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Category: Bookshop Memories

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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.

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Bookshop Memories: Bluestem Books, Lincoln, Nebraska

Bluestem Books – Lincoln, NE

Growing up in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the 1980s and ’90s, there was a bookshop in the scuzzier part of downtown in an old brick building, under a towering overpass that took you out to the interstate on the east side of town. It was a tiny corner of our modest town that felt like a much bigger city. There were pigeons. 

Bluestem Books was an institution by then. There were always cats around, and no one cared if you stayed and browsed or just sat and read for hours on end. Even as a teen doing his best grunge impression day in and out browsing the history, essays, and mystery sections. There was an old green chair in a little nook that was a coveted spot. People would circulate through the store, accidentally sneaking up on one another because there were virtually no open lines of sight because of the tight, full shelves. 

The building was also ancient, for Lincoln. The wavy glass in the drafty windows and crumbly brick gave the building a charming derelict feel it may have deserved. Doorways had been knocked through brick walls, giving the shop a rambling layout. The wood floors creaked dreadfully, though muffled under threadbare, faded rugs. Old cast iron pipes passed through here and there, their purposes unclear. Strange metal fittings studded the concrete vault ceilings in places. I wondered if portions of the bookshop had once served as a meat locker or some other weigh-station for once-living things headed out on the nearby rail lines. 

It was always warm in there. It probably had more to do with an old boiler heating system, but that was my recollection of it. Going there on an intensely cold day, howling winds that wanted to slam the door on you as you wrenched it open. The door may have been kept attached to the building with a long, old storm door spring to help it eventually snap shut. The spring sang a stretched-out springy twang and thwack back into the door as it closed. There was a faded, soiled note taped to the door with instructions on how to use the door. “Hold on tight on windy days,” or “Don’t let the door slam,” or something like that. 

Near that old green chair were a couple of short shelves dedicated to series like Everyman’s Library and The Modern Library — small vintage uniform editions of classics and some contemporary fiction, “contemporary” meaning 1920-1965 or so, arguably the heyday of such series. It was there that I saw the Modern Library series as a series — the recognizable books were a great size and affordable, and they looked cool on the shelf. Looking cool on the shelf is a virtue we don’t admit often enough as book lovers. 

I don’t remember if I bought any Modern Library books there that early … I may have. I never had a lot of money, but I sometimes had a job after school, so I had a little spending money in my teens. I don’t remember buying much there in my teenage years, really. But it felt good to be somewhere where I could buy books. 

After leaving Lincoln for college, I would try to come back whenever I was back in town. I’d bring friends sometimes but usually come alone. It was the kind of bookshop that in some ways was better to go alone. 

Reading one of the John Dunning biblio-mystery novels featuring his rare bookseller/ detective, Cliff Janeway, which takes place mostly around Denver, I sat upright one night where toward the end they mention Bluestem Books in Lincoln by name. My book world had been so insular, so much part of my niner life that it was strange to think this author had been there too and wrote about it, and it came into my hands. I took my battered paperback down to Scott at Bluestem and had him autograph it. He laughed and told me he’d had a few others, but not in a long time. 

Around 2000, they added a bookshop dog, who was a delightful addition, and quite a departure from the cats they had. A floofy friendly thing a little less broad than an ottoman and about as tall named Don Diego. I’m not a cat person, but I remember one cat named Thurber who had been awarded employee of the month for several months (and years) running. But then Diego was different. He was eventually awarded the title of Director of Customer Relations, a role to which he was perfectly suited. He was a Havanese, a breed of dog I had to look up later after I’d asked the owners about him. “He’s hypoallergenic!” they claimed. Don Diego’s grand-niece Maribel is now filling in since his retirement. 

Bluestem Books magnet featuring Havanese dog, Don Diego
Don Diego de la Bluestem. And the old address under the overpass.

Even by the mid-1990s, things were changing in downtown Lincoln’s western district, soon to be ubiquitously known as “The Haymarket.” The thrift stores and vacant storefronts that were home to the homeless and pigeons were beginning to change. Fresh brown paper went over the windows, and work trucks began to fill the alleyways. Eventually, it became Lincoln’s hotspot, to the betterment of local tax revenues, no doubt, but losing its seedy charm. 

Bluestem had to move too, eventually but managed to find a larger location not too far away, but it’ll always be the old building in the shade of an overpass I used to think was a meat-locker by the railroad tracks on the bad side of downtown that I’ll hold in my heart.  

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

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Bookshop Memories: Barnes & Noble – Lincoln, Nebraska

Barnes & Noble – Lincoln, NE

When Barnes and Noble arrived in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the spring of 1994, they staked out a huge chunk of prime real estate right on “O” Street. It cleared a fiefdom from the car dealership that ran nearly uninterrupted for eight blocks on both sides of Lincoln’s main street. This giant new store was a big deal. Not only did they bring easy access to a cosmopolitan newsstand, but of course, that hallmark and highmark of modern western culture: Starbucks coffee. Finally, we could buy fancy, expensive coffee drinks and not have to go all the way downtown for the pleasure. And it was from a brand we had heard of on television. 

My Dad, who owns a small business, had rented a pleasant office nearby several years earlier on a bank building’s fourth floor. He was thrilled. Who knows how many hours he killed there during the week looking through car magazines, bringing home the occasional Hemmings Motor News or the aspirational DuPont Registry for us to get a glimpse into how wealthy people live. “This house has its own waterpark!” One night he came home with an espresso machine. It wasn’t one sold by Starbucks, I’m sure. However, we cannot doubt the inspiration for buying the contraption. This strange, exotic machine stayed in its box in the pantry for some time, though I don’t know why. Perhaps we were intimidated by it.

One day I was home playing hooky, sometime in the seventh grade, and I dug the machine out and plugged it in for the first time. By then, I was regularly drinking sweet milky coffee concoctions. It was time to learn about the real thing. I read the manual, opened the little packet of pre-ground, measured coffee pods, and let it rip. Soon, I was dissolving Werther’s Original candies to mix in. Italian branded flavored syrups had already appeared in our home to make Italian sodas, so the idea to sweeten it up wasn’t a new one. I had one waiting for Dad when he came home. I was lucky my head didn’t explode with what was probably a near-lethal amount of caffeine in my young body.

When Barnes & Noble came to town, going to the bookshop became less remarkable. In those years, the store was clean, cool, and bright—a respite in a hectic day, not a dive into some subject, writer, or experience. We were just going to grab a coffee, maybe browse a little and go.

Festooned with holiday decorations and a table of ladies ready to wrap gifts, I quickly made it my preferred place to buy gifts during the holidays. The big wood double doors, with the little panes of glass, swung easy and offered a warm welcome in the winter. The ladies were from some good society doing good works. Their wrapping paper was thick and subdued, and it was only a donation to have them quickly wrap up all these rectangles. I’ve never been great at wrapping gifts, so it was an easy choice. 

It was the ’90s, I was in high school, and I didn’t have much money to spend. So, another thing I loved at Barnes & Noble was that they carried Dover Thrift Editions. If you’re not familiar with this series of books, they are the absolute most cheaply produced paperback books of all time. And with our annual 14-hour drive each way to Michigan for Christmas at my Grandparents’ ahead of me and a weeklong stay with virtually no television and early bedtimes — it was a reading paradise. Yes, I could read our assigned books for school, but I already wanted to read other stuff. And the Dover Thrift copies of Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, and The Hound of the Baskervilles fit easily in my bookbag and only cost a dollar or maybe two each, at the most. B&N would even put them on sale for half-price, so $10 would buy a lot. It was almost as good as the used book sale in the mall’s basement each summer, but these books were *new*. 

The wallpaper graphic covers today give me a warm, Christmassy feeling, awakening memories of laying in the rollaway bed in my grandparents’ basement in northwestern Michigan, the little basement well-windows filled with snow diffusing morning daylight bright enough to read by. Grandma cooking a full breakfast upstairs and a few murmured Good Mornings meant the coffee pot was already on its second run. 

I didn’t own a lot of new books. Most of the books on my shelves were claimed from my parents’ shelves or bought at the used book sales put on by the retired teachers association. They had books as cheap as 10 cents back then. I could come away with a grocery stack about to split for a few dollars, stuffed with wonderful old Modern Library editions, the solid colored Penguin paperbacks, and anything else that struck my fancy. Writing that memory, in particular, makes me feel like when my grandfather would reminisce about going to the movies, buying a candy bar, taking the streetcar home, and leftover change still clanking in his pocket from the quarter his mother gave him for his outing. 

It feels strange to feel nostalgia for Barnes & Noble in the 1990s. Having the behemoth come to town felt like a declaration of war against the small independent shops. However, many of them were just fine in the end. The bookshops at the mall took the brunt of the blow — places like Walden Books and B. Dalton. At least that’s how it looked to a teenager in Lincoln, Nebraska. 

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

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Cross Border Raid for Books

Every bibliophile wants to hunt at Larry McMurtry’s Booked Up in Archer City, Texas. At least you should. It was my pleasure to organize such a trip for the toddling Bibliophiles of Oklahoma back in January.
 
Photo by the author: Storefront of Booked Up, Inc., No. 1
 

If you’ve not heard of Booked Up, it is a world-class book mine in an unlikely place. McMurtry has bought and sold books for decades. Sure, he’s a Pulitzer Prize/Oscar-winning writer, but in interviews and his recent memoir Books , he’s just another bibliophile bookseller. McMurtry’s purpose for relocating to his ancestral home was to establish an American book town (without a festival, which, “is the last thing I want”, according to McMurtry). A fantastic interview spelling out his motivations and ideas on Nigel Beale’s Biblio File is here.


For most book collectors, Archer City may as well be on the moon, but for we few book lovers shouting in the hinterlands, it is our Shangri La. We don’t have a Strand, a Powell’s, or a CODEX book fair. Having journeyed to Booked Up a few times before, I served as the bibliosherpa, along with Lynn Wienck of Chisholm Trail Bookstore, who is even more familiar with the environs of the Red River country.

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For the Bibliophiles of Oklahoma, this was our most well-attended event, so we will certainly go again, perhaps in early autumn. North Texas can be merciless in the summer. For our trip, at the end of January, the weather was pleasant, though crisp. It looks chilly in the photos, right? All of our members found additions to their collections. Not too hard when a dozen ravenous bibliophiles descend on 400-500,000 quality books. Everyone also saw items that surprised them. For me, it was a very nice (bargain!) copy of The Great Gatsby for my Modern Library collection. One spouse that was dragged along was surprised how such a large number of books could be so well organized, well-lit, and clean. Her one complaint was that the 10′ shelves were too tall for her. An example is below. This is where I spent more than half my day, in the Books About Books section. Yes, nearly that entire run visible, all 10′ high, are Books About Books — publishing memoirs, bibliographies, and other wonderous treasures.

When it comes to surprises, you don’t have to take my word for it. John C. Roberts, a member of the esteemed Caxton Club of Chicago, published a fantastic article in the January issue of the Caxtonian about his own southern sojourn from Chicago. Even this more established collector of modern firsts found surprises.

Photo by the author: The Books About Books section

There are a few practical considerations weighing a trip to Booked Up.

You won’t go there “passing through” to somewhere else. For many collectors, Archer City can be a destination. Really.


Virtually none of the inventory, which is hand-selected by McMurtry for quality, is online. None. And, perhaps as many as 500,000 books, no junk. None.


Wear layers. There is little/no heating or air-conditioning in the four buildings, and north Texas can have erratic weather. The buildings are a little spread out.


According to the signs posted about, books are organized Erratically/ Impressionistically/ Whimsically/ Open to Interpretation. Moby Dick could be in American Fiction, Animals, Nautical, Fishing & Hunting, Travel, etc.

Photo by the author: Storefront of Booked Up, Inc., No. 2


As of this writing, they still accept major credit cards and cash.

If you go with a group, bring your own water and synchronize watches. Cell service is spotty at best.

For those of you who went, leave a comment below to make everyone jealous to go with us next time!

 

 

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