established the shop many years earlier and had a connection to Texas Tech University there in Lubbock. So many private libraries from retiring or dead professors came to the shop over the years. When he died, the shop passed to the son. The impressive books were in beautiful condition usually, and priced accordingly. I was also haunting the place to find severely underpriced books. No one can know everything, and many booksellers were still reluctant to sell online. A sharp-eyed booklover with a little extra time could still visit bookshops and find things to resell elsewhere and make a tidy profit. However, those days were dwindling.

I did find a signed first of Among the Gently Mad there, which felt like a find, though it was still a rather new book. Of course, I wanted it for myself. It was priced too high for me, and when I later came back with the money, of course, it was gone. That’s how that always goes. 

There were some nice collectible paperbacks here. The vintage Penguins and related early paperback books were incredible. I remember being shocked to see that some Penguins were issued with dustjackets.  It was the first place I saw Armed Services Editions. There was an enormous collection, perhaps complete, of the books of the food writer M.F.K. Fisher. Now that I live very close to her final home, I think back on that collection. I wonder what happened to it. 

There was also a wonderful shelf with pictorial publisher cloth bindings from around the turn of the 20th Century, with all kinds of amazing motifs present: Moose and lumberjacks in checked jackets, armored knights and castles, and flags galore. It made for a beautiful display. He also had some very nice bins of ephemera to browse. I recall seeing a lot of sheet music, but there was a lot more, though now I don’t remember what. I remember specifically going there in search of WWII-related ephemera to scan and use as filler in museum exhibitions, but not finding much to work with. Most of it was too old. And all of it was nice. I don’t remember anything more specific in the ephemera, except for some fruit crate labels. The ephemera stock did seem to freshen up periodically, so he must have restocked it, and I always held out hope of finding something cool. 

The shop has long since closed, I understand. 

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

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My Panels at Comic-Con — San Diego

July 21-24, 2022 – San Diego Convention Center

Friday, July 22 — 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM in Room 24ABC
Celebrating 100 Years of Charles Schulz
Moderator Damian Holbrook (TV Guide) and panelists Robb Armstrong (JumpStart), Benjamin L. Clark (curator, Charles M. Schulz Museum), Melissa Menta (Peanuts Worldwide), Alexis J. Fajardo (Schulz Creative Associates), and Hailey Cartwright and Promise Robinson (Armstrong Project scholarship recipients) discuss the centennial and legacy of the Peanuts creator; the publication of a new book Charles M. Schulz: The Art and Life of the Peanuts Creator in 100 Objects; and Peanuts’ inspiring Armstrong Project (named for Franklin Armstrong, Peanuts’ first Black character): two $100,000 endowments to Howard and Hampton Universities to support the work of up-and-coming Black animators.

Saturday, July 23 —4:30 PM – 5:30 PM in Room 26AB
It’s a Filmstrip, Charlie Brown
In the 1980s, kids got career advice from Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and pals (including a new Latina friend) in educational filmstrips produced by the Peanuts animation team. Benjamin L. Clark (curator, Charles M. Schulz Museum) and Nat Gertler (The Aaugh Blog) discuss and present some of these filmstrips, with one live-cast voice performance by cartoonist Gladys Ochoa (Ribbons of Thought), Allison Gertler (Invisible Zeppelin), and more., and more.

Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz, December 11, 1997
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Bookshop Memories — Hester Books, Lubbock, Texas

Hester Books – Lubbock, TX

I moved to Lubbock, Texas for graduate school at Texas Tech University in 2003, and I was surprised by how many used bookshops there were. Not only paperback exchanges but a few real, excellent used bookshops too. Three of them in fact. All of them sprinkled along the same street. Two of them not too far from each other and the last just a bit further east. 

Hester’s was perhaps the largest, and almost certainly the best known in Lubbock. Run for many years by Ross Hester, he was in his eighties, maybe even close to ninety in those days. His daughter, Renee, ran it day-to-day. Both were friendly and as chatty or quiet as you needed them to be. Mr. Hester didn’t do much at the store, but he would still come by regularly, shuffling to his desk near the center of the shop and telling great old stories about living in Lubbock and World War II. Still a nearly dry town, you could buy alcohol from taxi drivers back during the War, according to him. 

Behind a bright blue door, Hester’s was bright and tiled. The shelves were white too. At least, that’s how I remember it. They had a good mix of books, dividing the large store about in half between fiction and non-fiction. There was also a long, low shelf that ran in from the entrance in the middle of the store of freebies you could help yourself to on your way out. These were the real odd-balls, the broken spine classics. It was a wonderful shop.

One thing I didn’t like was that though they went to the effort to put just about every book with a dust jacket in a plastic Brodart cover protector, they would sometimes touch up areas of color loss with magic markers. I’m sure for a general used bookshop, it helped the presentation for appearance-conscious buyers, but for collectors, it was more than a step in the wrong direction. I don’t remember that fact stopping me from buying anything in particular, but it was disappointing to see. At least they didn’t tape the dustjackets up to “fix” the tears, or tape the jackets to the books.

A charming thing, however, was that they may have been about the last bookshop in the U.S. to actively use a bookseller’s label. This custom goes back a very long way, but in the U.S. it seems to have had its heyday from the late 19th Century to the middle of the 20th, or so. You’ll sometimes still find these small, discrete labels placed inside the front or back cover of old books. They can be a simple typographic label with the name of a bookshop and city, maybe an address or location, like the Hester label, or they could be more elaborate labels, sometimes die-cut in the shape of an open book, or with a small logo. They are sometimes called a bookseller’s ticket, though “ticket” seems to be more associated with the tiny labels of bookbinders than booksellers, for some reason.

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

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Bookshop Memories — York College Bookstore, York, Nebraska

York College Bookstore — York, NE

York College, a little, private liberal arts college where I did my undergrad degree in history was right for me at the time. The tree-lined campus on red brick streets is idyllic, even romantic. My parents met there. Three generations of my family have attended and worked for the college, including a one-time president, who was a first cousin of my grandfather’s. I love the place. However, the less said about the bookshop, though, the better. It’s a cartoon of a college bookshop and not a funny or flattering one. But, it does come with a ghost story.

I can vaguely recall the college’s bookshop in my pre-school days when my parents came back for alumni events. We only lived an hour or so away, and my paternal grandparents lived in a nearby town that was even smaller than York. For decades the bookshop was in the basement of the oldest building still standing on campus. It had that old basement smell mingling with the smell of new books and creaky wire spinner racks of postcards and bumper stickers. The building it was in was wonderful. Hulitt Hall was built in 1903 and when I was there as a student myself, it still had the original wood trim featuring the college’s first mascot: the pansy. As a history major, most of my classes were in that building’s single classroom. 

At the basement level, at that time, was the mailroom for the campus, which included all the student P.O. boxes, and the bookshop. But, there was a new, large building on campus under construction at that time, and the college bookstore was slated to be housed in the new building. My roommate and I had work-study jobs in the maintenance and grounds department of the college, so it fell to us to dismantle the bookshop’s fixtures, shelving, and furnishings and move them into storage. New fixtures, shelving, and furnishings were planned for the new bookshop. There were no plans to use the old junk, but a thrifty ethos of “waste not, want not” hovered over every task. We did a lot of schlepping crap into storage.

This particular job had no precise schedule. We had a key to the building, so we decided it would be good to go over after dinner one evening and do the job. There would be no classes, and probably fewer professors to disturb, who had offices on the upper floors. Almost all the professors of the various humanities had their offices in the building beginning two floors above us. After gorging on cafeteria food the way only college freshmen can, we went over to Hulitt to see the job ahead of us. The place was deserted. The basement level had two ground-level entrances. One walk-out basement door, and another up a staircase that was then approaching 100-years worth of herds of students stomping up and down to the one and only mailroom on campus for decades. The threadbare carpeted wooden stairs were the creakiest stairs I’ve ever heard in my life. 

I checked upstairs on the office floors to see if anyone was around and let them know we were in the building. I had some regulars and favorites already, but no one was around. My roommate and I recited to each other the fact the creepy old building had been built as the music conservatory with tiny practice rooms on the third floor and that a female student one winter’s night in the 1950s left via the fire escape from one of those rooms and slipped on some ice and fell to her untimely death.

We went back into the former bookshop, now empty of books, t-shirts, and a few tchotchkes for alumni. I saw the buzzer on the door to alert a bookshop worker who may be alone in the back that they had a customer. No need for that thing anymore, so I yanked the wire out of it, disconnecting it from the electricity in the building. We didn’t need the annoyance as we went in and out.

We started to work, dismantling metal shelving units. There were posts and shelves. All of it made a clatter as we tossed them into banging-clanging piles of like things and sizes, to make loading and organizing easy on ourselves. We found a radio in a back room and turned it on to keep us company as we banged around. 

We’d been working for a couple of hours and the music on the radio shifted formats as the sun went down. By the time it was dark, we had to just shut it off. We worked with only our din and conversation for the company. 

Then, the radio, still in the back room and both of us together in the main area, snapped back on at full blast to blaring static. We were dumbfounded and both went and looked in the back room where the radio had been the whole time. The sound shifted horribly and was warbling and was frankly eerie. My roommate snapped it off. Just as he did so, the buzzer on the front door, that I had disconnected, started buzzing. Not a normal in-and-out, door open and close buzz, but a fast-paced staccato.

We ran out, and no one was there. No one was in the hall, no one was on the stairs. No one was there, yet someone seemed upset, perhaps using a ruckus to bother us the way we’d been making a racket that night. 

My roommate and I maintain that we don’t believe in ghosts, but something we were never able to explain happened that night.   

We went back and finished the job in the broad light of day. In four years there, we never had anyone tell us they pulled a prank on us. In fact, we told very few people of that night until much later.

We helped install things over at the new bookshop in the new building. It was soulless from the start and has since been kicked out to another building with less prestige, a thing no one knows what to do with, and no ingenuity to make it into something great. At least it’s probably not haunted. 

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

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Bookshop Memories  — The Bookshops of Omaha, Nebraska

Bookshops of Omaha  —  Omaha, NE

Clerk Magda Andreassen is in Kildahl Olsen’s Bok og Papirhandel in Vadsø, Norway. The store’s shelves are filled with books, magazines, and other stationery. The calendar on the wall is the date Friday, September 15, 1922.

In 2000, I got a summer job in Belleview, just south of Omaha, Nebraska. “The big city” for Nebraska kids. With around a half-million residents in the metro area, it surprises people. “It’s like a real city,” my New York City-raised father-in-law said on a visit once many years later. You have to imagine it in his NYC-Italian-Bronx accent, expressing genuine surprise. 

Back in 2000, it was my second summer vacation of college. I’d made the mistake of just going home the summer after my freshman year. It was dumb, but maybe I’d been more homesick than I could admit after that first year away. I had no idea what to do with myself besides going home and working again at my old job and hanging out with the few friends still hanging around. 

If you’re reading this and you’re young and privileged enough to go away for school … stay away. Go somewhere else, anywhere, and do anything. ANYTHING. Except for work on a commercial fishing boat. I had friends that did that and still don’t talk about what happened that summer twenty years later. A good friend that went to northern Alaska that summer to work in an oil field had a better time. He also went to make “a ton of money,” but it turns out a bag of Doritos cost $20 or something and had to be ordered a week in advance. He came back about as broke as when he went but exhausted from the work and eager for the easy life of a student.

I learned my lesson, and about as far as I could get from Lincoln was Omaha — i.e., not far, but it was something. But living with family friends who fed me frequently, my expenses were virtually nil, which was good because my income was also almost nil. I made enough money for gas, liability insurance on my truck, and a little food. And, of course, old books. 

Omaha still had several large used bookshops east of 72nd Street, including a cluster in Old Market. Twenty years later, I don’t remember the names and locations. They were all gone by the time I lived there again around 2015—all gone but one, Jackson Street Booksellers. 

Jackson Street was and is an incredible shop. An excellent selection of books then and now. If you’re looking for a used copy of last year’s bestseller, they probably have it. If you’re looking for a first-person account about cooking donuts for troops during the Crimean War, they may have it. When we moved to California, I unloaded several hundred books on Jackson Street. They gave me great prices and were always available to look at another car trunk load of books. They’re also conveniently located in Old Market, where you can grab an ice cream cone or a beer (or both!) nearby if you require refreshment after browsing at Jackson Street. 

One of the old bookshops, Pageturners, lives on in name only. The location in Dundee was bought and turned into a bar and now bears the name Pageturners Lounge. A nice bookish mural spans the back of the building, but other than that, it’s not much of a literary hangout. Going there for a beer on a quiet afternoon, a baseball game played on the TV. There wasn’t much else to look at in the big mirror above the bar. Even sitting there, I couldn’t recall much about the bookshop that had been there, though I’m sure I had been there many years earlier. 

There was space for readings at the renovated bar and such, but I’d never attended any, though we tried. We were in the last months of pregnancy or had a newborn in our time there, so stopping in for a drink once was about all I could squeeze in. Omaha has a literary scene, though it is very small, and hard to get into if you’re not at one of the Universities. But Omaha does attract the occasional big name author for signings and such, so there’s often something good to look forward to if you’re a booklover.

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

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Bookshop Memories  —  Yellowed Pages, Lincoln, Nebraska

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.

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Bookshop Memories: A Novel Idea – Lincoln, Nebraska

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.