Amazon, Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Powells send me regular emails. Half Price Books keeps me informed of sales with their coupon cards. Polite staff at The Book Seller, housed in the main library, sell me their withdrawn books. When I need books that I didn’t know I needed – for reference and for reading - I visit Tina’s Paperback Book Exchange.
Tina knows books. She’s known books since grade school, or before. She sits at the counter looking over the cover of the book she is currently reading, to answer my questions, to direct me to books, to suggest that the book I don’t know I am looking for might be the third one down on the second shelf, to talk books.
Tina finds books I didn’t know existed. Amazon might have alerted me about them once I bought something similar, but Tina has the ability to synthesize all the parts of my interests. She’s a reading book-seller, able to anticipate what I would like and what aspect of a book is going to be important in what I’m writing.
A few months ago, as I began developing a manuscript about an astro physicist, I was at Paperback Book Exchange browsing the shelves. “I need an old book about the stars,” I said, “something that would have been kept in the attic, read by a kid years ago. A good book.”
“What about this one?” The illustrations were vaguely Art Deco, the paper thick, the dust jacket slightly chipped at the bottom of the spine, the smell of old paper, dry attics, and time. The Young Folk’s Book of the Heavens. Published in 1925. It was perfect. Up to date astronomy information I could find on the Internet. What I needed and Tina found was period information for my story’s plot and character development.
Books reach Tina in the usual ways and in some not so usual. Customers trade in their have-reads to be applied toward the price of to-be-read finds. Stock keeps changing, augmented by sources only Tina knows about. In addition to an exhaustive knowledge of what’s in the store, Tina has the ability to find what someone is looking for. “I need a book on quantum physics that I can understand,” I tell her, acknowledging that I’m requesting a specialized item geared toward a non-science bent mind. She will find it.
Tina remembers. “I’m looking for all the books Margot Benary-Isbert or Alexandra Raife or Joseph Altsheler have written,” I say. One by one, she finds them. She sets aside other books for me to look at on my next visit, books that she has unearthed at rummage sales, found in tag bins, discards, results of her regular route of discovery.
A few times I’ve accompanied Tina on book scouting expeditions. I will quickly scan the titles on the shelves and be ready to move on. She will reach to the shelf; pull out a book, and say, “Is this the one you were hunting for?” Tina found The Forsytes by Suleika Dawson, a contemporary continuation of the family story. She also found John Fisher’s The World of the Forsytes, a book about the society and customs of Galsworthy’s original Forsyte saga family. Books come to her. Books like her.
There’s a box of Free to Good Home books at the back door of the Paperback Book Exchange, but there’s a hundred thousand or more books for sale inside the store: paperback and hardcover, familiar and hard to find, all arranged by category. What’s there? Tina knows. “Do you have any mysteries by Agatha Christie?” asks a customer. “In the mystery section right around the corner in the next room, on the third shelf,” Tina answers.
Today I have time to browse: I let my hands and eyes look over who has appeared on the shelves since my last visit. A book about psychology, mentioned in something else I read. A biography of Victoria Woodhull (Notorious Victoria), the first woman to run for president, the first female Wall Street broker, one of the first women to advocate Free Love (a term Henry Thoreau coined long before the 1960s movement). Books of poetry, travel, adventure, escape, romance, mystery, philosophy, and war.
Paperback Book Exchange is more than a bookstore. There’s time to stand and talk; there’s time to ponder the character, the plot, the plausibility of what happened in a bestseller or a much loved classic. Surrounding us are thousands of books. The smell of paper and ink, turned pages and book memories fill the store. It’s better than a library, because once I buy a book, I don’t need to take it back. I can simply go there again, for talk about books and stories, and more books.
As Tina would say, “Imagine that: about books.”
Paperback Book Exchange – Neenah, WI
Tina knows books. She’s known books since grade school, or before. She sits at the counter looking over the cover of the book she is currently reading, to answer my questions, to direct me to books, to suggest that the book I don’t know I am looking for might be the third one down on the second shelf, to talk books.
Tina finds books I didn’t know existed. Amazon might have alerted me about them once I bought something similar, but Tina has the ability to synthesize all the parts of my interests. She’s a reading book-seller, able to anticipate what I would like and what aspect of a book is going to be important in what I’m writing.
A few months ago, as I began developing a manuscript about an astro physicist, I was at Paperback Book Exchange browsing the shelves. “I need an old book about the stars,” I said, “something that would have been kept in the attic, read by a kid years ago. A good book.”
“What about this one?” The illustrations were vaguely Art Deco, the paper thick, the dust jacket slightly chipped at the bottom of the spine, the smell of old paper, dry attics, and time. The Young Folk’s Book of the Heavens. Published in 1925. It was perfect. Up to date astronomy information I could find on the Internet. What I needed and Tina found was period information for my story’s plot and character development.
Books reach Tina in the usual ways and in some not so usual. Customers trade in their have-reads to be applied toward the price of to-be-read finds. Stock keeps changing, augmented by sources only Tina knows about. In addition to an exhaustive knowledge of what’s in the store, Tina has the ability to find what someone is looking for. “I need a book on quantum physics that I can understand,” I tell her, acknowledging that I’m requesting a specialized item geared toward a non-science bent mind. She will find it.
Tina remembers. “I’m looking for all the books Margot Benary-Isbert or Alexandra Raife or Joseph Altsheler have written,” I say. One by one, she finds them. She sets aside other books for me to look at on my next visit, books that she has unearthed at rummage sales, found in tag bins, discards, results of her regular route of discovery.
A few times I’ve accompanied Tina on book scouting expeditions. I will quickly scan the titles on the shelves and be ready to move on. She will reach to the shelf; pull out a book, and say, “Is this the one you were hunting for?” Tina found The Forsytes by Suleika Dawson, a contemporary continuation of the family story. She also found John Fisher’s The World of the Forsytes, a book about the society and customs of Galsworthy’s original Forsyte saga family. Books come to her. Books like her.
There’s a box of Free to Good Home books at the back door of the Paperback Book Exchange, but there’s a hundred thousand or more books for sale inside the store: paperback and hardcover, familiar and hard to find, all arranged by category. What’s there? Tina knows. “Do you have any mysteries by Agatha Christie?” asks a customer. “In the mystery section right around the corner in the next room, on the third shelf,” Tina answers.
Today I have time to browse: I let my hands and eyes look over who has appeared on the shelves since my last visit. A book about psychology, mentioned in something else I read. A biography of Victoria Woodhull (Notorious Victoria), the first woman to run for president, the first female Wall Street broker, one of the first women to advocate Free Love (a term Henry Thoreau coined long before the 1960s movement). Books of poetry, travel, adventure, escape, romance, mystery, philosophy, and war.
Paperback Book Exchange is more than a bookstore. There’s time to stand and talk; there’s time to ponder the character, the plot, the plausibility of what happened in a bestseller or a much loved classic. Surrounding us are thousands of books. The smell of paper and ink, turned pages and book memories fill the store. It’s better than a library, because once I buy a book, I don’t need to take it back. I can simply go there again, for talk about books and stories, and more books.
As Tina would say, “Imagine that: about books.”
Paperback Book Exchange – Neenah, WI
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